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Tom Wolfe wins 2004 Bad Sex in Literature prize
Hoyt began moving his lips as if he were trying to suck the ice cream off the top of a cone without using his teeth. She tried to make her lips move in sync with his. The next thing she knew, Hoyt had put his hand sort of under her thigh and hoisted her leg up over his thigh. What was she to do? Was this the point she should say, "Stop!"? No, she shouldn't put it that way. It would be much cooler to say, "No, Hoyt," in an even voice, the way you would talk to a dog that insists on begging at the table. Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns — oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest — no, the hand was cupping her entire right — Now! She must say "No, Hoyt" and talk to him like a dog. . . . . . the fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair — what's that! — Her panties were so wet down. . . there — the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right. . . there-there- The Guardian collects all the nominated passages for comparison. The avowed purpose of the Bad Sex award is to restore priggish embarrassment toward explicit prose, "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." But the annual media coverage of the award tends to treat it more as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of loopy, breathless, over-the top sex writing. And why not? One purpose of literature is to make the familiar seem strange, to relate common experiences in creative ways, and why should sex be any different? I like most of the nominated passages. Wolfe told the Guardian in a recent interview that intended to depict the sex in I Am Charlotte Simmons as "un-erotic". "I personally would be shocked out of my pants if I was at college now," confides Wolfe, who spent four years trawling the campuses for raw material. The book, he says, is "about sex as it interacts with social status. And I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up. Sex now is so easy to consummate - it is a pressure that affects everybody, girls more than boys, I think." As he notes, the America which votes tomorrow is a country riven over morality like never before. On the flip side of the culture of ubiquitous sex is that of puritan Christianity, as harnessed in no small part by Bush. "Yes, there is this puritanism," says Wolfe, "and I suppose we are talking here about what you might call the religious right. But I don't think these people are left or right, they are just religious, and if you are religious, you observe certain strictures on sexual activity - you are against the mainstream, morally speaking. And I do have sympathy with them, yes, though I am not religious. I am simply in awe of it all; the openness of sex. In the 60s they talked about a sexual revolution, but it has become a sexual carnival." So Wolfe is probably not a Daze fan, but I still like Wolfe's writing.
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The Literary Review bestowed the