Some of the offending passages, excerpted on BBC News, are pretty poorly written. Paul Theroux's line, "Her hands were all over me, four hands it seemed, or more than four," recalls a scene from one of the Naked Gun movies, which is not usually something you want from serious literature. But really the only laugh-out-loud example is from Philip Roth's The Humbling:

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.

It's possible that Roth's actually trying to be funny with his vadge-mask image (is this like a cock bib?), and none of the other nominees is really all that terrible. But neither are they hot. As Booker Prize judge Lucasta Miller points out, it's not so hard to write about sex in a silly or funny way. But why is it so tough, at least in capital-L Literature, to make sex actually erotic? Miller offers a clue:

A trap people fall into is an earnest anatomical description of sex. The difficulty with the anatomical is that it can read like a bit of a textbook. To stop it doing so, they will put in flowery metaphors from the animal kingdom, but you don't need that detail. When people use similes and metaphors in their anatomical depictions of the sexual organs, it's toe-curling and embarrassing.

So penis is out, but so is pork-sword? Miller's words sound pretty restrictive, but she also has a point — it's easy for sex writing to sound too clinical, but the farther it veers from straight-up health-class vocabulary, the more it risks being silly. Book critic Melissa Katsoulis says the solution is to avoid writing about sex entirely. She tells the BBC's Tom Geoghegan,

If I was writing a novel, I wouldn't attempt to write it except in the most Victorian and prim way, because it's awful. It's a cliche, but the moments of genuine frisson in books are when hardly anything happens. When you have a dream about someone you fancy, it's because they sat down next to you on the bus or something, not because you were at it, hammer and tongs. Either be suggestive or funny, but trying to do the nuts and bolts isn't going to work.

I'm not sure what kind of sex Katsoulis is having (hammer and tongs?), and I also can't cosign her statement about dreams (a bus?). And in a larger sense, it's a shame that people shy away from sex writing just because it's difficult. Miller says literary sex should focus on "the characters and their emotional state," because "that's the difference between porn and art." But I'm not so sure there's really a clear-cut difference, and I think that if literature is allowed to manipulate our emotions, it should be able to turn us on too.

This is not to say, however, that I have any concrete answers regarding sex writing. I tend to prefer the cheerfully vulgar to both the metaphorical and the clinical, but these are obviously matters of taste. As with actual sex, no sex writing is going to please all the people all the time. But — also as with actual sex — that's no excuse for not doing it.

Is It Difficult To Write Well About Sex? [BBC News]
2009 Bad Sex In Fiction Award Nominees Announced [Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Book Patrol Blog]

XI is Kahil's self-published magazine of eleven erotic stories, relayed in reverse chronological order. The stories are written by Kahil, but are not autobiographical. Instead, they tell the story of the sex life of an anonymous girl, from her last partner back to her first. She uses pared down language to describe the sexual encounters, coupled with photographs taken from her blog, Le Gueule de Monde.

Instead of writing a confessional about her own life, Kahil draws upon her experiences to create a magazine of sexual encounters that does not romanticize or elevate sex. In an interview with Dazed Digital, Kahil explains that she want her work to have a universal quality, an anonymity that could allow each reader to insert themselves into the work:

The text, although explicit in its language, is also very matter-of-fact, and merges the emotional with the physical, which is what sex does. It's not porn and it's not romanticism, it's just sex.
In a way, it was mostly about wanting to bring sex down into the fabric of everyday, through the use of anonymity. The fact that I immersed these texts within pages of portrait photography is a way of detaching it from the author and creating multiple voices. Any of the girls in the photographs could be the author, and any of the men pictured could be the men in the texts. No one is named. Even the reader could become the author...

It is refreshing to see an artist approach sex in such a simple, honest way. Kahil's work is erotic, but clearly not pornographic. The 48-page publication is intended to bring sex down to earth, remove it from the realm of movie screens and glossy magazines. When asked whether she thinks her desire to de-sensationalize sex is only furthering the sensationalism that surrounds the act, Kahil replies:

I've always been interested in sex as subject matter, it holds so much emotion, complexity and is far-reaching. It's shared ground. I'm neither sensationalizing it, nor de-sensationalizing it. It's a tool for narrative just as anything else could be, and a lot of my work revolves around it. Celebrating sex sounds a bit corny, but I'd love to do just that! More, more, more!

XI Ways To Talk About Sex [Dazed Digital]
Rasha Kahil [Official Website]

Copstick says the Erotic Review will have almost exclusively male writers on her watch because she doesn't want the magazine to be "drowned in estrogen." She adds, "I think women, too many of them, whether it's nature or nurture or politics, they're not straightforward about sex." See, it's okay that she's basically calling most women inhibited prudes, because she used the phrase "nature or nurture." She's so enlightened! She continues,

It's almost like writing about food ... Ladies who lunch, should not really write about food because they don't really love food. They don't salivate at the thought of a great steak.

We get it: women only like salads and hand-holding, so they obviously can't write about primitive, manly desires for food and sex. Is it nature or nurture? Who knows! Point is, men are way more in touch with sex than women are. Like how they know exactly where a woman's clitoris is, and how to make her orgasm. Or perhaps women's pleasure isn't the kind of thing Copstick thinks it's important to be "straightforward" about. She's clearly the expert, though — since she "loves sex," she is able to capture the correct "scratch and itch burst of endorphins" that makes good sex writing. Most women are frigid and hate sex, so they know nothing of the joys of "itchy" erotica.

Besides its obvious all-women-suck-but-me exceptionalism (so handily exemplified elsewhere by Megan Fox), Copstick's assertion is just plain wrong. In a few minutes, we thought of the following steamy female sex writers: Annie Sprinkle, Anais Nin, Susie Bright, Pauline Reage, Erica Jong, Anne Rice under her pseudonym A.N. Roquelaire, and Rachel Kramer Bussel, whose In the Flesh Reading Series includes many more women reading their erotica — including, on July 16, Megan. We bet you can think of other women writers whose take on sex is a lot more than "straightforward."

Erotic Review Owner: "Women Can't Write About Sex" [Reuters]
In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series [Official Site]

The writers surveyed, who include the very talented Rachel Kramer Bussel and Nerve editor turned Salon employee Sarah Hepola*, had various opinions on why sex writers are getting the ax, from lack of innovation to a mainstreaming of sex writing to lack of talent to an excess of exhibitionism or all three at the same time. What they failed to mention, however, is the Carrie Bradshaw effect.

Before Sex and the City, very few papers had columns exclusively devoted to the sex lives of a single (almost always young, female) writer. After Carrie Bradshaw and her minions became a cultural touchstone, I think many, many media outlets scrambled to have a Carrie to call their very own. The problem is, they weren't looking for originals, they were looking for real life facsimiles of an already sort of annoying fictional female. So, when the time came to cut some unwanted fat, these Manolo-clad also-rans were kicked to the curb.

*None of the sex writers mentioned here or in the Salon article are Carrie Bradshaw-esque at all. They are clever and talented and do not talk about expensive footwear!

Sex Writing Goes Limp [Salon]
Sex Doesn't Sell [SF Gate]