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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Porn, Sex And Marriage: What's OK, And What Isn't? : NPR

Warning: Today's post deals with sexual content and may not be appropriate for all audiences.

Dear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer "radical empathy" and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety.

>

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Today they're delving into the adult topics of pornography and masturbation. A man says he masturbates regularly while watching pornography but still maintains a healthy sexual relationship with his wife. But he is still "troubled" by the notion that the porn industry is exploitative of performers, and questions whether it is morally acceptable to fantasize about women other than his wife.

To help in their discussion of these topics, the Sugars are joined by Wendy Maltz, sex therapist and co-author of The Porn Trap.

Dear Sugars,

Is it bad to masturbate to online porn? I am a happily married man in my mid-50s, and have been married for 15 years to a wonderful woman. We have a satisfying sex life, having sex approximately once every week.

However, I go online to masturbate to porn about three times a week. I work from home and find that I become sexually turned on during the working day. I look at masturbation as a healthy release. Viewing online porn allows me to accomplish the "task" more quickly and get back to work.

That other purveyor of personal wisdom, Dr. Phil, advises that watching porn is an immoral betrayal of a marital partner and says the women in porn videos are likely to have been abused as children and are being exploited. I have a teenage daughter and avoid videos of young girls, preferring age-appropriate subjects in the so-called "mature" category. I also avoid watching porn up to 24 hours before I am likely to have a date with my wife in order to be able to enjoy and contribute to our sex together.

>

My wife knows that I look at porn. While we don't discuss it, she doesn't feel that it is a betrayal of her. I look at viewing porn as an extension of masturbation, which I believe is healthy and a necessary release, one that is as private as going to the bathroom. If not for porn, I would still masturbate. I doubt Dr. Phil believes that masturbation is immoral. Is masturbating while fantasizing about someone besides my wife immoral? Assuming that online porn is the problem, is it possible that you can make distinctions?

I know that many of the women on porn sites are probably psychologically damaged in some way, and that the pornography industry may be contributing to that damage. On the other hand, is it possible that accepting money for video sex is not always exploitative? Is it possible that some of the women who perform in online sex videos do it out of a healthy appreciation of sex?

Signed,

Troubled by Porn

Steve Almond: I could have written this letter, and I felt a great sense of sympathy for this guy who's trying to figure out the same questions I struggle with when I bother to even struggle with them: Am I complicit in something that is very clearly against my moral code? In what ways? And what are my other alternatives?

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Follow the Sugars on Twitter @dearsugarradio.

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I think he is in a productive state of bewilderment, and I think most of the men of conscience who consume porn in one way or another are either suppressing this set of questions or are struggling with them. The porn industry is like football or like meat or like fossil fuels â€" it's essentially exploitative. But because I have a libido that operates differently than my wife's, I get horny and I want relief. I lament that I no longer sit there and do the imaginative work of masturbating without porn. There are a lot of people who aren't even grappling with the ways in which pornography is an ethical concern because, frankly, people don't want porn served with a side dish of ethics.

Wendy Maltz: I have a lot of respect for the man who wrote this letter. He's really thinking about his relationship to porn and trying to figure it out. He doesn't have the secrecy and shame element going on that a lot of people have with porn. But there's something happening â€" he's starting to question it. I can't say if his porn use in particular is a good thing or a bad thing. It's so personal. People have ask themselves, "What does porn mean to me? What is it doing to me? Where's it taking me?"

Cheryl Strayed: What do you mean when you say "Where's it taking me?" Do you mean to suggest that, in some ways, his porn use could be robbing his marriage of a sort of intimacy that it might have if he didn't use it?

Wendy: Porn is a very powerful product. It's like nothing we've ever seen before. There's a conditioning process associated with porn. It can become a stronger habit. Our sexual arousal response gets patterned to particular cues, and those cues can be the images in porn or they can be the smell of a lover's neck. Images are very powerful, so porn could be affecting the intimacy he has with his wife in ways he's not even aware of. He says porn is not an issue in his marriage, but he and his wife aren't really talking about its place in their relationship either.

Steve: There's a kind of "don't-ask-don't-tell" policy when it comes to porn in relationships. Pornography, predominantly for men, is a little secret cavern â€" it's a place we go, even if we're in happy, deeply communicative relationships, as it seems this guy is.

Cheryl: Part of my response to this letter is that there's nothing wrong. This guy wants to have an orgasm about four times a week. Presumably, if his wife wanted to have sex more, she would be making advances towards him. And he has a different sex drive than she does, and so he just takes care of himself. He doesn't need to tell his wife. There is such thing as privacy, even when you're married to somebody. Wendy, is this inherently a bad setup, or are you thinking, well clearly, because he's asking these questions, he's not entirely comfortable with it?

>

Wendy: From a clinical perspective, we're not talking about someone who is disassociated or who uses porn in lieu of sex, but there's something going on for him â€" he signed his letter "Troubled by Porn." One of the things that I wonder about is, why does he use porn a lot while he's working? Is sexual release a way of dealing with stress for him? Maybe he's not feeling as productive or as recognized in his field as he'd like to be? Has porn become a way that he self-soothes? And if so, is that at the expense of learning other ways to take care of himself â€" reaching out to a real person or going for a run?

The other thing is his age. Being a man in his mid-50s, it can take a little longer to get sexually aroused. The erections aren't as firm. Sex can become a little bit more laborious in terms of functioning, but under usual circumstances, that's offset by really good communication with a partner you've been with for years.

Cheryl: Or by a sense of humor â€" that sex doesn't have to be a performance. It doesn't always have to equal orgasm. It's a sensual exchange of pleasure and communication.

Wendy: And there's this wonderful growth that a couple can have. I've been married for nearly 40 years now, but I had a rough beginning as a sexual person. I've now experienced what it's like to be in a long-term relationship where you don't have a heavy influence of porn and where you can really work with your partner and learn with your partner and grow with your partner sexually. I think a lot of couples are missing out on that growth.

Steve: Troubled by Porn, you've reached a moment where you have to ask yourself, "What is the meaning of porn for me? And if I'm unsettled, do I need to start having the difficult, but necessary, discussion with my wife to say, 'I feel greater desire and I want it to be toward you. I want to find a better balance between my porn use and our sex life together.' "

You can get more advice from the Sugars each week on >Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear more about how porn can affect relationships.

Have a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail.com and it may be answered on a future episode.

You can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on >iTunes, >Stitcher or your favorite podcast app.

"

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Post-Election, Survivors Of Assault Are Struggling To Have Sex Again

After the now infamous recording of President-elect Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women by the pussy came out, Anna*, 33, went to her Facebook page to share her story. In high school, she had been raped by her boyfriend, and in that moment, she wanted people to know.

“I didn’t say anyone’s name, I just said I had been raped and I was a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor, and why it bothered me so much what Trump had said,” Anna told The Huffington Post. “I said, this is not just locker room talk. This happens to people, and this happened to me.”

After posting, Anna felt great. She heard from several women who shared their own stories and she helped connect them to resources. But then her ex-boyfriend reached out, saying he was going to sue her ― at the the same moment Trump was threatening to sue his accusers. It was an unsettling parallel Anna could not quite wrap her head around, and she was anxious for the election to be over.

“I kept wanting to think that Trump wouldn’t get elected and our nation would say this kind of thing isn’t OK,” Anna said. Since Trump’s win, she has been in a tailspin. For a week-and-a-half, she couldn’t sleep. She still hasn’t really been able to be intimate with her husband.

“Since Trump’s comment, we’ve only had sex a couple of times,” she said, adding that she was going to meet with her doctor to talk about options. “I don’t want to feel this way.” 

I had gotten to a point where I had taken my own power back from my rapist, and this felt like the American people telling me, "No, no. He still has more power over you." Ali, 28

The 2016 presidential campaign was difficult for many women, especially those who felt triggered by Trump’s so-called “locker room talk,” and a string of allegations that he’d groped and kissed women without their consent. But Trump’s win, they say, is even more difficult ― not just a reminder of everything they’ve been through, but a minimizing of it. And it has left their sex lives in shambles.

“It resurfaced a lot of past trauma that I had experienced about seven years ago when I was sexually assaulted,” Ali, 28, told The Huffington Post. “I had gotten to a point where I had taken my own power back from my rapist, and this felt like the American people telling me, ‘No, no. He still has more power over you.’”

Prior to Trump’s win, Ali had sex with her husband every other day. Now, they’ve been having sex maybe once a week ― not nothing, but not the same. When they do have sex, Ali feels far less enthusiastic. 

“I’m just not as comfortable letting myself be sexual right now,” she said.

It is hardly a surprising reaction, says Wendy Maltz, a sex therapist and author of The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide For Survivors Of Sexual Abuse.

“Here, we have a really unprecedented situation where a person who has been identified as a sexual perpetrator by many women has been elevated to the highest position in the country,” she said. “For many [people] who’ve been sexually abused, it’s a huge shock.”

Trump’s broader triggering effect has been well-documented. Soon after Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” tape came out, RAINN ― the sexual assault survivor nonprofit that runs the National Sexual Assault Hotline ― saw call traffic increase by 33 percent. At one point during the campaign, 3,000 therapists signed a “manifesto” detailing the psychological toll they believed Trump was taking on their patients, everything from anxiety and fear to shame, Politico reports. One therapist who works with survivors of domestic abuse and sexual assault told Slate she’d seen an uptick in patients calling for emergency counseling sessions, and experiencing flashbacks and an inability to go outside. 

When I look at Donald Trump, I have this visceral reaction where I look at him as someone who actually sexually assaulted me. Jamie*, 31

But it’s not just Trump’s behavior, Maltz said. It’s the feeling that many Americans simply didn’t care enough about their experiences to vote against a sexual aggressor that has made it so challenging for women to be intimate again, even with trusted partners. And Maltz points to research that has found that “institutional betrayal” ― the kind that happens when a student reports an assault and his or her university fails to provide backup ― can exacerbate trauma, leading to further anxiety, depression and sexual problems.

“Those results suggest that institutions ― or in this situation, the election ― has the power to cause additional harm to assault survivors in the form of sexual effects,” she said. Women can feel re-traumatized, Maltz added. They can project their feelings onto someone else, such as a partner or even Trump himself.

That’s exactly what is happening to Jamie*, 31, who was date raped when she was 16.

“When I look at Donald Trump, I have this visceral reaction where I look at him as someone who actually sexually assaulted me,” she said. “It has put me into this hole, where I don’t feel like I want to be intimate with my live-in boyfriend of four years.” They have not had sex since the election, and she has no sexual appetite right now.

Jamie understands, of course, that Trump did not actually assault her ― but she can’t shake the feeling that she has been violated in some way. 

“I’ve never experienced looking at a stranger and having that kind of reaction,” she said. Jamie is hopeful she and her boyfriend will resume their sex life soon, but the thought of seeing Trump’s face every day for four years worries her.

“I just feel like, ugh. Dirty. Muddy,” Jamie said. “I feel like I was victimized.”

* First names have been changed for privacy reasons. 

Suggest a correction

"

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‘Pizzagate’ Recalls the Debunked Child Sex Rings of the ’80s and ’90s

Front entrance of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, a restaurant in Washington, D.C., that’s been at the center of a media conspiracy theory involving child sex abuse rings. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Pizzagate, a nutty conspiracy theory about a child sex ring run from a Washington, D.C., pizzeria, has become the focal point for the “fake news” alarmâ€"particularly after a rifle-toting man recently >showed up at the restaurant to “self-investigate” and rescue nonexistent victims. While no one was injured, the incident lent an eerie prescience to an earlier Washington Post >editorial titled, “ ‘Pizzagate’ shows how fake news hurts real people.” The politics of Pizzagateâ€"mostly pushed by Donald Trump supporters (including >Michael J. Flynn, son of Trump’s national security adviser-to-be Michael T. Flynn) and purported to implicate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief John Podestaâ€"make it even more emblematic of the “fake news” issue. To >many pundits, this is terrifying evidence of the dark irrationality unleashed by the Trump campaign.

The Pizzagate saga is indeed disturbing. An obscure reference in one of >Podesta’s hacked emailsâ€"a handkerchief with “a map that seems pizza-related”â€"was somehow deemed a code for child sex. From there spun a web of wild allegations with >everything thrown in: an >Instagram joke about restraining unruly children with tape; heart- and butterfly-shaped images supposedly resembling pedophilic symbols; >the name of pizzeria owner, James Alefantis, is said to be rearranged from the French J’aime les enfants (“I love children”). The restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, >received a barrage of threatening phone calls and online messages even before the visit from the gunman; the harassment also spread to neighboring businesses.

Is it scary that people’s lives can be severely disrupted, even endangered by baseless, zealotry-driven accusations of evil acts? Of course. Is this a danger uniquely linked to “fake news” and online vigilantes with a right-wing bent? Fairly recent history suggests otherwise.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a wave of notorious cases involving allegations of ritual child sex abuse rings in day care centers swept the country. In California, the infamous >McMartin Preschool case dragged on for six years before its ignominious end in 1990. (The trial ended with one defendant acquitted and the otherâ€"Ray Buckey, the sole male defendantâ€"acquitted on most counts with the jury deadlocked on a few more. All charges against five other accused employees had been dismissed earlier.)

The McMartin case began with accusations made by a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia whose allegations quickly escalated to madhouse material: A few months after her initial police report, she was claiming that her son had his ears and tongue stapled, that children were forced to drink the blood of a slaughtered infant and that Buckey “flew through the air.” Before long, small children were coaxed into telling fantastical tales of grotesque sexual acts, Satanic rites and animal sacrifice, often taking place in secret tunnels underneath the preschool, at other times in car washes and churches.

And where were the professional news media? Falling for it hook, line and sinker. Later, in 1990, Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize for a >multipart series that offered a devastating analysis of the McMartin media coverage, including that of his own paper. Among the faults of the press, he listed “pack journalism,” “laziness,” excessive coziness with the prosecution (Wayne Satz, the reporter covering the case for the local NBC News station was quite literally in bed with Kee MacFarlane, the social worker in charge of the children’s interviews) and “a competitive zeal that sends reporters off in a frantic search to be first with the latest shocking allegation.” As a result, Shaw wrote, “Reporters and editors often abandoned two of their most cherished and widely trumpeted traditionsâ€"fairness and skepticism,” instead embracing “hysteria, sensationalism and what one editor calls ‘a lynch-mob syndrome.’ ”  

Alas, this was typical of how the media treated the bogus day care sex abuse cases. In New Jersey in 1987, 25-year-old kindergarten teacher >Margaret Kelly Michaels was convicted on charges that included forcing 3- and 4-year-olds into naked orgies, raping them with utensils, urinating on them and making them eat her feces. (The children’s “disclosures” were elicited under highly coercive questioning, in an investigation triggered by one little boy’s misconstrued comment.) These horrors were utterly improbable given the lack of physical evidence and lack of privacy in the room where Michaels supposedly committed her crimes. Yet once again, media skepticism was absent. It took two journalists outside the political mainstreamâ€"Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal on the right, Debbie Nathan on the leftâ€"to raise obvious questions about the case. Michaels spent five years behind bars, out of a 47-year sentence, before her conviction was overturned on appeal.

The 1980s sex abuse panic was a mainstream hysteria while Pizzagate is a fringe one; but the two have uncanny similarities. In both cases, things ranging from innocuous to eccentric to mildly inappropriate got recast as suggesting pedophile proclivitiesâ€"particularly if they could be seen as sexually “creepy.” Today, Pizzagate “sleuths” find it >incriminating that Comet Ping Pong, an >offbeat arty venue, has had weird murals with abstract nudes and that some of its employees’ Instagram accounts have featured bawdy (nonâ€"child-related) cartoons. Thirty years ago, Buckey and Michaels were portrayed as perverts because he sometimes wore loose shorts with no underwear and she had scribbled a vaguely erotic poem in her notebook.

The child sex abuse panic of the 1980s is also a reminder that paranoia about pedophiles is hardly the sole province of right-wing nuts. While some of the fears about devil worship were driven by religious fundamentalism, feminists who saw hidden child rape as an intrinsic part of patriarchal violence played a >major role in ritual abuse scare. (They were even more involved in the closely related >bogus moral panic about recovered memories of incest, also treated with excessive credulity by the mainstream media until the early 1990s.) Indeed, MacFarlane, one of principal malfeasants in the McMartin fiasco, had >started out as a feminist activist before turning child abuse crusader.

During the McMartin case, in 1989, the Los Angeles County Commission on Women >launched a Ritual Abuse Task Force headed by feminist psychotherapist >Myra Riddell. Women’s liberation doyenne Gloria Steinem not only >endorsed a 1990 recovered-memory manual that encouraged women to see everything from arthritis to trust issues as symptoms of forgotten abuse but >helped fund a futile quest for evidence of guilt in the McMartin case. And as late as 1993, Ms. magazine ran a lurid cover story purporting to be a survivor’s account, headlined, “Ritual Abuse Existsâ€"Believe It!”

So let us by all means decry the conspiracy theories and the “fake news” of today. But we would do well to remember that even real journalists and cultural progressives are not immune to absurd claims of pedophile conspiracies when the right buttons get pushed. And as much as one can sympathize with innocent people harassed and threatened because of Pizzagate, the plight of innocents imprisoned on horrific made-up charges was far worse.

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