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The Great Male Novelist is supposed to stare long and hard at the world and then put down on the page glimmering paragraphs of truth.
What the hell is going on in these sex scenes, then?
Granted, sex is a difficult thing to capture, and when you remove a sex scene from the larger context of its novel (as they are rendered here), moments that work stop working; you wind up with weird jokes (perfect for our purposes).
And not all of these scenes are hilarious because they're inept or purple. Some of the following scenes are laughable because they were written to make the reader laugh (see Nicholson Baker, Philip Roth, and Geoff Dyer).
Don't worry about needing to keep it in your pants. Here are 25 Laughable Sex Scenes From Famous Male Novelists.
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Compiled by Greg Topscher (@gtopscher) and Ross Scarano (@RossScarano)
From Tropic of Cancer
Author: Henry Miller
Participants: Henry Miller
Worst Line(s): "I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent. Your Sylvester is a little jealous now? He feels something, does he? He feels the remnants of my big prick. I have set the shores a little wider, I have ironed out the wrinkles."
Bravado is one thing—and we all know Henry Miller has loads of that—but this passage suggests he might have radioactive sperm. Is that a superpower?
From Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Author: Geoff Dyer
Participants: Jeff Atman, Laura
Worst Line(s): "His brain was completely empty, devoid of the thoughts that were racing through it, all except one: Laura's ass. What was it about women's assholes? Where did it come from, this irresistible desire to stick one's fingers, cock and tongue up them? Shit was horrible, revolting stuff, but women's assholes...Maybe he should do a five-hundred-word op-ed piece on that, how the only thing in life contemporary man loves more than eating pussy is licking ass."
You know you want to read that op-ed.
From To Have and Have Not
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Participants: Harry Morgan, Marie Morgan
Worst Line(s): " 'You lie. You always lie to me. There. There. There.'
'No. You're the best.'
'I'm old.'
'You'll never be old.'
'I've had that thing.
'That don't make no difference when a woman's any good.'
'Go ahead. Go ahead now. Put the stump there. Hold it there. Hold it. Hold it now. Hold it.' "
Hemingway's a literary giant who made a name for himself for the words he didn't write, so he's not exactly going to spell it out. But we will: stump insertion.
From Portnoy's Complaint
Author: Philip Roth
Participants: Alex Portnoy, Thereal McCoy
Worst Line(s): "She pushes Drake's Daredevil Cupcakes (chocolate with a white creamy center) down over my cock and then eats them off of me, flake by flake. She pours maple syrup out of the Log Cabin can and then licks it from my tender balls until they're clean again as a little boy's. Her favorite line of English prose is a masterpiece: 'Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.' When I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles."
Philip Roth invented thirst.
From 1Q84
Author: Haruki Murakami
Participants: Tengo, Fuka-Eri
Worst Line(s): "In the next second, Tengo realized that he was ejaculating. The violent spasm went on for several seconds, releasing a great deal of semen in a powerful surge. Where is my semen going? Tengo's garbled mind wondered. Ejaculating like this after school in a grade school classroom was not an appropriate thing to do. He could be in trouble if someone saw him. But this was not a grade school classroom anymore. Now he realized that he was inside Fuka-Eri, ejaculating toward her uterus. This was not something that he wanted to be doing."
"Where is my semen going?"—no joke, this is a very important question to ask yourself when ejaculating.
From Underworld
Author: Don DeLillo
Participants: Marian Shay, Brian Glassic
Worst Line(s): "The day had slipped down to a drowsy pulse located somewhere near her eyes. When she stretched she felt the jismic crust in her pubic hair speck out and crackle slightly. He whispered, 'Let's have a civilized final fuck and get out alive.' "
"Jismic crust" my be the most creative language ever used for a detail nobody likes to think about. But it is really hard to forget.
From The Fermata
Author: Nicholson Baker
Participants: John Westman (the UPS Guy), Marian
Worst Line(s): "She held the hem of her skirt with her chin so that she could look down at her spread vadge. The road was pounding the Van Dilden's cockshape into her stinging cuntskin. She reached back and twisted the Fusilier in her ass. Her clit looked as if it were ready to jump up and propose a toast to old friends; the other end of the double-header was sitting solidly to one side of it, talking in the fast, even, confident nasty-rumor language that vibrators use with their clit-clients. She felt a gorgeous huge thick-muscled orgasm moving slowly up her legs and fanning out toward all orifices. She spat her skirt out. 'Pump the brake harder!' she commanded again. 'Oh shit! Oh God! That's it. Pump it. Brake, brake, brake. That's it, like that. FUCK ME WITH YOUR TRUCK! JACK THAT BIG UGLY DICK AND FUCK MY ASS WITH YOUR TRUCK!' "
Nicholson Baker: looks like Santa Claus, writes the most outrageous sex scenes. Try to reconcile these two things.
From Women
Author: Charles Bukowski
Participants: Henry Chinaski, Iris
Worst Line(s): "My cock was still hard. I picked up one of the shoes and rubbed my cock with it. It felt great. Then I put the shoe back on the floor. When Iris came out of the bathroom still smiling, my cock went down."
What? Some shoes are very vaginal.
From The Autumn of the Patriarch
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Participants: The General, the girl
Worst Line(s): "He used bread to soak up my first adolescent sauce, he would put things there before eating them, he gave them to me to eat, he put asparagus stalks into me to eat them marinated with the brine of my inner humors, delicious, he told me, you taste like a port."
Cooking with adolescent sauce is gonna be the next foodie movement, for sure.
From Money
Author: Martin Amis
Participants: John Self, Butch Beausoleil
Worst Line(s): "If I glance downwards, like so, and retract my gut, I can see her valentine card and the mysterious trail of her cleft, like the inside of a halved apple. Now do you believe me? Wait: here comes her hand, idling slantways down her rump, ten bucks of manicure on each fingertip. Why she seems to be...Wow. Selina herself doesn't do that too often. And I bet not even Selina does it on the first date."
Oh, a valentine card—guess that's not doing it for readers because it immediately conjures memories of valentine's day card exchanges with the entire class in third grade.
From Sexus
Author: Henry Miller
Participants: Henry Miller, Mona
Worst Line(s): "Then a groan, a spasm, a wild tortured look as if her face were under a mirror pounded by a hammer. 'Don't take it out yet,' she grunted. She lay there, her legs still slung around my neck, and the little flag insider her began twitching and fluttering. 'God,' she said, 'I can't stop it!' My prick was still firm. It hung obedient on her wet lips, as though receiving the sacrament from a lascivious angel. She came again, like an accordion collapsing in a bag of milk."
"Bag of milk" was the original "bag of sand."
From Seek My Face
Author: John Updike
Participants: Guy Holloway, Hope McCoy
Worst Line(s): "Even his prick was smooth, barely marked by the ridge and homely veins that other men had, like an ivory dildo."
Big veins add some extra menace to an already fairly aggresive looking organ, but a relatively veinless dick? Terrifying.
From Falconer
Author: John Cheever
Participants: The Cuckold
Worst Line(s): "Now and then he would take my cock in his mouth and this was the first time in my life that I ever had a mouth around my cock. I thought this would look like hell in a newsreel or on the front page of the newspaper, but evidently my cock hadn't ever seen a newspaper because it was going crazy. So then he suggested that we get into bed and we did and the next thing I knew the telephone was ringing and it was morning."
Stand up if your cock reads the Sunday funnies.
From Choke
Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Participants: Victor Mancini, Tanya
Worst Line(s): "Tanya yanks again, and my dog triggers, the white soldiers gobbling against the bedroom wallpaper beside her face. She yanks again, and my dog's coughing dry and still coughing."
Necessary context: Tanya is yanking anal beads from Victor's behind. Maybe necessary context? Palahniuk calls Victor's dick his dog. You got it from there.
From Portnoy's Complaint
Author: Philip Roth
Participants: Alex Portnoy, a piece of liver
Worst Line(s): "Well, where is this right mind on that afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house, and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe that I have already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That—she—it—wasn't my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled around my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty-and then had again on the end of a fork, at five thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.
"So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner."
The granddaddy of literary masturbation scenes needs no comment.
From The Godfather
Author: Mario Puzo
Participants: Sonny Corleone, Lucy Mancini
Worst Line(s): "Her hand closed around an enormous, blood-gorged pole of muscle. It pulsated in her hand like an animal and almost weeping with grateful ecstasy she pointed it into her own wet, turgid flesh. The thrust of its entering, the unbelievable pleasure made her gasp, brought her legs up almost around his neck, and then like a quiver, her body received the savage arrows of his lighting-like thrusts."
This scene is mostly hilarious for the fact that Mario Puzo wrote in a character (Lucy) with a wide-set vagina for Sonny Corleone's elephant dick, and then proceeded to make it a crucial plot development.
From Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Participants: Henry Dorsett Case,Molly Millions
Worst Line(s): "She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips."
This is how someone who spends lots of time on the Internet would describe an orgasm.
From House of Holes
Author: Nicholson Baker
Participants: Polly, a penis
Worst Line(s): "She was amazed. It was like his penis had a telescoping action—the more she taunted and reviled it, the more it kept adding intermediate sections. It was like a subway improvement project."
*drops mic*
From I Am Charlotte Simmons
Author: Tom Wolfe
Participants: Charlotte Simmons, Hoyt Thorpe
Worst Line(s): "Slither slither slither slither went the tongue, but the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now! She must say 'No, Hoyt' and talk to him like a dog..."
Tom Wolfe's infamously bad passage has kept fans of hilarious sex scenes happy for years. It has almost an avant garde quality to it. As if the characters were perfoming it in a Greenwich Village coffee shop in the '60s. "At the third 'slither,' really slap those bongos, Carl."
From The Death of Bunny Munro
Author: Nick Cave
Participants: Bunny Munro, River
Worst Line(s): "He feels like the flenched blubber a butcher may trim from a choice fillet of prime English beef and, as the song says, he has never felt this way before. This is completely new territory for him. He can see that the hard globes of River's breasts are perfect and better than the real thing and he attempts to lift his arm in order to pinch her nipples, which are the size and texture of liquorice Jelly Spogs, or stick his finger in her arsehole or something, but realises with a certain amount of satisfaction that he can't be fucked and he lets his arm drop to the side.
"River squeezes Bunny's cock with her muscular vagina."
For the licorice shaped/sized nipples alone, this is one of the weirdest series of food-related sex analogies you're likely to find. Cave throws in a little butcher scraps just to sweeten the pot.
From On Chesil Beach
Author: Ian McEwan
Participants: Edward Mayhew, Florence Ponting
Worst Line(s): "Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonised, rising vowels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a pile of towering soup plates."
That is one hell of a bad tug job.
From Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Participants: Callie Stephanides, The Obscure Object
Worst Line(s): "I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands, adjusting her legs around my waist. I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral, broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope."
RT if you've ever had an orgasm that felt like a Disney cartoon with cartoon gypsies.
From It
Author: Stephen King
Participants: Beverly Marsh, "Stuttering" Bill Denbrough, Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak, Stan Uris, Mike Hanlon
Worst Line(s): " 'No, I can't.' But she thinks that part of him can and wants to, because she feels something small and hard which presses against the right side of her belly."
Easy Dad laughs about how the little brain vs. the big brain, but this scene is really special because of the larger context. See, this is a sex scene between a bunch of adolescent kids, one girl and six boys, to be specific. Actually, this isn't funny at all. It's just distressing.
From Couples
Author: John Updike
Participants: Georgene, the Sun
Worst Line(s): "Pretending to be offended yet truly offended, Piet felt, by his interest in the Whitman woman, Georgene drew herself from his arms and stretched out against the blanket. Giving the sun his turn: whore. The foil decorated her face with parabolic dabs and nebulae and spurts: solar jism."
An author with such a gift for gross purple-headed sex talk, Updike had to be included twice. Here, a husband feels jealous because his wife has rebuffed him, choosing to sun herself instead. But because this is Updike, the situation is likened to the wife receiving a facial from the hot plasma sphere at the center of the Solar System.
From Sophie's Choice
Author: William Styron
Participants: Stingo, Sophie
Worst Line(s): "Her voice in my ear, the incomprehensible words in Polish nonetheless understood, urging me on as if in a race, urging me to some ever-receding finish line. Fucking for some reason on the gritty bone-hard floor, the reason unclear, dim, stupid—why, for Christ's sake—then abruptly dawning: to view, as on a pornographic screen, our pale white entwined bodies splashing back from the lusterless mirror on the bathroom door. A kind of furious obsessed wordlessness finally—no Polish, no English, no language, only breath. Soixante-neuf (recommended by the doctor), where after smothering for minute after minute in her moist mossy cunt's undulant swamp, I came at last in Sophie's mouth, came in a spasm of such delayed, prolonged, exquisite intensity that I verged on a scream, or a prayer, and my vision went black, and I gratefully perished. Sleep then—a sleep that was beyond mere sleep. Cold-cocked. Etherized. Dead."
Attacking Williams Styron's kinda adored Holocaust novel Sophie's Choice for its sexism is a thorny prospect, as the author's narrator, Stingo, a young man who fancies himself a writer, is meant to be an object of ridicule. This helps to shield the book from certain kinds of criticism—ostensibly. The reader laughs at his naïveté, the reader groans at his one-minded pursuit of sex, the reader eye-rolls at his purple prose. And Styron must be aware of this, right?
Even if you give the author the benefit of the doubt—which he's due—the book reaches a point where the reader can't help but feel that Styron is letting himself play out certain stereotypically male sexual fantasies under the guise of the character he's created—"Guys, he would act like this, nothing I can do about it"—a character that, again and again, is likened to Styron. This fantasy-making culminates in the book's final sex scene, where Stingo and Sophie, a survivor, couple pornographically.
Stingo has lusted after Sophie for the length of the novel. Indeed, his obsession with Sophie has grown concurrently to his learning about her time in the death camp at Auschwitz. This narrative linkage of the Holocaust and sex is symbolically represented by the carnal, fleshy Sophie. Her body, first abused by Nazis and now a site of charged eroticism, conflates genocide and sexuality. It's disaster porn and porn porn at the same damn time.
And so the reader arrives at the money shot. After hundreds of pages of griping about losing his virginity, Stingo gets to fuck Sophie. The long sex bout, which marginalizes her experience completely, concludes with him ejaculating in her mouth. Shortly after, Sophie kills herself. Stingo proudly tells her sad sad sad tale for the betterment of humanity. It's all beyond laughable.
This writer has no use for novels such as this. —Ross Scarano