Bad Sex: We Have A Winner!

Finally! The Guardian has published extracts from all this year's shortlisted contenders for the Literary Review Bad Sex Award. Always my favourite award of the year, the chance to revel in some prose that's purple in every respect, often from some of the world's greatest writers (John Updike won a lifetime achievement award this year) which makes us hacks feel so much better. I have to say, though, that the quality over the last few years has been going up, which is to say down, which is to say that the bad sex really does not hit the embarrassment G spot in the way it used to. In fact some of this year's extracts (notably Simon Sebag Montefiore's) barely qualify as "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant" in the words of the prize's founder, Auberon Waugh. Could it be that the Bad Sex Award has actually worked and made people write sex that is actually good? I do sincerely hope not.

Having said that, Rachel Johnson is arguably a worthy winner for sentences such as Almost screaming after five agonizingly pleasurable minutes, I make a grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside, but he holds both by arms down, and puts his tongue to my core, like a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop. Ugh. Do people really think of cats when having sex? But I do think that Ann Allestree has the right to feel robbed when she made such a sterling effort with 'Open your thighs,' he urged as he parted the folds of her vulva. 'You are so moist down there.' He stroked and probed her with two fingers as she felt her blood waken. He raised himself to his knees and bent to roll his tongue around her weeping orifice. Male readers: do not be fooled into thinking that words such as vulva, moist or (dear god no) "weeping orifice" are going to get many women's blood to waken. And Kathy Lette deserves a shout for He broke free with muscular ease, unhooked my bra with composed expertise, found my nipple and flicked his tongue back and forth until it went hard. His towel fell away. Sebastian's erect member was so big I mistook it for some sort of monument in the centre of a town. I almost started directing traffic around it. He rolled me sideways on to my back and, in one flowing motion, my tracksuit and panties were down, lassoing one ankle. His fingers edged up my thigh and then plunged inside me. All sounds a bit painful to me.

Congratulations to all involved, anyhow. I am weirdly jealous, there is some pretty grim sex in Gods Behaving Badly after all. As it happens, I met the Bed Sex Award organisers at a party a couple of years ago and begged to be on the jury one year, and they said they would consider it, as they backed, white-faced, from the room. Perhaps I will jog their memories. Or flick my tongue back and forth across their memories like a hungry cat...