Welsh attacked for 'misogynist' sex scene

Irvine Welsh facing hostile questions at the Edinburgh international book festival
Irvine Welsh facing hostile questions at the Edinburgh international book festival. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/Guardian
Irvine Welsh, creator of the heroin-consuming characters Begbie, Renton, Sick Boy and Spud in his debut novel Trainspotting, has been accused of misogyny in his latest work.

Welsh was speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival, one of the star turns on the opening day of the fortnight-long event in his home city, when he was rounded on by a number of women in the audience.

At the session he read passages from his new work - The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs - including a lurid scene in which a man in his 20s has sex with an ancient woman, called a white witch, whose physical attributes are described in grotesque and lavish detail. These range from the "sagging corrugations" of her body to her "ludicrously extended clitoris" to the smell of the "slimy golden-brown fecal matter that lay saturating the incontinence pads below her".

In the book this character, Mary, has refused to give the young man, Skinner, her advice without the payment of "a good cock". One of the first questions Welsh - whose previous books include Ecstasy, Glue, Filth and Porno - took from the floor was on whether he considered the passage misogynist, and he took no fewer than four others, with only one woman speaking out to defend him.

At one point, the session's chair even took a vote from the increasingly restive audience to determine whether another question on the subject was warranted - the audience voted against, but Welsh's interrogators remained persistent.

Welsh rejected the accusation: "I find it strange that you use the word misogynist when it is Mary who is taking Skinner for her own sexual pleasure. Misanthropist I would take, but not misogynist."

The description of the woman's repulsive body was an accurate reflection of the decay of old age, he said, rather than a woman-hating vision of the feminine. "It is the foulness of old age - and it is horrible. We are going to piss and shit and fall to pieces; we are human, we are decomposing matter. That's what old age is like.

"Mary understands her own predicament and takes power in the situation. It would be more disempowering to be the person who had to shag someone who was incontinent.

"I describe her fingers as going into Skinner's buttocks like meat hooks - I think she was enjoying herself."