All current discounts, deals & coupons in Gramercy Park, New York (Entertainment - Bars/Pubs)

If you get pleasure out of visiting the Museum of Sex — which calls itself MoSex and has been celebrating its fifth anniversary this week — is that a kink or a fetish?



According to the exhibition “Kink: Geography of the Erotic Imagination,” which takes up the first floor of the museum, they are very different things. A kink “is the use of props, costumes and role play to enhance partner intimacy.” So if you want to just visit the museum to gaze at its props and costumes, and then return to the outside world, that is probably a kink; if you want to live there, it’s a fetish.

When the museum was founded as an institution that would document, study and display all aspects of human sexuality, it was denied nonprofit status by New York State. Though there are other museums of erotica and sexual exotica in the world, the Museum of Sex’s curators, John Vollmer and Sarah Jacobs, say those institutions explicitly seek to spur sexual sensations — they are entertainments — while the Museum of Sex is among the first anywhere to have taken a curatorial approach to sexuality.

That docentlike devotion may add to the sense of fetishism, particularly now, when the museum’s muted marquee is overshadowed by the bold pink signs heralding the temporary exhibition “Kink,” with mysterious labels naming the novelties offered within, ranging from “enemas,” “rubber mackintoshes” and “shaving,” to practices-that-here-cannot-be-named.

Yet once you enter, the props, costumes and relics don’t do much to follow the museum’s own definition of kink and “enhance” sensations of pleasure and intimacy; instead, they evoke astonishment at how far humanity will go to stimulate pleasure or intimacy — even using objects that seem to make them impossible.

There are niche groups devoted to balloons or to imitating animals or to gas masks or to the accouterments of infancy, their props and costumes placed on display.

Judging from this show, kink objects like masks, medical apparatus and animal outfits seem to encourage not intimacy but distance, imitating not flesh but its avoidance, invoking not humanity but its absence.

For those not sharing a particular kink, there is something deliberately off-putting about its objects. Of course, in the cinema gallery, where monitors and projections are accompanied by museological text labels, a voyeuristic, peep-show pleasure is partly promised; and tape loops of pornographic hydraulics hold repeat viewers in rapt attention.

The Museum of Sex may refer to sex all the time, but it reproduces or inspires few of its sensations. As for the sensuous lure of surfaces and flesh and proportions, the mental stimulation of surprise and the sudden sharp pains or pleasures of insight, the social bonds created by sharing a gaze at a cherished or desired object — those might seem like things a museum of sex would be concerned with, but they are more readily experienced in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seeming to prove that Art can be more sensual than Sex.

There are also examples of early-20th-century sex education; samples of the great silent film comedian Harold Lloyd’s collection of Hollywood nudes; a computer touch-screen offering information about 19th-century patents for sexual machinery.

Katharine Gates, guest curator for that show, created an ornate “Erotic Roadmap” of kinks, laid out on the gallery floor: It suggests something esoteric, its labeled regions, like Latex or Goo or Taboo, crisscrossed by black lines making links between kinks. Daniel Gluck, the software entrepreneur who founded MoSex, said in an interview that he was interested in collaborations with other kinds of museums, not just sex museums. The museum’s past exhibitions — surveying sexuality in China or disability and sexuality — could be preludes to more ambitious projects.

Right now it seems an end in itself — a place where you can gawk at practices and objects that offer titillation and sensation, replacing familiar reality with another. Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews by Timothy Archibald

When San Francisco photographer Timothy Archibald stumbled upon an online community of "sex machine" inventors, he was both intrigued,and perplexed: "The group," says Archibald "...was made up of a handful of guys with names like 'Inventor Bob' and 'The Toymaker' ...sharing ideas and solving problems in the classic garage-inventor manner." But, within this pragmatic, technological discourse,Archibald found hints of strikingly "conventional-sounding" and "family-oriented" lives. This Virtual Exhibition, "Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews by Timothy Archibald" highlights a selection of photographs and interviews from this remarkable project Provocative and full of surprises, the exhibition unearths a vibrant American subculture where sexual adventure, technological ingenuity, and heartfelt personal visions intersect.

My first attempts to connect with the members of this group went nowhere. After doing more research, I found that a local company had begun producing erotic videos specializing in men and women having sex with machines. A chance conversation with an inventor got me into the depths of the Mature Audience section of eBay, where I discovered a regular offering of 15 to 20 different sex machines daily. Through this I stumbled upon a number of grassroots sex machine web communities. People in tiny towns and suburbs across America were building, selling, and collecting machines, and sharing their ideas with each other. - Timothy Archibald

Gay men, gay closet cases, couples who aren't having sex, couples enhancing their sex life . . . Renting it out to the women's prison is another idea I was thinking of. Scott Ehalt
Inventor
Sex Machines Unlimited
Champlin, Minnesota

Are sex machines some embodiment of men's misguided attempts at understanding women? Are the machines a form of contemporary folk art? I began to see this preoccupation of creating a mechanical sexual creation as part of human instinct. - Timothy Archibald

About two years ago I made the first machine. I was going through the Internet and stumbled upon some machines on something like World Sex News. I thought, why not turn a bicycle frame upside down? ]
This group of engineers working under the name Advanced Medical Robotics approached me about shooting an ad for a sex machine they were selling, called the Erotichine . . . We did the ad . . . Then we came up with the idea of having me create a porn site with just their machine . . . I thought it was a fairly untapped market, so I went with it . . . The other sites that were using machines had this tone to them that seemed predatory, menacing, like the machines were getting the women. Could the girl "take" the machine? I wanted this to be about the women, beautiful women enjoying themselves . . .