LONDON — The existence of the Bad Sex in Fiction award immediately raises the question, Why not a Good Sex in Fiction award?

“What on earth would you do that for?” asked John Walsh, a columnist at The Independent, who was in the crowd on Tuesday night for this year’s prize. “Good sex is like good driving — it’s the absence of things going wrong, and it is an extraordinarily boring thing to write about.”

Also, this is England, where sex is somehow funny anyway, and where people appreciate the agony of embarrassment much more than the thrill of achievement, at least when it happens to someone else.

“There’s nothing the English love more than a good literary joke against someone who is well known,” said Rachel Johnson, editor of The Lady magazine. She won the award in 2008, for a scene in her novel “Shire Hell,” in which the narrator lies back during lovemaking and thinks of slug extermination.