How important is sex to you? I’m asking because the recent news that British people are having less sex than ever before has got me thinking about the value of intimacy, and why abstaining from sex is often seen as an act of penance instead of one of self-love.

According to a three-stage study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published in the the British Medical Journal in May 2019, regular sexual activity between couples is on the decline.

Less than half of men and women in the UK aged 16-44 years old have sex at least once a week, and the steepest decline was among those who are living together, and the over-25s.

Researchers looked at data from the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles in 1991, 2001 and 2012, and found that millennials are having sex 4.9 times a month for men and 4.8 times for women, whereas 10 years ago it was 6.2 and 6.3 respectively.

One of the reasons we are all having less sex seems to be attributed to – you guessed it – technology and the ubiquitousness of social media. Study authors suggested that the pattern of declining sex within the UK is linked to an increasing use of tech and the “busyness of modern life”. They even highlighted two key events that could have had a knock-on effect: the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and the global recession of 2008.

The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners Show all 23 1 /23 The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 1. 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. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 2. Pax by John Harvey She was burning hot and the heat was in him. He looked down on her perfect black slenderness. Her eyes were ravenous. Like his own they were fire and desire. More than torrid, more than tropical: they too were riding the Equator. They embraced as if with violent holding they could weld the two of them one The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 3. Katerina by James Frey I’m hard and deep inside her fucking her on the bathroom sink her tight little black dress still on her thong on the floor my pants at my knees our eyes locked, our hearts and souls and bodies locked.Cum inside me. Cum inside me. Cum inside me. Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one. One. White. God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum. I lean against her both breathing hard I’m still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other’s eyes, she smiles. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 4. The Destroyers by Christopher Bollen (2017) She covers her breasts with her swimsuit. The rest of her remains so delectably exposed. The skin along her arms and shoulders are different shades of tan like water stains in a bathtub. Her face and vagina are competing for my attention, so I glance down at the billiard rack of my penis and testicles. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 5. Men Like Air by Tom Connolly (2016) The walkway to the terminal was all carpet, no oxygen. Dilly bundled Finn into the first restroom on offer, locked the cubicle door and pulled at his leather belt. “You’re beautiful,” she told him, going down on to her haunches and unzipping him. He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 6. The Day Before Happiness by Erri De Luca (2016) She pushed on my hips, an order that thrust me in. I entered her. Not only my prick, but the whole of me entered her, into her guts, into her darkness, eyes wide open, seeing nothing. My whole body had gone inside her. I went in with her thrusts and stayed still. While I got used to the quiet and the pulsing of my blood in my ears and nose, she pushed me out a little, then in again. She did it again and again, holding me with force and moving me to the rhythm of the surf. She wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 7. List of the Lost by Morrissey (2015) 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. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 8. Infrared by Nancy Huston (2012) In a delirium of restrained desire, I weigh, stroke and lick Kamal's balls, then take his penis in my hands, between my breasts, into my mouth. He sits up, reaches for me and I allow him to explore me in turn. He runs his tongue and lips over my breasts, the back of my neck, my toes, my stomach, the countless treasures between my legs, oh the sheer ecstasy of lips and tongues on genitals, either simultaneously or in alternation, never will I tire of that silvery fluidity, my sex swimming in joy like a fish in water, my self freed of both self and other, the quivering sensation, the carnal pink palpitation that detaches you from all colour and all flesh, making you see only stars, constellations, milky ways, propelling you bodiless and soulless into undulating space where the undulating skies make your non-body undulate. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 9. Ed King by David Guterson (2011) He freed himself from her nipple after a long attachment so as to kiss her on the mouth at length – as if seeking to set the world record for kiss duration – and she smelled her breast on his breath, which was otherwise piquant with saliva, a little tart, a little bitter, and humid with the churning underworld – the raw metabolism and generative heat – beneath the flawless exterior. Jim Long's odor had been a little like Naugahyde, and his mouth, lips, and tongue had often tasted metallic (or, just as often, steeped in vermouth), whereas Ed smelled vulnerably digestive, warm-blooded, moist, and, just now, breast-fed. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 10. 11.22.63 by Stephen King (2011) She said, “Don't make me wait, I've had enough of that,” and so I kissed the sweaty hollow of her temple and moved my hips forward ... She gasped, retreated a little, then raised her hips to meet me. “Sadie? All right?” “Ohmygodyes,” she said and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?” “A little more,” I said. “I don't know how much. I haven't been with a woman in a long time.” It turned out there was quite a bit more … At the end she began to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh sugar!” The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 11. The Shape of Her by Rowan Somerville (2010) The triangle of pubic hair, blond, a thin line bunched darkly, like desert vegetation following an underground stream. He placed his hand on the concave stretch that was her belly, letting two fingers rest in the yawn of her navel. He slipped downwards, grazing the tight skin of her waist with his fingertips. He reached her hair line and the muscles of her belly hardened as she raised herself up onto her elbows. She stayed his hand and drew him, yanked him, into a smothering kiss. She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself, her movement so brusque his chin bounced off her head... The wet friction of her, tight around him, the sight of her open, stretched around him, the cleft of her body, it tore a climax out of him with a final lunge. Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 12. The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave (2009) He slips his hands under her cotton vest and her body spasms and slackens and he cups her small, cold breasts in his hands and feels the hard pearls of her nipples, like tiny secrets, against the barked palms of his hands. He feels the gradual winding down of her dying heart and can see a bluish tinge blossoming on the skin of her skull through her thin, ironed hair. “'Oh, my dear Avril,' he says. He puts his hands under her knees and manoeuvres her carefully so that her bottom rests on the edge of the settee. He slips his fingers underneath the worn elastic of her panties that are strung across the points of her hips, slips them to her ankles and softly draws apart her knees and feels again a watery ardour in his eyes as he negotiates a button and a zipper. It is exactly as he imagined it – the hair, the lips, the hole – and he slips his hands under her wasted buttocks and enters her like a fucking pile driver. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 13. The Humbling by Philip Roth (2009) First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. Then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy's lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts, and then she slid down a ways and gently penetrated Tracy with the dildo. Pegeen did not have to force her open... The green cock plunged in and out of the abundant naked body sprawled beneath it, slow at first, then faster and harder, then harder still, and all of Tracy's curves and hollows moved in unison with it. This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 14. Will by Christopher Rush (2007) 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. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 15. The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer (2007) Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before. The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 16. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (2006) If Dawn Madden's breasts were a pair of Danishes, Debby Crombie's got two Space Hoppers. Each armed with a gribbly nipple. Tom Yew kissed them in turn and his saliva glistened in the April sun. I know watching was wrong but I couldn't not. Tom Yew slipped off her red panties and stroked the cressy hair there... Tom Yew got on her and sort of jiggled there and she gasped like he was giving her a Chinese burn and wrapped her legs round him, froggily. Now he moved up and down, Man-from Atlantisly. His silver chain jiggled on his neck. Now her grubby soles met like they were praying. Now his skin was glazed in roast pork sweat. Now she made a noise like a tortured Moomintroll. Now Tom Yew's body jerkjerked judderily jackknifed and a noise like a ripping cable tore out of him. Once more, like he'd been booted in the balls. Her fingernails'd sunk salmony welts into his arse. Debby Crombie's mouth made a perfect O. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 17. Winkler by Giles Coren (2005) And he came hard in her mouth and his dick jumped around and rattled on her teeth and he blacked out and she took his dick out of her mouth and lifted herself from his face and whipped the pillow away and he gasped and glugged at the air, and 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. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 18. Young Turk by Moris Farhi (2004) I am stretched out on a sofa. My beloved is determined to assess my age. She has an infallible method for doing so: the way they ascertain a tree's age: by counting the rings in its trunk. Consequently, she has my member in her mouth. Her lips are thick with lipstick. Starting from the base of my penis, her mouth ambles upwards. At each half-centimetre, her lips imprint a red ring around the shaft. She continues until she runs out of length. She counts the rings. On this occasion they add up to thirty-six. (An hour ago, the number had been forty-one.) She cuddles up to me. She coos. “Thirty-odd rings. What a mature oak in one so young!” The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 19. I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe (2004) 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. The fingers went under the elastic of the panties moan moan moan moan moan went Hoyt as he slithered slithered slithered slithered and caress caress caress caress went the fingers until they must be only eighths of inches from the border of her public hair - what's that! - Her panties were so wet down. There - the fingers had definitely reached the outer stand of the field of pubic hair and would soon plunge into the wet mess that was waiting right. There-there- The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 20. The Crime Tsar by Nichola McAuliffe (2003) 'It's all right, I won't break,' she whispered. She felt him aware of his size and weight. His care not to hurt her. She moved to accommodate him and felt the blind probings before he slipped inside her. He was bigger than she had remembered. She tilted her hips and felt the weight of his balls on her... what? Small expanse of skin between vagina and anus. Perineum - was that it? Her mind screamed: Shut up, Lucy! You're not doing the Cosmopolitan crossword now. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 21. The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro by Paul Theroux (2003) The softness of her skin in the dark, far softer-seeming because of the dark, was irresistible. And the aroma of her lily-fragrant perfume mingled with the cat smell of her steaming cunt made me salivate and pant like a lion, my nose tormented by damp fur and hot blood. Still I could not tell where her soft skin ended and her silk began, and the complexity of her vaginal lips was like another elaborate silken garment she had put on for me to stroke. I adored the gleam of her body in the light from the streetlamps and the blistered moon... She knelt and worshipped my cock with her mouth and her gloved hands and she cried out louder than I did when I came, spattering her face as she licked. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 22. Bunker 13 by Aniruddha Bahal (2003) She's taking off her blouse. It's on the floor. Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed. In spite of yourself a soft whistle of air escapes you. She's taking off her trousers now. They are a heap on the floor. Her panties are white and translucent. You can see the dark hair sticking to them inside. There's a design as well. You gasp. 'What's that?' you ask. You see a designer pussy. Hair razored and ordered in the shape of a swastika. The Aryan denominator. As your hands roam her back, her breasts, and trace the swastika on her mound you start feeling like an ancient Aryan warlord yourself. The 23 best / worst Bad Sex in Fiction award winners 23. Starcrossed by AA Gill (1999) His tongue is long and hard and tastes of mint. We don't say anything, but he pushes me to my knees in the middle of the shop. It's difficult to undo his flies. I put my hand in. It's hot and damp, and then, Christ; it's amazing, huge. It just goes on and on, as thick as... "As a magnum? A jeroboam? A methuselah? A bitter pump?" "A fucking salami. Shut up, John."

But other arguments offered by the researchers seem far more persuasive to me. According to the paper, another reason millennials are having less sex is because of a shift in societal attitudes and “changing norms”. This makes perfect sense. Yes, mounting financial pressures and digital distractions may result in us prioritising sex less, but as a woman I feel that it’s more to do with the fact that so many of us are now less willing to succumb to bad sex.

We’re more informed when it comes to our sexual encounters – and that reduces the likelihood of us having terrible sex.

A decade ago, we couldn’t find honest and open dialogues about sex online, but now we have Twitter gurus like Oloni lighting up our timelines, sex-positive vloggers like Shan Boody sharing their intimacy tips and comedy shows like Sex Education depicting normal, realistic relationships.

All this sex-positive media is showing us what good, consensual intimacy looks like. And it also reminds us that we can get it – any time we want it. As the study authors note, “social pressure to over-report sexual activity may have eased”, which makes sense.

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It’s like the old Streisand effect: banning or censoring something will often make that thing more desirable, and lead to people going to greater lengths to get it.

In 2019 we can enjoy more open conversations around sex than ever before: female-directed porn is very much in, as is consent, and if you want no-strings-attached sex as a man or woman you’ve got a plethora of apps to choose from and a never-ending carousel of potential matches at your fingertips.

As the study goes on to explain: “Gender equality may now extend to the sexual sphere; where women might previously have felt obliged to meet their partner’s sexual needs irrespective of their own, they might now be less inclined to do so ... Men are maybe not so intent on boasting as they once were. Women are not so intent on showing that they are pure as driven snow.”