This post is intended for mature audiences. Or maybe it’s only really appropriate for older audiences with a 5th grade sense of humor.
Last Friday I joined a Meetup.com group to walk around the Museum of Sex in New York. We met at the OralFix bar in the basement of the museum, which was rather hot — temperature-wise; it really wasn’t sexy in any way unless you count the names of cocktails. After meeting all the people in the group and almost immediately forgetting their names, we headed upstairs to the museum.
On the second floor of the Museum of Sex is a room with facts and statistics about American porn search habits — there are a lot of perverts searching for some fetishes that some people might find offensive (or really funny). There’s also some commentary about those habits — many of the comments were quickly made into NSA surveillance jokes.
I’m still not sure why they’d include QR codes on every porn search term — would anyone actually whip out their phone to check that? (If I had a QR reader app on my phone I might’ve checked to see if I got redirected to safe website.) One wall also had some pixelated thing that sort of looked like Lego porn — as someone in the group said, “That’s the least erotic porn I’ve ever seen.”
There was quite a bit about voyeurism and amateur porn, and people’s desire to show themselves to strangers. There’s even an archive of Anthony Weiner’s Twitter conversation before tweeting a picture of his junk, which was even funnier because The Daily Show had just run a segment the night before on politicians on Twitter (“Seriously, don’t tweet your junk”).
On the third floor, there were two more rotating exhibits — an art display by William Kent called “My Life Ruined by Sex” and a room full of facts about sex in the animal kingdom (nothing about bestiality). Quite a bit of the art exhibit was humorous, though I’m not sure what the inspiration would be to make a giant twisted penis battering ram out of wood (it’s not even a functional sex toy). The rest of Kent’s artwork was mostly screen prints that were a mix of classical art, propaganda, and sexual content. Some people confused the display of Kent’s woodworking tools with his sex toys, but I’m fairly certain he would’ve been in a lot of pain if used the tools in that way.
The animal exhibit included some sculptures of animal sex because everyone needs to see a chimp with a boner offering sugarcane for sex. It was the most educational part of the museum with documented instances on homosexuality, prostitution, and necrophilia in the animal kingdom — plus there’s panda porn since panda’s are notoriously not interested in sex.
My recommendation is to save your money and just check out the gift shop full of sex toys and novelty gifts. If you have the chance, go to the sex museum in Amsterdam instead.
Tickets for the Museum of Sex are $18, but I had a $3 discount. Most in the group had a Travelzoo 2-for-1 ticket. The museum is located at 27th St. and 5th Ave.
