The Advocate

Vamps, Virgins, Smokers, and Stags – The Museum of Sex Offers a Little Something for Everyone

James Hoff

Located inconspicuously on the corner of 27th and 5th Avenue, far from such “Museum Mile” giants as the Metropolitan and the Guggenheim, the Museum of Sex, or MoSex for short, is quietly challenging the curatorial status quo with a series of exhibits ranging from the relatively tame to the pleasantly hardcore. Despite the steep $18 entrance fee (Students get in for $13.50) and the remarkably unhelpful and unfriendly staff, MoSex, only seven blocks from the Graduate Center, is the perfect excuse to put off that seminar paper or dissertation and spend a little time studying what we would all rather be doing anyway.

Except for the nearly hidden entrance on 27th and the vibrators and dildos on sale in the gift shop, the lobby of the Museum of Sex looks like any other small, modern museum, with an abundance of smooth surfaces, muted whites, grays, and a general sense of sanitized decorum. Once past the turnstile that leads into the exhibits, however, it is plain to see this is not like any other museum you’ve ever been to.
Although the first exhibit, “Vamps and Virgins, The History of the American Pinup.” As the exhibit is tolerably mild, with only the occasional beaver shot, there is a palpable sense that somehow something is amiss. After all, it’s rare for us to share these sorts of experiences in public, much less with a room full of old men, German tourists, and middle-aged couples. Single patrons in the exhibit stand apart from one another, and couples talk very little, fixedly gazing at the photos and alternately reading the descriptions on the wall. Although we’ve all seen this kind of imagery before, seeing it on exhibit creates a sense of disconnect and cold rationality, as if the erotic nature of the images has been lost.

This first exhibit, traces the development of the female nude in photography from the comparatively risqué and enticing Victorian images of masters and maids (including a remarkable photograph of a young woman with one the first-ever electric vibrators) through to the decidedly “plain vanilla” playboy images of buxom blondes in bubble-baths of the 50s and 60s. Despite the poor lighting and the over-abundance of academic material that accompanies the exhibit, Vamps and Virgins does manage to offer a fascinating and first-hand insight into a side of American history that the curator, Jennifer Kabat has called “easily the single most important development impacting women's rights, the history of sexuality, and feminism over the last century.” Indeed, the exhibit, by turns pedantic and anecdotal, takes pains to show the degree to which the genre was influenced by American history and how the pinup, in turn, impacted American culture. From the early 20th-century “better than ‘cheesecake’” images of women in stockings and garter belts and the classically wholesome poses of 1930s “pictorialism,” to more straightforward and empowering images of sexualized woman in the twenties and sixties, the exhibit shows, if anything, just how volatile and powerful such images were to a society that has always been highly ambivalent about its own sexuality, alternately embracing pleasure, purity, and abstinence.

Stags, Smokers & Blue Movies: The Origins of American Pornographic Film, offers the viewer an entirely different and at times almost surreal experience. By the time the visitor has finished dutifully taking notes on the first exhibit and fully considered the cultural and political implications of her own experiences with the pinup, any potential arousal has been intellectually sublimated. Although the sometimes humorous, sometimes arcane information provided with the exhibit is interesting, it is as if the pleasure of the forbidden has been stripped away completely, sanctioned and sanitized.

It’s not until you climb the black stairs to the second-floor exhibit that you begin to realize where you are. There, in the darkened room, smartly displayed upon several knee-high, rectangular pedestals are running loops of various old stag films from the early 20th century to the 1960s. Looking down upon these images at once reaffirms the sense of being in a museum, reminding us these are cultural artifacts, not porn, while simultaneously providing viewers with a false sense of privacy, since only those standing directly next to you know what you are watching. The exhibit is arranged in chronological order, beginning in 1907 and ending in 1965. The first film, a stag party classic, is the relatively innocuous and humorous animated short “Buried Treasure,” in which a hapless man falls victim to the whims and desires of his own monstrously oversized appendage, leading him into a series of predictable mishaps along the way, including comic sex with a number of different animals. The rest of the exhibit, on the other hand, is surprisingly, refreshingly, and unapologetically “hardcore.” These films, which include a fair amount of fellatio, cunnilingus, female onanism, straight sex, and one instance of homosexual oral sex. They offer a glimpse of some of the earliest examples of what would become, in America, a multi-billion dollar industry by the twenty-first century. Most of the 35mm shorts, normally about 10-12 minutes each, are of poor quality compared to today’s standards, but lacking the flash and gynecological exactness of so much modern porn, these films seem somehow more intense and more raw. In the darkened and crowded exhibit space they seem strange, yet somehow powerfully real, their ability to move the viewer more dangerous because of the public nature of the exhibit. This is perhaps exactly what the curators were looking to accomplish, after all most of the films were originally viewed by large groups of men at stag parties.

The exhibit, on the other hand, is more than merely an intellectualized peepshow. Along with the films there are small viewing booths, looking conspicuously like those one might find in any number of porn shops from Chelsea to Times Square, except that these booths offer interviews and first-person accounts of men who had seen many of these films at stag parties and smokers in the 60s and 70s. Their honest, unapologetic, and earnest responses help to give the films a human face and place them within a broader cultural context.

In addition to the two main exhibits, the museum offers a sampling of its permanent collection, highlights which at the time include a “male chastity belt” designed to prevent the evils of masturbation, as well as a number of large, fully-equipped mechanical sex devices, a bibliographical history of sex education, and a rather depressing exhibit on “Sex, Society and Law” that makes one question the very notion of sexual progress. Although we should applaud the Museum’s mission “to preserve and present the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality,” current and past exhibits do tend to overlook male and female homosexuality except as aberration and exception.

James Hoff is a student in the PhD program in English.

“Vamps and Virgins, The History of the American Pinup,” closes March 30th. Museum hours are Sunday - Friday: 11:00am - 6:30pm (last ticket sold at 5:45pm) and Saturday: 11:00am - 8:00pm (last ticket sold at 7:15pm).