Gorgon Pussy, Cyclops Vagina

Jonathan Littell, an American writer and winner of the Prix Goncourt (France's highest literary honor), has just received a new accolade. His novel The Kindly Ones is the winner of the Literary Review's 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. And how very well deserved, this prize.

Littell compares a woman's privates to "a Gorgon's head" and "a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks." (Guess he's never heard of queefs, which certainly come with some vibration.) Then the fool goes on to make the analogy even more egregious: "If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert; I seemed turned to stone."

Oh ferdachrissakes.

Now, any good editor would have asked (aside from the obvious question, Are you fucking high?) "Don't you realize you're mixing your mythological metaphors? The Gorgon and the Cyclops are two very different creatures. What's more, if the narrator couldn't get it up, how could he feel he'd turned to stone? Doesn't stone imply a really, really HARD dick? And, while we're on the subject, don't use 'get hard' and 'hardened in the fire' in the same sentence; it's an awkward and amateurish instance of repetition."

I suppose it isn't fair to pull these passages out of context, but I can't help wondering if it's typical of male "literary" authors to dream up such strained and repugnant images of female genitalia. I've read similarly weird comparisons before. How can gynecologists do their jobs without fleeing in horror from examining tables?

Nurse: "Doctor, what's wrong? Your patient is waiting with her feet in those cold stirrups!"

Doctor O. D. Seus: "By the gods, I can't bear to go near another pudendum writhing with serpents! And that cunt eye, it keeps staring at me!"

Nurse: "Well, doctor, all you need do is overcome the law of inertia, turn your flaccid weenie into a stake, and poke that eye out. Want me to help?"

Seus: "But what about those damned snakes? The fuckers bite!"

Nurse (sighing): "I can tell you're fresh out of medical school. Don't you keep a mongoose in your instrument cabinet?"

FOOTNOTE: Castanet Feldman served as the model for the Gorgon photo.