Usually, it’s “literary” titles.  Or, genre books written by men for men.

This year’s winner, Rowan Somerville, however, decided he was over it.

When I realised that sex was going to be the central part of my novel The Shape of Her, I was a little worried. I sensed that to examine this subject with any authenticity required a suspension of defences, and that to do so in this country is to ask for a kicking.

When the book had been written and published, and I was told by an editor of the Literary Review, the magazine which runs the Bad Sex in Fiction Award, that I had won their annual prize, it felt like the closing of a circle.

Not only had I committed the crime of writing a novel in which sex was central. I had been quoted earlier that year describing the Bad Sex Award people as “sixth-formers sniggering because someone said penis”, and in this newspaper I had referred to their award as a “tediously titillating spectre”. So the response seemed inevitable. I arrived at the men-only “gentleman’s club” in London where the awards were being held, curious to see how the scene would play out.

I don’t enjoy wanting to correct punctuation in something someone got paid for. I’ll ignore it.

The message stands.

There is something sort of Beavis-y about the whole endeavor.  Yes, misguided prose happens. I seem to recall one recent-ish nominee likening a vagina to a cold oyster.

Not hot.  Ever.

But sometimes ‘not hot’ is the point.

I know that they are going to enjoy themselves when it comes to my novel. It is essentially about sexual abuse. The way the protagonists have sex is meant to be an expression of childhood experiences about which neither is consciously aware. The sex is deliberately wrong, cringeworthy, full of expressions of disassociation, of blocked passion and misunderstood urges.

When the young man finally has sex it is “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin”. This is meant to be an inappropriate and gruesome image. When the actress reads out the passage in a mawkish moan, the crowd erupts. I had an idea that I would explain how misguided it all was, but a boozy night in the club is no place to do so. So I collect the award and say that “there is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of a nation I thank you”.

WHY IS THE PERIOD OUTSIDE THE QUOTE MARK?

Nevermind.

He mentions James. And, yes, if anyone should be on the list of Bad Sex Awards this last year?  It should be her.

But… she wasn’t.

EL James, aka Erika Leonard, has done more than put together a gripping yarn; she has created a cheery and safe-looking high-street supermarket in an unexplored, guilty and subterranean corner of the mass consciousness. Yes, her prose is supremely anodyne, but it is precisely this quality that ensures its success.

The bland, easy-to-project-onto characters; the BDSM-lite; the reassuring but toxic idea that romantic love can change another person into the fulfillment of all your needs, and the shrewd use of a first-person present-tense narrative: all these features create an experience through which someone with a reading age of about 13 can explore desires that, prior to 50 Shades of Grey, were illicit and hidden. In short, James has moved this area of fantasy from taboo into Tesco.

This reminds me of a quote which roams the internet.

“Nothing about sex is cerebral…at least, none of the good parts are.”–Chuck Klosterman

Which is to say, you get to be the Worst Sex in attempting to elevate it. A huge chunk of the population demands that sex be as stupid as possible.  The dumber the better.

I kept hearing horror stories about hosted blogs being deleted without warning.