Bad, Bad Sex

The Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Awards took place earlier today and this year’s winner was the recently departed Norman Mailer. The awards were started fourteen years ago with the stated aim of “gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”

The award-winning passage, from one of Mailer’s last novels, The Castle in the Forest, describes the fictional, incestuous lovemaking between Hitler’s parents at the moment of his conception and features this gem of a sentence: “Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement.” Natch. But while Mailer was a titan of letters, and poking fun at Hitler a noble task deserving of such talent, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed that my pick didn’t win.

My vote was for Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. Surprisingly, Gary Shteyngart is not Brownlee’s nom de guerre nor is this his memoirs, although one would be forgiven for the mistake when reading passages such as this, which I present here in it’s entirety after the jump. It is lengthy but, most assuredly, worth it:

“You wanna pop me?” she said. This must have been some new-fangled youth term. The verb “to pop.”

“I wanna bust a nut inside you, shorty,” I said. “I wanna make you sweat, boo. Let’s do this thing.”

I’d like to say that she stepped out of her jeans, but in truth it took a while to maneuver two large dimpled buttocks and the accompanying vaginal wedge out of the hard shell of her Miss Sixty denims. We huffed and sweated; I had her hanging off the edge of the bed while I gripped the cuffs of her jeans; I nearly pulled a groin muscle getting her naked; but through it all I stayed hard, a testament to how much I wanted her. She kept her T-shirt on throughout the initial popping, which is just how I like my sex, infused with a little mystery. I slipped my hands beneath the cotton tee and felt the smooth creamery of her breasts while saving the visuals of those brown glossy globes for later. Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media – a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. Was it especially hairy? Good Lord, yes it was. Mountains of kinkiness black as the night above the Serengeti with paprika shoots at the edges – the pubic hair alone must have clocked in at half a kilo, while providing the inspiration for two discernible trails of hair, one running up to the navel, the other to the base of the spine.

Naturally, considering my size, she got on top of me. But given her impressive overall body mass and natural resilience, I could see a day when we could broach the missionary position, not that there’s anything special in attacking a poor woman that way. After we had fussed with the condom, I reached for her pubes, but she slapped me away. These preliminaries did not interest her. Instead, she just plain mounted me, holding on to my tits for balance, slipping me inside with no effort, both vaginal lips working to usher me into her tightness. I find it clichéd when couples insist that they have “the perfect fit,” but between the busted-up, zigzag, Broadway boogie-woogie of my maligned purple khui and the all-encompassing nature of her Caspian pizda, we reached a third way, as it were.

That is to say, she rode me. It was all very classy and contemporary, like a modern-art survey course at NYU. I wanted to have the slogan I RODE MISHA VAINBERG imprinted on her T-shirt. “Yeah, do me,” she kept saying, after issuing a few grunts so male and assertive they startled me into a brief homosexual fear, a fear compounded by one of her sharp nails digging into my tight rectum. “Do me, daddy,” she said, her eyes closed, her thighs slapping against my upper and lower stomachs, my own tits making wet noises against my frame. “Just like that,” she said, stealing a brief glance at me and then turning her head to the side so that I could lick her ear and plunge into her neck. “Just … like … that.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m fucking you, boo,” but the words did not convince me. “I’m busting my nut tonight,” I sang.

“My pussy fills so tight,” she sang back in perfect ghetto English.

“Ouch,” I said. She was crushing my pubic bone, grinding into it. “Ouch,” I repeated. “Baby doll … ouch.”

“Just a minute, pops,” she said. “Just give me a minute. Do me right. Just like that.”

“Move up a little,” I said. “Move up. It hurts. My bone.”

“Just … like … that,” she said.

“My bone hurts,” I said. “I’m losing it.”

“AW,” she shouted. “FUCK ME.” She leaned back. I slipped out. Her thighs trembled before me, and I felt a warm, abundant liquid spreading on my own thighs, not sure which of us had issued it. My bedroom was filled with the smell of asparagus and related greenery. “Aw,” she said again. “Fuck me.”

Pure genius. It was, perhaps, because of its awareness as a piece of horribly written erotica that this passage lost out or maybe Mailer was just getting the “sympathy vote” because he died, regardless of the fact that that particular talent is common to even the most illiterate of persons. Either way it matters little. To the Mailer estate I say congratulations and to Mr. Shteyngart I say good luck next year. I, for one, look forward to it.

Photo: vintage photo

Mailer wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award [MSNBC] : Guardian Unlimited