For a long time, there was a “bad sex in fiction” award, given to (usually) contemporary authors who (usually) wrote pretty good books, but had just the absolute worst sex scenes in them. I found an article from about ten years ago that collected what was the best at the time, and I wanted to share a couple with you:

From Winkler by Giles Coren:

He came again so hard that his dick wrenched out of her hand and a shot of it hit him straight in the eye and stung like nothing he’d ever had in there, and he yelled with the pain, but the yell could have been anything, and as 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.

From Kissing England by Sean Thomas:

It is time, time to f*** her. Now. Yes. Brupt, he rises, turns her over, flips her white body. Her smallwhite tidy body. She is so small and so compact, and yet she has all the necessary features… Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou are more compact and more.

Here’s a few from The Independent:

From The Office of Gardens and Ponds by Didier Decoin:

Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Mikyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.

From List of the Lost by Morrisey (yes, that Morrisey):

At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

From Will by Christopher Rush:

O glorious pubes! The ultimate triangle, whose angles delve to hell but point to paradise. Let me sing the black banner, the blackbird’s wing, the chink, the cleft, the keyhole in the door. The fig, the fanny, the cranny, the quim – I’d come close to it now, this sudden blush, this ancient avenue, the end of all odysseys and epic aim of life, pulling at my prick now, pulling like a lodestone.

Anne Hathaway’s cow-milking fingers, cradling my balls in her almond palm, now took pity on the poor anguished erection, and in the infinite agony of her desire, guided it to the quick of the wound. At the same time I searched wildly with the fingers of my left hand, groping blind as Cyclops, found the pulpy furred wetness, parted the old lips of time and slipped my middle finger into the sancta sanctorum. It welcomed me with soft sucking sounds, syllables older than language, solace lovelier than words. She pulled my hand away, positioned the prick, slid her buttocks deep into the grass, raised her thighs back high, crossed her legs behind my back, dug her heels into my spine and hauled at me savagely and hard. I fell into her.

It’s like just because you’re not writing erotica you have to clothe your sex scenes in silliness or terribleness, using metaphors and similes and analogies that no one would ever use, just to say something like “he took her nipple into his mouth and nibbled it” or “he had an erection”. It’s a little less bad in romantasy these days but there are still plenty of Instagram reels of women reading romantasy and then showing you what it looks like. I wish I had an image of this, but you’ll have to use your imagination: a woman reads “it was so big she couldn’t put her hands around it” and then shows us, progressively, what she can put her hands around, until she finally gets to a can of protein powder. Look, I’ve seen some big dicks in porn before, but never one as thick as a can of protein powder. Like, how would a guy even put on a pair of pants? (This particular woman seemed to have very long fingers, but even if someone is as big as a Stanley cup the woman he’s with would probably not survive. Probably. Except with a lot of practice, like some people do with those comically-large Bad Dragon dildos.)