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Bad Sex, Good Flow
Performed live at ‘Crimes Against Literature’, Melbourne Writers Festival (Melbourne, 23 March 2018) |
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In 2016, Trinidadian-born American feminist commentator and poet Onika Tanya Maraj asserted, ‘This the new style with a fresh type of flow. Wrist icicle, ride dick bicycle. Come true, yo, get you this type of blow. If you wanna ménage, I got a tricycle.’
Better known as Nicki Minaj, she allows her collab with popstar Ariana Grande to crescendo with: ‘I been here all night, I been here all day. And, oh, he got me walkin’ side to side.’
Three years before this historic mantra for sexual empowerment inspired everyone to don high-ponytails, fall off exercise bikes and ride ‘it’ till everything hurt, the 2013 Bad Sex Awards nominees found themselves invoking the same iconic phrase: ‘side to side’.
One entrant, House of Earth—the belatedly published 1947 novel of folk singer Woody Guthrie, set in Depression Era America—recounts:
Back and forth, side to side, they moved on their bed on the hay. Back and forth, side to side, they moved their hips, their feet, their legs, their whole bodies. Their arms tied into knots like vines climbing trees, and the trees moved and swayed, and there was a time and a rhythm to the blend of the movement. And inside the door of her womb she felt her inner organs and tissues, all her muscles and glands, felt them roll, squeeze, squeeze, and roll, and felt that every inch of her whole being stretched, reached, felt out, felt in, felt all around the shape of his penis. So magnified and so keen were her feelings that her inner nerves could even feel the bumps, the ridges, the pimples, the few stray hairs along the shaft of his male rod.
Similarly, Matthew Reynolds’ The World Was All Before Them—described on its publisher’s website as ‘the story of one year and two lives’ (so … anyone who’s ever had a best friend or lover ever, lol)—gives us:
In the dappled shadows the bodies cling and thrust and arc and stretch. Toes splay. Arms prop shoulders from which a torso slopes. Two legs spring into the air. A head flaps from side to side. Fingers tense, hips grip and ankles twine. Forehead bows to forehead and hair touches in the air as eyes look longingly into eyes, thighs vie, lip lips lip and…
But, damn, dammit!—what was this?
Anxiously he began to get the impression that his vas deferens was initiating its rhythmic squeezing too soon, too soon …
It’s telling that Minaj expounded on ‘this type of blow’ and later rapped the line ‘Gun pop and I make my gum pop’, as explosion metaphors seem central to portrayals of sex—men’s questionable ability to actually bring women to climax notwithstanding. (Mind you, seven out of the eight 2013 nominees are … men.)
Better known as Nicki Minaj, she allows her collab with popstar Ariana Grande to crescendo with: ‘I been here all night, I been here all day. And, oh, he got me walkin’ side to side.’
Three years before this historic mantra for sexual empowerment inspired everyone to don high-ponytails, fall off exercise bikes and ride ‘it’ till everything hurt, the 2013 Bad Sex Awards nominees found themselves invoking the same iconic phrase: ‘side to side’.
One entrant, House of Earth—the belatedly published 1947 novel of folk singer Woody Guthrie, set in Depression Era America—recounts:
Back and forth, side to side, they moved on their bed on the hay. Back and forth, side to side, they moved their hips, their feet, their legs, their whole bodies. Their arms tied into knots like vines climbing trees, and the trees moved and swayed, and there was a time and a rhythm to the blend of the movement. And inside the door of her womb she felt her inner organs and tissues, all her muscles and glands, felt them roll, squeeze, squeeze, and roll, and felt that every inch of her whole being stretched, reached, felt out, felt in, felt all around the shape of his penis. So magnified and so keen were her feelings that her inner nerves could even feel the bumps, the ridges, the pimples, the few stray hairs along the shaft of his male rod.
Similarly, Matthew Reynolds’ The World Was All Before Them—described on its publisher’s website as ‘the story of one year and two lives’ (so … anyone who’s ever had a best friend or lover ever, lol)—gives us:
In the dappled shadows the bodies cling and thrust and arc and stretch. Toes splay. Arms prop shoulders from which a torso slopes. Two legs spring into the air. A head flaps from side to side. Fingers tense, hips grip and ankles twine. Forehead bows to forehead and hair touches in the air as eyes look longingly into eyes, thighs vie, lip lips lip and…
But, damn, dammit!—what was this?
Anxiously he began to get the impression that his vas deferens was initiating its rhythmic squeezing too soon, too soon …
It’s telling that Minaj expounded on ‘this type of blow’ and later rapped the line ‘Gun pop and I make my gum pop’, as explosion metaphors seem central to portrayals of sex—men’s questionable ability to actually bring women to climax notwithstanding. (Mind you, seven out of the eight 2013 nominees are … men.)
The 2013 Bad Sex Awards winner takes the idea of explosiveness to galactic proportions: the pivotal coital moment in Manil Suri’s The City of Devi—which indeed depicts une ménage à trois involving a physicist, his wife and a gay man—threads the looming threat of nuclear obliteration with the demise of supergiant stars:
Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands—only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.
In 2014, Minaj—in one of my favourite songs of hers, ‘Only’—described a hypothetical threesome with rappers Drake and Lil Wayne, musing: ‘If I did, I did a ménage with ’em and let ’em eat my ass like a cupcake.’
There’s perhaps nothing sexier than sex and food (sex after food? sex with food? Call Me by Your Name, mo’fuckers! … sorry, *spoilers*)—so perhaps let’s end with an excerpt from Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet, voted by Guardian readers as their fave:
Manon smiled when she realised what I was doing.
You know the peasant saying? If you can’t imagine how neighbouring vineyards can produce such different wines, put one finger in your woman’s quim and another up her arse, then taste both and stop asking stupid questions… My fingers found both vineyards. At the front, she tasted salt as anchovy and as delicious. At the rear, bitter like chocolate and smelling strangely of tobacco.
Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands—only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.
In 2014, Minaj—in one of my favourite songs of hers, ‘Only’—described a hypothetical threesome with rappers Drake and Lil Wayne, musing: ‘If I did, I did a ménage with ’em and let ’em eat my ass like a cupcake.’
There’s perhaps nothing sexier than sex and food (sex after food? sex with food? Call Me by Your Name, mo’fuckers! … sorry, *spoilers*)—so perhaps let’s end with an excerpt from Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet, voted by Guardian readers as their fave:
Manon smiled when she realised what I was doing.
You know the peasant saying? If you can’t imagine how neighbouring vineyards can produce such different wines, put one finger in your woman’s quim and another up her arse, then taste both and stop asking stupid questions… My fingers found both vineyards. At the front, she tasted salt as anchovy and as delicious. At the rear, bitter like chocolate and smelling strangely of tobacco.