50 Shades Of Put It Away: The Worst Book Sex Scenes Ever
50 Shades Of Put It Away: The Worst Book Sex Scenes Ever
By Sam Parker
The huge, throbbing success of 50 Shades Of Grey - the erotic novel that became a self-publishing phenomenon - has brought with it a fair share of criticism.
From snide reviews to Twitter parodies, plenty have mocked the story’s breathless prose and naked cliches, even as E.L. James’s sale figures rose to uncontrollable heights of ecstasy.
But as book fans and writers alike know, grinding out a good sex scene is one of the deepest, hardest challenges facing the humble novelist, one that has ravaged the reputation of more than one titan of fiction in the past.
Any approach has its potential pitfalls.
Be too metaphorical, and your sex scene will slip from your grasp like with lithe wriggle of a snagged salmon, up, up, away from your impressive rod and through the sun-stroked streams, deep into a pool of pretension.
Play it too hard and fast, and you’ll sound like a crude twat.
So for this reason, we think 50 Shades Of Grey deserves to be cut some flack. From John Updike to James Joyce to, er, Giles Coren and Tony Blair, plenty of highly-regarded wordsmiths have drooped when faced with evoking coitus.
Don’t believe us? Here’s 50 of the funniest, weirdest and most cringe-inducing book sex scenes of all time…
That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me. On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct.”
– A Journey, Tony Blair
She would have lain down in the warm mud for him, even the mud of the pigsty, to enter the exaltation she found in his brute love … “
– Gertrude and Claudius, John Updike
…she grabbed at his dick, which was leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath, she scratched his back deeply with the nails of both hands and he shot three more times, in thick stripes on her chest. Like Zorro.”
– Winkler, Giles Coren
And so they made love together in the pouring rain, with Nurse Murray emitting a stream of girlish exclamations which seemed to indicate that she was enjoying herself. “Gosh”, “Golly” and, as things moved towards a conclusion, even “Tally ho!”
– The First Casualty, Ben Elton
He was bigger than she had remembered. She tilted her hips and felt the weight of his balls on her … what? Small expanse of skin between vagina and anus. Perineum - was that it? Her mind screamed: Shut up, Lucy! You’re not doing the Cosmopolitan crossword now.”
– The Crime Tsar, Nichola McAuliffe
His man lance prepared for duty.”
– Naked Dragon, Annette Blair
‘Oh,’ she says, as she pounds her bullet-proof pussy down.”
– The Death Of Bunny Munroe , Nick Cave
It didn’t take long for the beautiful and perfect Ed King to ejaculate for the fifth time in twelve hours, while looking like Roman public-bath statuary. Then they rinsed, dried, dressed, and went to an expensive restaurant for lunch.”
– Ed King, David Guterson
He felt as if he had been pierced through with iron nails that tore his lungs as he tried to breathe … He slid his hands around her waist. Her skin was smooth and she felt sleekly muscled, like a dolphin might”
– The Naked Name Of Love, Sanjida O’Connell
He was stroking her body over her silky dress and when his fingers got down to where her dress ended, just below her thighs, he reached up between her legs and plunged two fingers into her vulva, and began to probe her vaginal canal, as if he was searching for lost car keys.”
– Peyton Amberg, Tama Janowitz
I let my hand stroke boldly downward, my fingers aching to set him free, to grasp his turgid magnificence.”
– A Brush of Darkness, Allison Pang
She gripped my arms. Her nails tore into me. Soon we both were burning. Sweat pooled in the ridge of my back as I moved like a tide determined to crash against those ancient rocks.”
– Love Begins in Winter, Simon Van Booy
Fuck me,” I said. “Fuck me, God, fuck me, just fuck me. Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, please, please, please, just fuck me.”
– Incubus Dreams, Laurell K. Hamilton
I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg”
– The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell
For Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus. With each of these women Vaughan explored a different sex act, inserting his penis in vagina, anus and mouth almost in response to the road along which we moved, the traffic density, the style of my driving.”
– Crash, J G Ballards
It was Heaven. I was the earth, the mountains, the tigers, the rivers that flowed into the lakes, the lake that became the sea. He was thrusting faster and faster now, and the pain was mingled with pleasure, and I could have said: ‘I can’t take any more’, but that would have been unfair, because, by then, he and I were one person.”
– Eleven Minutes, Paolo Coelho
Her vaginal canal lifted skyward at the proper tilt, like an ack-ack gun, to bring down ecstasy from on high.”
– Toward The End Of Time, John Updike
Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina.”
– Ten Storey Love Song, Richard Milward
She sandwiches your nozzle between her tits, massaging it with a slow rhythm. A trailer to bookmark the events ahead. For now she has taken you in her lovely mouth. Your palms are holding her neck and thumbs are at her ears regulating the speed of her head as she swallows and then sucks up your machinery.”
– Bunker 13, Aniruddha Bahal
The size of his engine had surprised her”
– Six Feet Under, Howard Hodgson
Paul ejaculates voluminously and with very great force indeed. In fact he keeps on and on ejaculating, there’s loads of the stuff, out it all comes, pint after pint, and he begins to wonder if it will ever cease.”
– Too Beautiful For You, Rod Liddle
…the ram beat against the shuddering gate, echoing along the walls. She did not hide. She was there”
– In A Flag For Sunrise, Robert Stone
…the hot grip of her mouth, triggered his orgasm, which was not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.”
– Blinding Light, Paul Theroux
Austin’s nipples, his penis, his mouth, his arms were all glowing; a heat-seeking missile would have found five sites to bomb.”
– A Married Man, Edmund White
But did thee feel the earth move?”
– For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Her big soft lips locked around my hootchee and, true to her Scottish roots, she sucked away like she was the last person left on earth to play the bagpipes on Robbie Burns’ birthday.”
– The Sucker’s Kiss, Alan Parker
When I passed him he turned to look at me, and I saw those fine white lashes long enough to catch flies. Strange that a beast should have such beautiful lashes around eyes with as much expression as two marbles.”
– The Deposition of Father McGreevy, Brian O’Doherty
Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it pressed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death.”
– Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
Eric took the soap out of my hands and lathered up his own, set the soap back in its little niche, and began to wash my arms, raising each in turn to stroke my armpit, down my side, never touching my breasts, which were practically quivering like puppies who wanted to be petted.”
– Dead to the World, Charlaine Harris
The first electrical storm passes through her at once, like a break in the clouds, like alliterative quatrains, like wind chimes, freshly mown grass, goat cheese, new car interiors, church choirs, grand slams.
– Tracking The Tempest, Nicole Peeler
My nipples waved hello at him as he pulled down the cups of my bra.”
– Tracking The Tempest, Nicole Peeler
She was holding my head, murmuring ‘Pray,’ and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue.”
– A Dead Hand, Paul Theroux
Excited by the oysterish intricacy of her he sucked and licked the salty folds until they became sweet, and slowly she arched her back to heighten the angle of provocation.”
– The Rescue Man, Anthony Quinn
There was a lot of wool, and other material, some cheek, some panting, some movement, some pressure and lack of everything else.
– The Green Man, Kingsley Amis
Her open-wide eyes melting like boiling gold…the abrupt caesura of exploding staggering.
– The Constant Eye, Candida Clark
Her pubes was a field of wheat after the harvest, a field neatly furrowed; it was a nest, a pomegranate, an arrowhead, a rune. It was a shadow. It was moss on a smooth white stone. There was an orchid within the moss. There was a drop of dew upon the orchid.”
– The Rescue Man, Anthony Quinn
Her breasts themselves were large, however, and fully ripe. They seemed to be virtually uninfluenced by the force of gravity, the nipples turned beautifully upward, like a vine’s new tendrils seeking sunlight. The next thing that Tengo became aware of was that Fuka-Eri had no pubic hair.”
– 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense.”
– The Infinities, John Banville
His body knew only one goal, to bury itself into the snug fist of her femininity and let it milk him dry.”
– Demon Rumm, Sandra Brown
…and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
– Ulysses, James Joyce
Paul ejaculates voluminously and with very great force indeed. In fact he keeps on and on ejaculating, there’s loads of the stuff, out it all comes, pint after pint, and he begins to wonder if it will ever cease.”
– Too Beautiful For You, Rod Liddle
Still I could not tell where her soft skin ended and her silk began, and the complexity of her vaginal lips was like another elaborate silken garment she had put on for me to stroke.
– The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro, Paul Theroux
Soft rapturous murmurings turned to pleading demand for release from the agonising pleasure bestowed, and then, only then did he rise up and glide himself into her in blissful abandonment.”
– Deadly Conclusion, Bronwyn Davis
The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”
– The Shape Of Her, Rowan Somerville
For a few seconds, Anna held on as if to a bucking bronco. … The night being blacker than the inside of a Highland cow, it was impossible for Anna to see Jamie’s expression.”
– Bad Heir Day, Wendy Cope
We began to climb peaks and fall off them. We did old things in new ways. And new things in old ways. At times like these we were the work of surrealist masters. Any body part could be joined to any body part. And it would result in a masterpiece. Toe and tongue. Nipple and penis. Finger and the bud. Armpit and mouth. Nose and clitoris. Clavicle and gluteus maximus. Mons veneris and phallus indica.”
– The Alchemy of Desire, Tarun Tejpal
It is time, time … Now. Yes. She is so small and compact and yet she has all the necessary features … Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou art more compact and more - She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa … Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh …”
– Kissing England, Sean Thomas
He came and he came - we are dealing with a hero here. At one point his lover backed away to inspect the unaltered gush of it, like a plumber saying to a customer, “Don’t blame me. This water supply will stop when the dam’s empty.”
– Fan Tan, Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell
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