No jokes, please, we’re British: why I can’t get it up over the Bad Sex Awards

I'm not sure I can get it up over the Bad Sex Award.

A few writers are regularly vocal about the prize getting right on their tits: they say that it discourages experimental and exploratory sex-writing, or writing about sex altogether. That it’s a prurient award created by prudes.

Established in 1993 "to draw attention [my italics] to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it,” the Bad Sex Award doesn’t so much gravely call for better sex writing as gleefully highlights what it condemns.

The prize is the skirt round the Victorian piano leg, the fig leave painted over the Renaissance nude, it instructs us tongue-in-cheek—like Frankie ‘titter ye not’ Howerd—that sex should be an entirely serious business, and that therefore it isn’t. At best it’s a celebration of what it seems to condemn: ‘redundancy’ in sex writing.

The prize condemns the “tasteless… redundancy” of linguistic excess (isn’t sex itself characterised by excess?), but sometimes ludicrous can be ludic. What can’t be mentioned slips sideways into metaphor, which slides so quickly into pun—the ability of something to represent more than one thing at once is the basis of the dirty joke. Jokes, in turn, are evidence of what they repress in their telling (“Jokes virtually instruct us not to talk about them,” wrote Adam Phillips) and as such they have been used with thrilling and disturbing flexibility equally to reinforce or to bypass social norms.

There have always been politics of gender and class attached to who's free to say what, and where: it’s no accident comedy acts were, along with girlie shows, the backbone of vulgar vaudeville. Sex provokes language that constantly and joyously slips through the barriers of taste, which intersect so closely with social boundaries. How monstrous would sex writing be as the unvarying literary equivalent of Alvar Aalto furniture: minimal, tasteful, useful—qualities you’d look for in a stool, perhaps.

Sex writing, for anyone who hasn’t noticed, is not the same as sex. Confusingly, though, it’s close to a speech act: the words having the potential to provoke a state as well as describing it. There’s nothing so discomfiting as admitting you might be turned on by prose you find silly.

Rather as millionaire Henry Spoffard in Anita Loos’ 1926 masterpiece, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—who “loves to reform people”—allows any act into the movie scenarios he “senshures” so long as no one appears to be having any fun, the BSA makes no allowance for the author’s… well… authority.

There is little thought that the “reduancy” in sex writing might be intentional play.

One debut writer I spoke to, shortlisted a few years ago, was mortified that his writing, robbed of its context, seems involuntarily rather than purposefully clunky. He was rightly concerned that the judges expected his writing to aspire to some kind of objective reality, rather than an expression of character, situation, and genre through language.

Perhaps the key, as in parapraxis (the Freudian slip) is that the humour lies in the presumed unitentionality—the slapstick pratfallenless—of the writer’s butt on the line position. If the author doesn’t intend the double entendre, she or he becomes the joke’s butt. The BSA does not so much draw lines around what’s laudable in sex writing as what does and doesn’t qualify as funny.

Using humour as a method of literary critique is novel to say the least. Laughing at, not laughing with, is a playground game of social exclusion. As so often in the UK, the whole thing is not so much about sex but about class (I remember a 2013 judge protesting the award could not be a celebration of ‘public school’ attitudes as he had only “attended a London day school”).

A titterfest started by the notoriously conservative Auberon Waugh, the award seems unlikely to do more than patrol sex writing as one of the nervous borders some kind of wishfully boundaried identity, liteary, social, or national (the Great British Jerk-Off?). Like Brexit it insists on keeping track of what’s allowed in, in the name of preserving an identity that seems no more than magical thinking.

There is nothing imaginary about the system the prize parodies. The BSA's 'worst of' mirrors a culture of ‘best of’ prizes, acting as a mis-en-abime to literary prize culture which, however generous and glamorous, is, in these days of pricey arts degrees and falling publisher's advances, no more than a precarious way to support literary development.

Will the shortlisted writers be “discouraged” from writing as they do? It seems unlikely. What does the honour do for (to?) the winners? Are their reputations damaged? Enhanced? The point seems less to do with producing good or bad writing than a cycle of reciprocal outrage that ensures the production of the prize itself.

Which is something I suppose I could write more about, but I really couldn’t give a--