Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony celebrates 24th year

“It’s terribly British, isn’t it,” said the man next to me at last night’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards ceremony at the (appropriately named) In and Out Club in St James’s. He was referring, of course, to the yearly bash â€" now in its 24th year â€" in which the Literary Review magazine nominates half a dozen passages from contemporary fiction seen to represent sex at its most cringeworthy, reads them out to champagne-infused guffaws, and then awards a prize to the author of the worst.

It is a terribly British event, but it also provides a snarky satisfaction that transcends nationality. Because for anyone with the sneaking suspicion that the sexual act is better done or seen than artistically described â€" that its complex idiosyncrasy is one of the few things that lie outside the remit of the otherwise resourceful English language â€" the Bad Sex Awards hits its mark.

Yet as the entrants this year make clear, writing about sex with flagrant abominableness is still cheerily far from going out of fashion. Hearty examples were a passage from Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis’s The Butcher’s Hook:

When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine, rutted with bone like mud ridges in a dry field, to the audacious swell below.

“Audacious swell”? Quite.

Then there was the American Gayle Forman’s entry, from Leave Me:

They were in that room, Jason had slammed the door and devoured her with his mouth, his hands, which were everywhere. As if he were ravenous. And she remembered standing in front of him, her dress a puddle on the floor, and how she’d started to shake, her knees knocking together, like she was a virgin, like this was the first time.

Erri de Luca.
Claudio Onorati/EPA

But the gong went to the Italian poet and translator Erri De Luca for The Day Before Happiness (de Luca understandably wasn’t present). “My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach,” the Neapolitan was justly rebuked for writing:

With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her … I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.

Not everyone felt this deserved the award â€" as an American woman nearby remarked to me, this could clearly be read as satire, plain and simple. Perhaps, but satire doesn’t necessarily get you home dry, especially when it’s ambiguous. After all, the book, a coming of age story, is not particularly comic in the way that, for instance, the early sex-mad tomes of Philip Roth and Martin Amis were.

In fact, the awards were conceived not to discourage writing about sex, but to discourage writing about sex badly. The wording of the original mission statement in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, is revealing: the bash was to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”.

It would be helpful to have some guidance on what non-redundant, good sex writing looks like, since it’s not entirely clear whether it can exist in a literary form at all. After all, the most sexually charged novels of the last 100 or so years use the rule of thumb that the act is unmentionable, boring, or best only suggested.

The novels of Dickens, Eliot and Trollope are full of sexual yearning, and their emotional and erotic pull are none the worse for the veiled references to kissing and love. Even in 20th century novels with subject matter devoted to romantic entanglements, the sexual act is not necessarily spelled out or even mentioned â€" Iris Murdoch doesn’t go further than “making love” as an account of the nocturnal activities of her highly sexually charged couple Dora and Paul in The Bell (1958).

And while Margaret Drabble’s super-sexy characters Clara and Gabriel get pretty steamy in Jerusalem the Golden, nothing beyond the fact is spelled out. It’s a blessed relief which does nothing to diminish the profoundly saucy atmosphere of the book.

The awards are also a humorous reminder not just of the imaginative power but also of the literary value of discipline and restraint in matters of bonking. A recent book about prime minster Herbert Asquith’s passionate attachment to Venetia Stanley tells of his thousands of letters to her, all passionately headed with variants of “my own darling” and “darlingest”.

Asquith’s desperate fixation with Stanley pours out from every page, but had he indulged in anything more sexually explicit than the desire to “go for a little drive, or will you come to Downing St & have a talk”, it would hardly have helped, and probably only hindered, the accumulated intensity of his fixation. Voluble lusters: take note.

Zoe Strimpel, PhD Candidate, University of Sussex

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Female Orgasm To Oral Sex; 9 Surprising Things Science Taught Us About Our Sex Lives In 2016

We're constantly reminded of sex, whether by a sultry magazine cover at the newsstand, a steamy scene at the movies, or a night at the bar. Science got its hands dirty this past year trying to unravel the latest patterns and trends in the field of sex research, a popular and often controversial area of interest. Here's what we learned.  

Sex: Why It Feels So Good

Many people will admit they love sex because it feels so good. It’s a source of pleasurable sensations that facilitate an emotional connection between two people, but science has found it’s also an altered state of consciousness. A study in Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology found sexual pleasure floods the brain with a surge of neurochemicals â€" chemical messengers that forge emotions, feelings of attachment, and even love. The level of pleasure that’s felt is linked to the release of chemicals, which can be used to measure the intensity of an orgasm.

We discovered that if sexual stimulation is intense enough, and goes on long enough, synchronized activity could spread throughout the brain. This intense focused attention outcompetes usual self-awareness for access to consciousness, and so produces a state of sensory absorption and trance.

>Read More: How The Brain Functions During An Orgasm

So, how long should this euphoric-like state last?

In an article for The Conversationalist, Dr. Brendan Zietsch, a psychologist from the University of Queensland, focused on how long heterosexual couples report penetrative sex actually lasts. The findings revealed the average time for each couple, across all the times they had sex, ranged from 33 seconds to 44 minutes. Meanwhile, the average across all couples was 5.4 minutes. This means a couple will typically go for an average of 5.4 minutes every time they have sex. Zietsch suspects penis shape could influence how long men last in bed.

Who's Getting It On Vs. Who’s Not

Sexless Millennials

Dating apps like Tinder, frequently used by Millennials, have led casual sex to become more common. Naturally, we would assume Millennials are having more sex, but a study in Archives of Sexual Behavior found more young people are living sexless lives than their counterparts born in the 1960s did at the same age. However, this does not mean a vast majority of young Millennials are having less sex than previous generations. It just means that the amount of people born in the early 1990s who are not having sex is larger than a similar cohort from previous years.

Sex In The “Golden” Years

Many believe once you get older, the sex becomes less and less frequent until it comes to a halt. This year, researchers have noted older adults are having more sex, and they agree it does get better with age. A survey conducted by the University of Guelph and the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN) found older couples are starting to be active and get creative by adopting new positions and activities.  People over 40 are still having sex, and becoming more adventurous in bed with more than half admitting they were more interested in trying new things to boost pleasure than they were a decade ago.

The elderly also continue to be sexually active, and consider sex essential to their well-being, happiness, and overall quality of life, especially after retirement. Some older adults abstain from sex due to health conditions, or loss of interest, but others refused to renounce it.

The concept of sex is pretty straight forward, but when it comes to the female orgasm, science is still figuring out one of the greatest mysteries.

This is what science has taught us about our sex lives in 2016. Photo courtesy of Everton Vila, Public Domain

Women And Sex

The Female Orgasm: Hot Spots Of Pleasure

New research pinpoints there's a new understanding of the female orgasm: It incorporates the external clitoral glands, the internal region around the G-spot that corresponds to the internal clitoral bulbs, the cervix, and the sensory stimulation of non-genital areas, such as the nipples. In other words, it’s the stimulation of one or various erogenous zones that induces pleasure and orgasm during masturbation and sexual intercourse.

>Read More: Erotic Hypnosis For Sexual Climax With Mind Control

Researchers believe orgasms don't have to come from one site, nor from all sites, and most importantly, they don't have to be the same for every woman, nor for every sexual experience the woman has to be considered whole and valid. Orgasms are a very individual and subjective experience.

Female Orgasm Can Boost Fertility

Evolutionary biologists have debated the purpose of the female orgasm beyond just sexual pleasure. A study found orgasms could potentially boost fertility by as much as 15 percent. It performs some sort of “sperm-retention function,” meaning it could act as a suction to “suck up” semen into the vaginal canal. However, there are conflicting studies that debate whether the female orgasm has a biological purpose.

Women Receive Less Oral Sex

Not all is fair in love and oral sex. A study in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality found women are more than twice as likely to go down on their partners than men, but they are less likely to enjoy performing the act. The biggest gender difference in oral sex was the enjoyment of giving oral. More than half of men who had given cunnilingus reported enjoying it a lot, while an additional 41 percent enjoyed it somewhat, and 7 percent didn't enjoy it much or at all. Contrastingly, only 28 percent of the women who gave fellatio found it very pleasurable; for 55 it was somewhat pleasurable; and 17 percent didn't enjoy doing it. The findings suggest equal reciprocation could satisfy both partners.

>Read More: Does 'Going Down' On Your Partner Have Biological Roots?

Sex In Relationships

Good Sex In Long-Term Relationships

Couples often get into a rut about sex being boring and predictable, but great sex is possible in long-term relationships. A recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found long-term couples can reignite the spark, and have better sex, by being responsive to each other. Partners who are responsive to each other outside the bedroom are able to maintain their sexual desire.

More Sex Leads To Positive Feelings About Partners

Unsurprisingly, the more sex we have with our partners, the more likely we’ll begin to have more positive feelings towards them. A study from Florida State University found the frequency with which couples have sex has no influence on whether or not they report being happy with their relationship, but their sexual frequency does influence their more spontaneous, automatic, gut-level feelings about their partners. Whether sex is happening once a month or once every few hours, it’s really about quality over quantity.

In 2016, science has taught us there are shades of grey when it comes to sex â€" it’s not as concrete or simple as we believe.

See Also:

>Sex Once A Week Makes For A Happy Life (Unless You're Single)

Straight Women Turned On By Attractive Women Are Either 'Bisexual Or Gay', Says Study

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