Is that an iliac crest in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

No offense meant to the men in my audience, but male authors write lousy sex scenes. Especially Tom Wolfe. I’m sorry, but reading the words “iliac crest” and “pectoral sheath” as the romantic leads are getting busy is about as sexy as reading the Congressional Quarterly.

I’m having the most marvelous time mocking the prose of his latest, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” I picked it up at Barnes & Noble, because it was remaindered and because I have a weakness for fat novels. And I finally got around to reading it.

I’ve read other male authors who seem to be suffering from the same problem. They have a great set up. They have great characters. They have prose to die for. But when a sex scene looms, they either pan up into the trees or go about it as clumsily as an anatomy lesson. In fact I believe that the contest held every year for the worst sex scene in literature has been won by a male author. Philip Roth and Salmon Rushdie have won, and in 2004 Tom Wolfe garnered the dubious honor for “…Charlotte Simmons.”

Here is an example of one of his “winning” passages:

“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...”

It only goes downhill (or, as he might say, a slither on the southbound express to her iliac crest) from there.

My solution for these well-meaning men? Hire a woman to write your sex scenes. At the very least, have one of the XX persuasion read it for you and comment. If she either laughs or falls asleep, that’s not good.