[Music]
now if I was to ask you what bad sex was
what it looked like
sounded like felt like chances are I
think that you might come up with quite
a range of different answers
there’s no adage that says one person’s
good sex is another person’s bad but
maybe there should be but if I was to
ask you what a bad sex scene looked like
I think you might come up with some
quite similar answers we might talk if
we’re thinking about literature about
clunky metaphors or awkwardly mismatched
characters or cliches all kind of
euphemisms for sex that just feel
awkward or embarrassing or bad somehow a
bad sex scene in literature you might
say could look something like this like
a Furious Matador he thrusts his
throbbing member into her desperate
yearning flower oh god she cried she was
a locked door begging to be opened and
he was the locksmith of her dreams now
this is pretty bad right right I can
promise you with almost total certainty
that the author of this passage won’t be
offended if you think so because it was
me and if you can make me a moment of
just a very brief I promise literary
analysis this bad sex seems got it all
so it’s got the slightly weird opening
simile so like a Furious Matador it’s
got the inevitable but awful genital
genital euphemisms so he has a throbbing
member and she has a desperate yearning
flower it has the inevitable exclamation
of female pleasure that has to always
greet the throbbing member and finally
as if all of that wasn’t enough it ends
on a seriously clunky
you metaphor she is a locked door
begging to be opened
he is the locksmith of her dreams now as
a lecturer in English literature I do a
lot of research on sex and shame which
means that I have to read loads of dirty
books and it means that I have to watch
loads of truly filthy films which you
know isn’t the worst job in the world
there are worse but I like to make my
job that a little bit more uncomfortable
by deliberately seeking out the sex
scenes that make me personally feel as
embarrassed and awkward as possible and
those are the sex scenes that I write
about now I think it’s quite easy if you
want to to avoid bad sex scenes maybe
more so than avoiding bad sex for
example I can think of one case at least
where the Christmas Day gift-giving of a
copy of Fifty Shades of Grey wasn’t
exactly received with the Glee that was
perhaps anticipated but what I’d like to
suggest in my talk today is that we
become much more curious about the
embarrassment and awkwardness that we
feel when we experience bad sex scenes
I think bad sex scenes have a lot to
teachers about the world that we live in
now in and of itself that’s not exactly
a revolutionary idea that notorious
bedroom curtain twitcher freud had a lot
to teach us about the way that our
desires shape culture and how culture
shapes our desires in return and we need
to take a more contemporary example that
the sustained consumption of hardcore
pornography not only changes our
attitudes attitudes to sex but the way
we actually go on to have it so just as
we shape the culture then we’re shaped
by it
in return so let’s talk about bad sex
scenes why they make us feel awkward and
what we can learn from those feelings of
kind of cringe enos and embarrassment
when we watch or read them okay so the
first thing to think about when we’re
thinking about shame and embarrassment
in particular is the way that those
feelings are actually related to
feelings of interest and enjoyment which
might have first seemed quite
counterintuitive it might seem to you
that feelings of shame and embarrassment
are actually the opposite to feelings of
interest and absorption and enjoyment
and pleasure but what I want to suggest
to you today is that for there to exist
the possibility that we are turned off
by something there also has to exist the
possibility that we can be turned on by
it now mid 20th century American
psychologist called sylvan tompkins came
up with some really useful ideas about
how to think about this relationship
between pleasure and enjoyment on one
hand and shame and embarrassment on the
other and what he said about shame is
that it happens only when we’ve had some
kind of prior interest in a thing or a
person so what he said about shame then
is that shame operates ordinarily only
after interest or enjoyment has been
activated and inhibits one or the other
or both
so for shame to happen there has to have
been some interest and furthermore he
discovered in his work that shame also
only happens when you’ve been unable to
completely cut off your interest in the
thing that’s now causing you shame and
to illustrate that he used a set of
really interesting examples of the
experience of seeing a stranger on the
street
so Tompkins says that shame happens in
these circumstances then firstly you
looked at by a stranger I think we can
all relate to that if we looked at by a
stranger it can make us feel a bit
awkward self-conscious embarrassed or
you’re interested in looking at someone
but suddenly can’t because they’re
strange or you expect someone to be
familiar but they turn out to be
unfamiliar and I think what he’s talking
about here is the experience of thinking
that you know someone and then them
taking you by surprise or and this last
example I think will speak to anyone who
incredibly short-sighted like I am you
start to smile at someone in the street
hello then realize they’re a stranger so
all of these examples he says cause a
shame but they’re all examples that are
to do with having some kind of interest
in something that’s then cut off causing
a shame shame throws us back then
suddenly self-consciously on ourselves
our interest has been severed we might
feel when we’re ashamed like we have
something on our face that everybody can
see except us so that’s a little bit of
background about how shame and
embarrassment are related to interest
and pleasure but what does this mean for
thinking about literature and for
thinking about bad sex scenes in
particular well to start to answer that
question I want to take us back in time
a little bit to the 1920s to the
publication of these two books so the H
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and James Joyce’s Ulysses now both of
these books were banned almost as soon
as they were published on account of
containing what was judged to be
sexually obscene material ulysses
famously features an account of a man
masturbating on a beach whilst he looks
a woman he
is an avid reader of romance novels
slowly lifting her skirts and Lady
Chatterley’s liver features an account
of an affair across class lines and also
features a really detailed anal sex
scene so when these books were published
and then when they were subsequently
subsequently banned censors called them
slimy and disgusting and immoral and
evil and there was particularly an
anxiety about the possibility that women
might read these books it being felt at
the time although I still think this
belief persists to some extent that
women were likely to be more sexually
corrupted by reading literature and
seeing some knowing smiles and the
audience there than men were in other
words that a woman would read Ulysses
one day and then the next day go out to
a beach and Hika skirts up that was the
belief so both of these books then hit
kinds of raw cultural nerve when it came
to sex Ulysses was mocking the very
thing that ultimately got it banned the
idea that women reading literature was
going to make them sexually corrupt
somehow and Lady Chatterley’s liver was
kind of a triple hitter not only did it
feature an affair across class lines the
belief being in English society at that
time that the only way that that society
was going to care was if people didn’t
move across class lines it also featured
a really detailed account of female
sexual desire and it brought with it the
suggestion that World War one had
somehow rendered the elite classes
impotent so these were both books then
that made judges very nervous and in
return they labeled these books as bad
and that’s another way of thinking about
the word bad in my title today that bad
sex scenes are not just sex scenes that
have been deemed to be poorly written
somehow like a stunning passage from the
beginning of my talk
but they’re also sex scenes that have
been viewed to be somehow morally
objectionable sex scenes that are going
to turn readers rotten here’s the catch
though in order to decide that a book is
dirty you have to have a dirty mind and
I think this is something that the
judges who banned these books were
trying to draw a kind of pure righteous
looking veil over and that’s another
thing that shame allows us to do if we
call something shameful we get to kind
of hold it a distance from us and
pretend we’re not personally implicated
by it the judges who banned these books
then were afraid that they were going to
kind of bring into being a society where
for example people had anonymous sex or
had affairs or enjoyed taboo kinds of
sex without realizing that the fact that
these books had been written was proof
of the fact that that society was
already in place okay so today we view
these books as modern-day classics and
they provide us with really interesting
windows onto the times that they were
written in and sure yep particularly for
me lately Lady Chatterley’s liver
contains scenes that feel kind of cringy
but what I’d like to suggest is that we
interrogate and become curious about the
feeling for what it can teachers about
what we want and don’t want from sex and
about the world that we live in
more generally okay so to bring it
forward took the contemporary then we
don’t really ban books in the West so
much anymore although it still happens
but what we have are other kinds of
disciplinary mechanisms for pushing away
the bad sex and the bad sex seems that
we don’t want to encounter and one of
these happens every year in London
amongst the literary elite and that is
the so named bad sex in fiction award
so every year the bad sex in fiction
award judges read all the literary
fiction from that year and pull out the
novels that they believe have most
crossed the lines of good taste when it
comes to their depiction of sex and the
novelist who they feel has written the
the worst sex scene gets the gb/s honor
of receiving the bad sex in fiction
award now it goes without saying that no
novelist wants to receive this award
just as no one presumably wants to be
told that they’re bad in bed and hardly
ever any novelist ever turns up to
collect their prize because the bad sex
in fiction award is kind of like a
modern-day stalks that has almost
started to work to shame authors of
literary fiction out of even trying to
write about sex in their books for fear
that they might receive one of these
awards the bad sex in fiction award in
other words feeds on shame and we have
other ways of shaming or pushing away
the sex scenes that we don’t want to
think about in contemporary society and
another one of those ways is mocking
people who read erotic fiction which I
think you can see a lot with the kind of
cultural snobbery that greeted the
publication of Fifty Shades of Grey
now I had a high school English teacher
he when my friends and I were reading
books like Fifty Shades of Grey
as teenagers used to tell us in a very
haughty grammar school teacher sort of
voice these books girls and like
drinking dirty milk that’s how she’d say
it and I think the implication there was
that by reading these books we were
somehow turning ourselves into dirty
girls so she was trying to censor our
reading in a way that I think there’s a
certain kind of censorship today around
contemporary erotica
so maybe we haven’t moved on so far then
since the days of Ulysses and Lady
Chatterley’s liver but what I’d like to
suggest is this next time we feel
embarrassed about a bad sex scene and
want to hold the sofa cushion over our
face or slam the book sure how about we
become a bit more curious about that
feeling about what it can tell us not
only about our hopes and desires for sex
but about the way that we move through
the world it could be then that bad sex
scenes are kinds of invitation in
disguise to come back to our
prize-winning passage from the beginning
of the talk bad sex scenes could be like
locked doors begging to be opened which
might just make us the locksmiths of
their dreams thank you
[Applause]
now if I was to ask you what bad sex was
what it looked like
sounded like felt like chances are I
think that you might come up with quite
a range of different answers
there’s no adage that says one person’s
good sex is another person’s bad but
maybe there should be but if I was to
ask you what a bad sex scene looked like
I think you might come up with some
quite similar answers we might talk if
we’re thinking about literature about
clunky metaphors or awkwardly mismatched
characters or cliches all kind of
euphemisms for sex that just feel
awkward or embarrassing or bad somehow a
bad sex scene in literature you might
say could look something like this like
a Furious Matador he thrusts his
throbbing member into her desperate
yearning flower oh god she cried she was
a locked door begging to be opened and
he was the locksmith of her dreams now
this is pretty bad right right I can
promise you with almost total certainty
that the author of this passage won’t be
offended if you think so because it was
me and if you can make me a moment of
just a very brief I promise literary
analysis this bad sex seems got it all
so it’s got the slightly weird opening
simile so like a Furious Matador it’s
got the inevitable but awful genital
genital euphemisms so he has a throbbing
member and she has a desperate yearning
flower it has the inevitable exclamation
of female pleasure that has to always
greet the throbbing member and finally
as if all of that wasn’t enough it ends
on a seriously clunky
you metaphor she is a locked door
begging to be opened
he is the locksmith of her dreams now as
a lecturer in English literature I do a
lot of research on sex and shame which
means that I have to read loads of dirty
books and it means that I have to watch
loads of truly filthy films which you
know isn’t the worst job in the world
there are worse but I like to make my
job that a little bit more uncomfortable
by deliberately seeking out the sex
scenes that make me personally feel as
embarrassed and awkward as possible and
those are the sex scenes that I write
about now I think it’s quite easy if you
want to to avoid bad sex scenes maybe
more so than avoiding bad sex for
example I can think of one case at least
where the Christmas Day gift-giving of a
copy of Fifty Shades of Grey wasn’t
exactly received with the Glee that was
perhaps anticipated but what I’d like to
suggest in my talk today is that we
become much more curious about the
embarrassment and awkwardness that we
feel when we experience bad sex scenes
I think bad sex scenes have a lot to
teachers about the world that we live in
now in and of itself that’s not exactly
a revolutionary idea that notorious
bedroom curtain twitcher freud had a lot
to teach us about the way that our
desires shape culture and how culture
shapes our desires in return and we need
to take a more contemporary example that
the sustained consumption of hardcore
pornography not only changes our
attitudes attitudes to sex but the way
we actually go on to have it so just as
we shape the culture then we’re shaped
by it
in return so let’s talk about bad sex
scenes why they make us feel awkward and
what we can learn from those feelings of
kind of cringe enos and embarrassment
when we watch or read them okay so the
first thing to think about when we’re
thinking about shame and embarrassment
in particular is the way that those
feelings are actually related to
feelings of interest and enjoyment which
might have first seemed quite
counterintuitive it might seem to you
that feelings of shame and embarrassment
are actually the opposite to feelings of
interest and absorption and enjoyment
and pleasure but what I want to suggest
to you today is that for there to exist
the possibility that we are turned off
by something there also has to exist the
possibility that we can be turned on by
it now mid 20th century American
psychologist called sylvan tompkins came
up with some really useful ideas about
how to think about this relationship
between pleasure and enjoyment on one
hand and shame and embarrassment on the
other and what he said about shame is
that it happens only when we’ve had some
kind of prior interest in a thing or a
person so what he said about shame then
is that shame operates ordinarily only
after interest or enjoyment has been
activated and inhibits one or the other
or both
so for shame to happen there has to have
been some interest and furthermore he
discovered in his work that shame also
only happens when you’ve been unable to
completely cut off your interest in the
thing that’s now causing you shame and
to illustrate that he used a set of
really interesting examples of the
experience of seeing a stranger on the
street
so Tompkins says that shame happens in
these circumstances then firstly you
looked at by a stranger I think we can
all relate to that if we looked at by a
stranger it can make us feel a bit
awkward self-conscious embarrassed or
you’re interested in looking at someone
but suddenly can’t because they’re
strange or you expect someone to be
familiar but they turn out to be
unfamiliar and I think what he’s talking
about here is the experience of thinking
that you know someone and then them
taking you by surprise or and this last
example I think will speak to anyone who
incredibly short-sighted like I am you
start to smile at someone in the street
hello then realize they’re a stranger so
all of these examples he says cause a
shame but they’re all examples that are
to do with having some kind of interest
in something that’s then cut off causing
a shame shame throws us back then
suddenly self-consciously on ourselves
our interest has been severed we might
feel when we’re ashamed like we have
something on our face that everybody can
see except us so that’s a little bit of
background about how shame and
embarrassment are related to interest
and pleasure but what does this mean for
thinking about literature and for
thinking about bad sex scenes in
particular well to start to answer that
question I want to take us back in time
a little bit to the 1920s to the
publication of these two books so the H
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and James Joyce’s Ulysses now both of
these books were banned almost as soon
as they were published on account of
containing what was judged to be
sexually obscene material ulysses
famously features an account of a man
masturbating on a beach whilst he looks
a woman he
is an avid reader of romance novels
slowly lifting her skirts and Lady
Chatterley’s liver features an account
of an affair across class lines and also
features a really detailed anal sex
scene so when these books were published
and then when they were subsequently
subsequently banned censors called them
slimy and disgusting and immoral and
evil and there was particularly an
anxiety about the possibility that women
might read these books it being felt at
the time although I still think this
belief persists to some extent that
women were likely to be more sexually
corrupted by reading literature and
seeing some knowing smiles and the
audience there than men were in other
words that a woman would read Ulysses
one day and then the next day go out to
a beach and Hika skirts up that was the
belief so both of these books then hit
kinds of raw cultural nerve when it came
to sex Ulysses was mocking the very
thing that ultimately got it banned the
idea that women reading literature was
going to make them sexually corrupt
somehow and Lady Chatterley’s liver was
kind of a triple hitter not only did it
feature an affair across class lines the
belief being in English society at that
time that the only way that that society
was going to care was if people didn’t
move across class lines it also featured
a really detailed account of female
sexual desire and it brought with it the
suggestion that World War one had
somehow rendered the elite classes
impotent so these were both books then
that made judges very nervous and in
return they labeled these books as bad
and that’s another way of thinking about
the word bad in my title today that bad
sex scenes are not just sex scenes that
have been deemed to be poorly written
somehow like a stunning passage from the
beginning of my talk
but they’re also sex scenes that have
been viewed to be somehow morally
objectionable sex scenes that are going
to turn readers rotten here’s the catch
though in order to decide that a book is
dirty you have to have a dirty mind and
I think this is something that the
judges who banned these books were
trying to draw a kind of pure righteous
looking veil over and that’s another
thing that shame allows us to do if we
call something shameful we get to kind
of hold it a distance from us and
pretend we’re not personally implicated
by it the judges who banned these books
then were afraid that they were going to
kind of bring into being a society where
for example people had anonymous sex or
had affairs or enjoyed taboo kinds of
sex without realizing that the fact that
these books had been written was proof
of the fact that that society was
already in place okay so today we view
these books as modern-day classics and
they provide us with really interesting
windows onto the times that they were
written in and sure yep particularly for
me lately Lady Chatterley’s liver
contains scenes that feel kind of cringy
but what I’d like to suggest is that we
interrogate and become curious about the
feeling for what it can teachers about
what we want and don’t want from sex and
about the world that we live in
more generally okay so to bring it
forward took the contemporary then we
don’t really ban books in the West so
much anymore although it still happens
but what we have are other kinds of
disciplinary mechanisms for pushing away
the bad sex and the bad sex seems that
we don’t want to encounter and one of
these happens every year in London
amongst the literary elite and that is
the so named bad sex in fiction award
so every year the bad sex in fiction
award judges read all the literary
fiction from that year and pull out the
novels that they believe have most
crossed the lines of good taste when it
comes to their depiction of sex and the
novelist who they feel has written the
the worst sex scene gets the gb/s honor
of receiving the bad sex in fiction
award now it goes without saying that no
novelist wants to receive this award
just as no one presumably wants to be
told that they’re bad in bed and hardly
ever any novelist ever turns up to
collect their prize because the bad sex
in fiction award is kind of like a
modern-day stalks that has almost
started to work to shame authors of
literary fiction out of even trying to
write about sex in their books for fear
that they might receive one of these
awards the bad sex in fiction award in
other words feeds on shame and we have
other ways of shaming or pushing away
the sex scenes that we don’t want to
think about in contemporary society and
another one of those ways is mocking
people who read erotic fiction which I
think you can see a lot with the kind of
cultural snobbery that greeted the
publication of Fifty Shades of Grey
now I had a high school English teacher
he when my friends and I were reading
books like Fifty Shades of Grey
as teenagers used to tell us in a very
haughty grammar school teacher sort of
voice these books girls and like
drinking dirty milk that’s how she’d say
it and I think the implication there was
that by reading these books we were
somehow turning ourselves into dirty
girls so she was trying to censor our
reading in a way that I think there’s a
certain kind of censorship today around
contemporary erotica
so maybe we haven’t moved on so far then
since the days of Ulysses and Lady
Chatterley’s liver but what I’d like to
suggest is this next time we feel
embarrassed about a bad sex scene and
want to hold the sofa cushion over our
face or slam the book sure how about we
become a bit more curious about that
feeling about what it can tell us not
only about our hopes and desires for sex
but about the way that we move through
the world it could be then that bad sex
scenes are kinds of invitation in
disguise to come back to our
prize-winning passage from the beginning
of the talk bad sex scenes could be like
locked doors begging to be opened which
might just make us the locksmiths of
their dreams thank you
[Applause]
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