Accidental work of art? Yes. Successful crossover into mainstream culture? Affirmative. Before it was an HBO special, My Dad Wrote a Porno was a podcast hosted by Morton, Levine, and James Cooper with more than 150 million downloads. And yet, Belinda Blinked, for all its inadvertent comedy and experimental grammar, still manages to be a model of absolutely terrible erotica. In the first chapter, Belinda arrives for a job interview at Steeles Pots & Pans, a dynamic homeware company with an unorthodox interview process that involves immediately taking all your clothes off. From there, she experiences a maelstrom of X-rated misadventures, like an Emmanuelle of the cookware-sales industry. She’s perpetually getting entangled with characters with names like Mistress Sweetjuice and Alfonse Stirbacker, all detailed in Flintstone’s florid, curiously specific prose. (In one chapter, he describes a character’s nipples as being “as large as the three-inch rivets which had held the hull of the fateful Titanic together.”)
Read: The indelible awfulness of E. L. James’s ‘The Mister’
In Britain, where My Dad Wrote a Porno originated, the art of bad (-ly written) sex is so entrenched that it’s celebrated once a year at the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. While neither Belinda Blinked nor E. L. James’s The Mister would qualify for the prize—it rewards only badly written sex scenes in otherwise good novels—they do have plenty in common with works by luminaries in the publishing world: Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Tom Wolfe, John Updike, Morrissey. In fiction, it turns out, bad sex is the great democratizer.
Consider Rocky Flintstone’s particular yen for unnecessary information. In the HBO special, Morton reads from a chapter in which Belinda goes on a kind of corporate retreat, spearheaded by a woman named Natasha Biles, who doubles as “the local female lifeboat member,” and who’s wearing a “comfortable yet sexy black leather trouser suit.” During the orgiastic events that follow, Natasha produces dice for a game, which Flintstone specifies were purchased at “Humphrey’s Dice and Mice Joke Shop … suppliers to royalty.” Later, one character removes his clothes and places them on the edge of a wing-backed chair perched on the carpet of the “recently vacuumed room.” This is reminiscent of a postcoital interlude in Newt Gingrich’s surprisingly racy 1995 speculative novel, 1945: “[John] stretched in turn, reached over for his cigarettes and gold-plated Ronson on the Art Deco nightstand with its Tiffany lamp.”
Extraneous detail, though, can seem sweetly innocent when compared with the propensity in bad literary sex to get food involved. Rocky Flintstone is infamous for describing a woman’s breasts as hanging “freely, like pomegranates.” He’s nevertheless in the shadow of Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, who in the 2004 novel The Last Song of Dusk describes a woman’s “weasel-like loins clutching and unclutching his lovely, long, louche manhood, as though squeezing an orange for its juice.” Nicola Barker, in her 2012 book The Yips, leans fully toward patisserie: “She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of warm custard.” E. L. James, of course, joins in. “Oh my,” Anastasia Steele thinks during one coupling in Fifty Shades of Grey. “Sweat and body wash and Christian. It’s a heady cocktail—so much better than a margarita, and now I can speak from experience."