NYC Day 10 - The Great American Sex Tour...Perhaps

Wednesday, 25 May 2005 - Today was the day I started regretting losing my windbreaker, because it got bone-shakingly cold at night. It was also a day that started remarkably late, as I woke in the afternoon and spent a long time thumbing through my Lonely Planet NYC guide. It was the first time I'd seriously used the guide, which is quite a shame really, since there's too much to do in Manhattan to leave things to chance.

The guidebook alerted me to a place I hadn't known about before coming here: the Museum of Sex (MoSex). I headed there without a second thought.



Walking to the museum from the 28th Street Station at 7th Avenue, I passed by the Flatiron Building. It's nowhere as attractive as the Chrysler or Empire State buildings, but it's just as iconic to New Yorkers for its strange wedge shape, and the fact that it was one of the tallest buildings in the world when it was built waaay back in 1902. Iconic as it may be, however, seeing the building was one of the more ho-hum touristy moments I've had in my week here.



The Museum of Sex turned out to be a small-ish, 3-storey establishment. It was running two concurrent exhibitions--one on the evolution of American pinup photography, and one on the history of American pornographic film. Those, alongside a permanent collection featuring an assemblage of sex aids, sex manuals, books used for formal sex education, porno magazines and the like. Amazingly, everything was tastefully presented, as if what was on display was not so much sex per se, but the society that engendered it.



It was a rather eye-opening experience to view pornographic photography and film dating back to the late Victorian era. Looped silent movies, lewd postcards and photographs embodying the style of the times all proved to be terribly amusing, if not enlightening. Consider the still below. I took it off a piece of old animation about a man wooing a woman, banging her then getting his balls knocked off or something...



Among the exhibits in the permanent collection were the very first issue of Hustler, as well as items which clearly warranted the "mount" part of the museum's warning. In all seriousness, though, who actually uses such things??