“This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.”
And that bit doesn’t even mention the huge green dildo…
The above passage is Philip Roth’s entry (no pun inteded) in this year’s Literary Review Bad Sex Award- a trinket designed to “draw attention to the cruse, tasteless… passages of sexual description in the modern novel”. It’s also the one award that usually affords new up-and-coming novellists the chance to take on the true heavyweights of their field. A chap called Anthony Quinn, for instance, is on this year’s list for his debut novel which means he’s gone from writing film reviews for The Independent to duking it out with both a legend like Roth and Australian doom-monger/Droopy impersonator Nick Cave for an award which only 2 years ago was posthumously scooped by Norman Mailer.
The sheer breadth of talent and experience on display in the list (Richard Milward’s ‘Ten Storey Love Song’- another nominee- might be the worst book ever written) just goes to prove one thing for certain- nobody, no matter who they are, should ever attempt to write about the sexual act.
Ever.
Returning to Roth as an example, he’s had half a century to nail (no pun intended) a decent description of sex since he wrote “her breasts swam towards me like two pink-nosed fish and she let me hold them” in ‘Goodbye, Columbus‘ but as his most recent attempt demonstrates, all he’s really been able to do in 50 years is ramp up the deranged imagery and filter everything through what appears to be either a compound nervous breakdown or a major psychotic episode.
The basic problem appears to be this: the author wishing to describe the act of physical sex-doing is going to have to confront some intense physical and mental sensations achieved via some frankly ludicrous bodily actions by the participants. Removed from the pleasure of involvement or the onanistic joys of watching attractive people enjoying it, sex is a mostly preposterous activity involving thrusting, odd primal noises and face pulling that wouldn’t look out of place in a documentary about people having their feet run over by heavy machinery.
A writer is therefore faced with a stark choice. Option 1 is to write about sex with brutal frankness and simplicity. This would make a novel feel like a school biology textbook and therefore be about as erotic as the instructions for assembling a piece of flat-pack furniture that begin with ‘insert rod A into slot B and secure with nuts provided’ (no pun intended)
Option 2 meanwhile involves cloaking the description with similes, metaphors and symbolism until it resembles less an erotically charged missive from Planet Orgasm and more the demented ramblings of a couped-up prisoner of war who’s spent 4 solid decades thinking constantly about a shag but has had nothing but a dusty hole in the ground and a potato sack on which to take out his frenzied yearnings. This is the approached favoured by most writers and of which Roth’s earlier passage is a particularly fine example.
Neither of these options seems particularly viable or attractive and that’s why I feel that, while the bad sex award is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Any description of sex in novels should henceforth be banned before any other truly great writer like Philip Roth shags up their reputation (no pun intended) by claiming that women involved in sex acts with huge green dildoes are also wearing masks on their fannies.
In defence of the art of writing about sex, Richard Milward (he of the appalling ‘Ten Storey Love Song’) said that “some authors spend five pages describing a walk in the park but when it comes to sex they’ll just do two sentences- ‘she rolled off him’. Sex is exciting stuff- it can be very dirty and smelly. But you’ve got to get stuck in”.
No pun intended.
Leaving aside his descrpition of sex as ‘smelly’ in the folder marked ‘Too Much Information’, Milward totally misses the point about what should and shouldn’t be described. If a couple in a novel actually have sex the reader’s imagination should be able to fill in the blanks, as it were, rather than the author ruining everything with a combination of cack-handed imagery and punishing detail. To illustrate my point, let’s turn to the world of film.
It might be a cliche to say it, but cinema doesn’t get any more erotic and powerful that the image of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around on the beach in From Here to Eternity. They are utterly consumed with each other and, let’s be frank here, it’s clearly the prelude to the best shag in the world. Lancaster is about to do things to Kerr that none of us would be proud of but which will live with both of them forever. It’s gonna get nasty. There’ll be animal noises. It might hurt. Your imaginations can fill in the rest (provided their like mine that is)
But does the film show us this? No. We just get the kiss in the sand, not the eye-watering fuck-fest that inevitably follows. And that’s why it’s such an erotically charged moment. Fast forward 40 years and cinema’s desperate attempts to be erotic involved filming right up Sharon Stone’s skirt so you could see her lady regions. Even without the fat bloke from Seinfeld and Jurassic Park sweating away it wasn’t in the slightest bit erotic or arousing. It was just a fanny.
But at least it wasn’t wearing a mask.