On Shirley Clarke's 'The Connection'
The Bad Sex Award, crowning a writer deemed to have written the most mortifying sex scene(s) that year, has been handed out annually by the Literary Review since 1993. Past winners include Tom Wolfe, Giles Coren (for a book in which the narrator compares his ejaculating dick to a shower-head dropped in the bath) and Morrissey. The enterprise, while certainly adding to the gaiety of the nation, is in many ways a rather dispiriting one, which errs on the side of sex-shaming, and which trades in a peculiarly British way of smirking at or being disgusted by sex. Of course, what makes the passages singled out for lols seem funny is the fact that by the time the words are out they are already old-hat, absurd, obsolete. Put down on the page by their authors at the height of their horn, these words needed to be immediate to have any power - they seized an aspect of their writer's libido at a particular stage, and - as that fuck-want disappeared, so the words themselves came to seem ridic