Gimme MoSex
does the museum of sex deserve to be called a museum?
The Museum of Sex is surprisingly crowded on a Friday afternoon. Besides the expected groups of giggling teens wandering through the racy galleries, there are older couples exploring together and a middle-aged man, Chuck, who has come for a visit on his last day touring the city from Hawaii. The museum is an odd place on the outside: with its colorful, enticing window signs, it stands out in the bleak landscape of the East 20s. But this oddness is nothing compared to the bizarre scene inside.
The Museum of Sex is not technically a museum, as it was denied not-for-profit status when it opened in 2002. As such, it functions as a for-profit organization, a fact perhaps reflected in the rather high admission prices considering the rather small size of the building. Students are charged $13.50 for entrance, though $3-off coupons are ubiquitous in New York publications. This ambiguous status is one reason to question the museum’s place in the pantheon of New York art institutions. Is it a museum, there for educational purposes or to display art, or is it no better than a tourist attraction or a sexually explicit exhibition hall?
The Museum of Sex forces one to define the word “museum.” Must a museum host artwork? If so, do sex toys and pornography qualify as art? The permanent collection holds several prints by Keith Haring and one by Pablo Picasso, but the rest of the contents are much more utilitarian than artistic or aesthetic. An anonymous man with his girlfriend argued that museums do not, in fact, have to contain art; he gives the American Museum of Natural History as an example. You go there, he says, to learn about history and humanity and science, and you go to the Museum of Sex to learn about sexuality.
The newest exhibit at the Museum of Sex is called “Sex in Design.” After a thoroughly un-groundbreaking introduction featuring sexualized album and magazine covers, the contents of the exhibit turned into essentially the wares of a sex shop. Scores of vibrators and dildos were justified by wall text explaining that sex toys are “often appreciated for their aesthetic value as well as their ability to provide pleasure.” The explanation is a stretch, for the exhibit seems more exhibitionist than artistic. A display case that features all matters of condoms is accompanied by wall text rationalizing their presence with the words, “Condoms are now available in a variety of colors, flavors, shapes and textures. With an emphasis on safe sex, whether for the prevention of disease of pregnancy, condoms have become chic.”
“Sex in Design” really made me wonder what motivates people to come to the Museum of Sex and shell out $15 instead of just stopping into one of Babeland’s many locations. But an answer began to appear as I talked to patrons. Erika, a teenager visiting the museum with college friends, told me that she was much more comfortable looking at sex accoutrements in a museum environment than somewhere else. He said the exhibit’s few antique vibrators—the kind doctors used to use to treat women’s “hysteria”—showed an educational aspect absent in some of the rest of the wares. Still, it is hard to imagine a more sexualized atmosphere than the one at the museum.
The second exhibition hall hosts “Sex and the Moving Image.” It is what it sounds like: essentially a room full of porn. The exhibit hopes to “take our practiced ‘cinematic gaze’ and refocus it on the historical, political, and social reason sex on screen has been represented in various manners over time.” I’m not so sure it’s successful, for patrons were much more focused on the racy images on screen than the explanations next to them on the wall. It was a bizarre scene: a group of people—strangers—sitting together and raptly watching a video about the Kama Sutra. A female voice explained various sex positions while a couple demonstrated, rather explicitly. Again, the educational or artistic value of such a display was challenged when I realized the video was on a loop and had repeated while the same people watched.
I belong to a sex-positive camp that believes in openness about sex in American culture. We need to talk about things much more than we do. Along these lines, a museum that opens the discourse about sexuality would appear to be a positive entity in a rather repressed society. MoSex doesn’t really succeed in this sense, either, because the crowd appears largely self-selected, with some patrons looking embarrassed about their very presence in such a place. One woman angrily confronted a Spectator photographer, even though the camera was pointed nowhere near her. Even the woman working in the gift shop (which had a healthy selection of the same sex toys on display just a few rooms away) told me she was uncomfortable discussing the museum on tape.
Although most of the people I talked to said they found the museum educational and informative, it doesn’t really contain anything one couldn’t learn by browsing the Internet for an hour or so. A man who declined to give his name, but who seemed to enjoy sexual joking while I interviewed him about visiting the museum with his girlfriend was not particularly impressed with the contents of the museum. “I’ve seen it all,” he told me. He did, however, tell me they would later try out some of the things they saw at the museum.
Yet I think there’s a value in the experience one can have at MoSex. It’s one of the only places one can go to look at explicitly sexual content in the company of strangers. Some were comfortable with it, while others supplemented their curiosity with nervous laughter.
MoSex has yet to carve out its place in New York’s cultural landscape. It’s neither museum nor tourist attraction, but something in between. The differing reactions from visitors mirror the varied viewpoints of Americans on the controversial subject. The museum says it is here to educate, but until it can branch out from its X-rated content to something more artistic and new, it doesn’t warrant the museum title it has bestowed upon itself. \\\