“Slither slither slither slither went the tongue…”
We love good erotica, but we won’t deny that there’s a unique pleasure in reading really, really bad smut. If you understand the joy of wondering, “Why would he use that metaphor? Why would anyone ever use that metaphor?” then you’ll get a kick out of The Telegraph’s compilation of the top ten worst sex scenes in modern literature.
Part of what makes this fun is that the authors whose work is being singled out are widely-published and even celebrated: the quote above is from Tom Wolfe. We feel okay poking fun at Tom Wolfe in a way that we wouldn’t feel if we were laughing at a stranger’s slash fan fiction.
Of course, bad sex – like all sex – is subjective. Still, “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her” is, at the very least, memorable.
