Best Sex Writing 2009 is out. David Kelly passes along this bit from "Penises I Have Known" by Daphne Merkin:
Penises, it appears, deserve to be worshiped or envied (or, if need be, encouraged) but they don’t deserve to be nattered on about. This is still sacred male territory and women trespass at their own literary peril. The potholes are everywhere you look, waiting to trip you up into porn or parody, or perhaps the high gutter baby talk of D. H. Lawrence. Which is not to suggest that Lawrence didn’t, despite what is clearly a complicatedly ambivalent attitude toward women, manage to move the conversation more radically forward than most. There may be something laughable about the rhapsodic way Mellors and Lady Constance talk about his “John Thomas” in “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but there is also something both daring and poignant about Lawrence’s attempt to win over his strait-laced and corseted readers to the liberating effect of erotic nakedness.
And then there’s the bad sex in writing award.
The Dish 