New York’s Museum of Sex
If you don’t want your perception of the Victorians as prudish, stiff, and upholders of decent morality, then don’t go to the Museum of Sex. However, if you would like to see a bunch of skeletal Victorians putting the newly invented camera to use in more creative ways than your usual stiff portrait and wiping your preconceptions about the Ye Olde Victorians out the window, go to the Museum of Sex (Or as they playfully like to call themselves, MoSex).
When enter the museum through the gift shop, you are greeted with an unapologetic deluge of decadent deviations of the sexual manner, all available for sale. In the middle of the shop is a provocatively posed mannequin, dressed in the latest in BDSM fashion. This mannequin can be clearly seen from the street, through the large shop windows. For a society that likes to keep sexuality behind closed doors, this is a refreshing change—a dare to the passerby to come in and explore their sexuality in a public forum.
Besides the deceased Victorians, the fist exhibit also featured images from other eras, right up to the twentieth century. After this first exhibit, entitled “Hardcore: A Century and a Half of Obscene Imagery,” you go up the stairs to what is made to look like a campground with several different tents. Entitled “Splendor in the Grass,” according to the museum’s website, this exhibit invites visitors to “enter a complex immersive environment with five multisensory ‘camping tents,’ completed by a campfire, log seats, and constantly-changing ‘sky.’” I went into a tent that was completely black except for a red strobe light, and pheromone filled smoke. The walls were covered with life-like silicone body parts that you were meant to touch. I felt more silicone boobs in that tent than a plastic surgeon does on a day’s work.
My favorite part of the museum by far is also the most famous one—the bouncy castle from the Funland exhibit (which ended on June 11th, but they kept the castle). Or as I like to call it, The Magical Bouncy Boob Castle. They give you two minutes to jump freely in this delightful perversion of a cherished childhood ride. I gleefully let myself fall into gigantic plastic breasts that were as wide as I am tall. Set to the tune of the musical Oliver’s “Food, Glorious Food” I sang loudly into my phone’s camera “Boobs, glorious boooobbbs! Large, buxom, and plentiful!” and then lost my footing and promptly fell over into the warm embrace of a four foot tall breast.
I finished off the day with a delicious Cucumber Mint Gimlet at the museum’s bar, called Play. The two single bathrooms in the bar are non-gendered, and feature a foggy plastic semi-see-through wall where the mirror would be, in which you can see people washing their hands in the other bathroom. On the opposite side of this wall there are two conveniently placed handles. In the non-gendered bathrooms. Facing a see-through wall. I’ll just leave it up to you, dear reader, to deduce the function of these design choices. If you are interested in bringing your significant other and seeing these design choices up close and in person (for posterity’s sake, of course) Play and the Museum of Sex are located on the corner of 5th Ave and 27th St in Midtown.
-MW
