British “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” highlights the most awkward description of an intimate encounter

For more than 15 years, the Literary Review magazine’s bad sex in fiction award has pointed out the best of the worst sex descriptions in literary royalty. The award is given to “the passage considered to be the most redundant in an otherwise excellent novel” in an attempt to discourage authors from writing poorly featured sexcapades.
Here’s the latest winning passage and an explanation as to why it received the award. Read all about it here.

"This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be," writes Roth. "There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze."

'Roth is very anxious about his description of sex," said Jonathan Beckman at the Literary Review of the extract. "Why write of a scene that repeatedly features a green dildo, 'this was not soft porn', unless you're worried that it might be taken as such - in this case, with sentences like 'then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy's lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts...', the worry seems justified. But it's the overcompensation that qualifies this passage for the award – the totems and shamans are an attempt to convince us that Roth's leering is actually giving some vital anthropological insight."

Famed author Norman Mailer won the award in 2007 for this line: His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety
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Mailer’s response: "Some authors spend five pages describing a walk in the park but when it comes to sex they'll just do two sentences - 'she rolled off him'. Sex is exciting stuff - it can be vey dirty and smelly, but you've just got to get stuck in, and I'm not afraid of doing that."

I’m sure the Literary Review would melt down if they searched for “often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description” in specified erotica.