Shut. Up.
This is a real award?
I just learned there is an annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. No joke. Click on it. (Don't worry, there are no dirty pictures. I wouldn't even describe it as literary porn. But you will cringe when you read just the sentence from the winner.)
I am positively giddy about this. Something on Twitter led me to the title of an article about how the award came to be. The title was, "No sex, please. We're literary!"
I clicked on it because I thought that was funny, and it talked a little about how we think literature is great if it makes us laugh or cry, but there's this unspoken rule that it shouldn't turn us on. The author thinks that's a bad rule. And I tend to agree.
It might be a synthetic turn-on, kind of like if I read a passage about a huge dinner, and the author describes the food in steamy, delectable detail, I feel hungry. I'm not really hungry, but I want to eat those things now that I'm thinking about them. And I might go to the kitchen and get some crackers if it was an especially good passage.
(I get crackers because that's the only thing I'm usually sure will be in my kitchen. I try to keep snacks on hand, but I usually end up, well, snacking until they're gone. And I'm left with the least fun snack of snacking -- crackers. If I'm hungry enough to go somewhere, I'm truly hungry, and I'm getting steak or chocolate.)
My family laughs at my grandmother because she always has the latest Harlequin novels with her, and she devours them. It's not that she doesn't like to think; she does. She reads dry nonfiction history to compare to her historical fiction, or, more frequently, racy fiction set in the past. She likes authors who do their research.
I'm not sure how or when she settled on romances, but I was about 14 when I discovered that asking MeMe for recommendations is a much better idea than asking to borrow a book.
I remember being exactly 23 pages into the first book I borrowed from her and thinking, "My grandmother reads this?!" And, more disturbingly, "My grandmother thought this was something appropriate for me to read?!"
I finished the book, I insisted to my parents, because it was a mystery, and I wanted to see what happened.
Which was true.
Partially.
Come on, I was a teenager, and when MeMe announced over dinner that she'd lent me a book, my dad almost spit Sprite across the table.
"Did you return it?" he asked pointedly.
"Of course not," she answered for me. "She hasn't finished it yet. I just gave it to her this afternoon."
It was no big deal to her. Sex scenes were a part of reading, and I was going to stumble upon them soon enough on my own.
We've all seen the newest in-law come across an open book lying on a chair, pick up the book, flip it over, read a few lines -- and nearly pee their pants. And after a few too many drinks, once, an uncle told me he learned some things he didn't know from one of her books.
But after reading that article, I thought maybe we've been too hard on MeMe. Maybe her romances are the same as the silly books I read for giggles.
I kind of hid the fact that I was reading Shopaholic books last summer because I thought they were unintellectual. Is it because I knew the easy laughs were as trite as the sex scenes?
It's an interesting thing to consider. What do you think? Do sex scenes take the intellect out of books?
Wouldn't it be more impressive for a writer to reach our most visceral level -- something we do instinctually -- than to touch a more evolved emotion like humor or empathy? And why do we look at that like it's a terrible thing instead of admiring the author for the ability to move readers so deeply? Why the stigma?
