So it’s that time of year again. The season of ignominy every fiction writer dreads: the naming of the Bad Sex in Fiction award recipient.

Sigh.

Every year since 1993, the award is given by Literary Review, Britain’s leading monthly literary magazine that reviews a wide range of published books, from fiction to historical, political, biographical and travel. The award is reserved for the author of a work of fiction who, in the opinion of the judges, produces the “worst description of a sex scene” in a novel.

Yikes.

Those Brits have entirely too much time on their hands, is what I have to say.

This year’s winner of fiction’s least coveted prize is Irish writer Rowan Somerville, author of The Shape of Her. Listen, the award is offered in kind of good fun. How could it not be? Kind of like, I suppose, how the Razzies are a send-up of the Oscars, and have a chuckle at actors who are phenomenally bad in a certain role. (Hey, how about a Razzie for Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz for that two-hour waste of a studio budget called Knight and Day? Just a suggestion.) The stated reason for the award is “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it”.

Admittedly, the line from The Shape of Her that clinched the award for Somerville, one describing a nipple, is cringe-worthy – [It was] like the upturned nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing in the night – but there have been worse lines penned.

I can’t imagine any author feeling good about receiving a Bad Sex award. Never mind Somerville’s seemingly nonchalant response while accepting the dubious honour at a ceremony recently: “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation, I thank you.” Dude, come on. Someone felt that your description of the sex act sucked! I compare it to somebody handing me a prize for being Worst Woman of the Year. Embarrassing, yeah? All I know how to be is a woman. It’s natural; I don’t wake up each morning thinking, how will I try to be a good woman today? Seriously, how much of a loser would I have to be to get that award? In the same way, I think it’d be a million times easier to hear one’s writing stinks in general, rather than one’s description of a sex scene blows. Metaphors and other literary devices may be tricky but, if you’re an adult writer, how difficult could it be to write something you know? Writers are supposed to be able to represent any form of human nature, aren’t they? (If they can’t write it, does it mean they’re not good at it, too?) Regarding writing about sex, the representation doesn’t have to be great – there’s no Best Sex award, for God’s sake – it just has to pass muster. It can be boring. Just not bad. So, really, how hard could writing about it be?

Apparently, very.

This is why you never really see a lot of sex in literary fiction. Reading about sex doesn’t work unless it’s one of those books for which there’s a high expectation (read: 100 per cent of sordid and juicy bits. But not in mainstream literature. Oh, characters in mainstream literature are endlessly having affairs and dalliances, losing their virginity, testing each other’s sexual boundaries. Sex, after all, is at the very core of Western literature. It’s just that literary authors don’t often go into details about it. Think about it. How many authors are there, I mean, titans in the literary world, who dedicate more than two, three lines to the sex act? Yes, the characters are attracted to each other; they lean in for the kiss. What’s that, two sentences? Mention may be made of the man’s erection and the woman’s sublime ecstasy about being needed, but just when you’re about to go with them into the bedroom, whoops, there goes the door, slammed in your face. Next thing you know, you’re waking up with them, the morning after, when a multitude of regret and recrimination is about to set in. What happened the night before? Did he have performance anxiety and could only close the deal after a couple false starts? Did she call out somebody else’s name? Who knows? You’re left to fill in the blanks, use your imagination.

However, when brave-heart authors do dedicate to more than merely a cursory mention of the sex act, and write it in the most straightforward way they know, they’re often accused of producing porn. We must draw the line between art and porn, the critics will bleat.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

No wonder the Bad Sex award has been around for the past 17 years, and has seen even respected, top-drawer writers copping it. Hey, Jonathan Franzen was on the shortlist for it this year.

The truth is, we’re still not truly comfortable with human sexuality. Even in 2010, there still exists a lot of prudishness. Whether the prudishness lies with the author or the reader is another question altogether. Do writers write self-consciously about sex because they are themselves uncomfortable with sex? Or do they mess up because they think they may offend their readers or not live up to their expectations? One female writer, crime novelist Stella Duffy, in an interview with the BBC, admitted, “People will always assume that I’ve had the sex I’ve written about.” This is why many writers simply leave out the full-on sex scenes. Perhaps Western civilisation is still light years away from a frank description of sex in mainstream literature. Perhaps full frontal sex is best left to reading material that has to be wrapped in brown paper and found on bottom shelves at drug stores.

But getting back to Somerville’s nocturnal animal-sniffing nipple. Is this how men see our nipples? Little nocturnal animals sniffing in the night? Sniffing what? Seriously? I understand Somerville wanting to be literary in his description, and he probably is in the thrall of a woman’s nipples, but I think he was just overreaching. Or maybe he wasn’t. Is there sniffing when puckering occurs? The next time I stand in front of my bathroom mirror on a cold night, I’m going to incline my head and listen. Maybe if I’m very quiet, I’ll hear it.