is it just me or

[angevin2]

Are this year's Bad Sex Award finalists (link obviously nsfw) awfully disappointing? Like, one of them really just made me hungry for pudding. Actual pudding, I hasten to add (although it's British so probably a Bakewell pudding isn't what I'm picturing when I see the word "pudding," and also, the word "pudding" has just grown completely

Comments

[kindkit]

Reading over the excerpts from the nominees, I've decided that I'm tired of the Bad Sex Awards. They're fundamentally unfair, because they don't acknowledge that literary descriptions of sex may be trying to seem grotesque or ridiculous rather than pretty, romantic, or sexy. Nor, for that matter, that one can easily take a metaphorical description out of its carefully developed context and make it look inept.

I'm sure some of the nominated scenes are genuinely bad, even in context. But I increasingly feel that the awards are motivated by prudishness and decided upon via deliberately bad reading practices that don't take tone or context into account.

[kindkit]

My reading of the duke and his boxers was that it was meant to be risible, because the duke is risible and the novel is satirical. But perhaps I'm giving it too much credit.

[kindkit]

Words like "crude" and "redundant" suggest to me that the Bad Sex Awards people aren't entirely thrilled at the existence of sex scenes in books at all--they very much carry the implication that sex scenes ought to be discreet and few.