New York’s Museum of Sex: Serious, Sly, Fun, and Funky

A collection on sex through the ages explores its power, delights — oh, and there’s plenty of paraphernalia.

T oday is Valentine’s Day, so what to write, what to write? There’s Fragonard’s Progress of Love series at the Frick, commissioned by Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s last mistress, in the early 1770s. It’s bouncy and lush and gauzy, with a lovely young couple flush with romance. It’s suitable. There’s a dark cloud, though. Madame du Barry rejected Progress of Love. We don’t know why. Too fluffy? Too unreal? Du Barry, after all, had actually worked in a brothel and knew hard knocks before she met the king. Heck, Ethel Merman played her in Du Barry Was a Lady. And the romance between Madame du Barry and the king was cooling, from love to “Friendship, Friendship, Just the Perfect Friendship.” Write about chocolate? Making it is an art. Flowers? Growing them is an art, as is arranging them.

How about the Museum of Sex on Fifth Avenue at 27th Street in Manhattan? It opened in 2002 and is a serious place. Sex is serious stuff that can be fun, too, and the museum is both. It does intelligent exhibitions and has mastered the light touch. Now, we can look at sex in art here and there in museums. There’s Fragonard, of course, but also Titian’s Danaë, which is about sex and money; Cupid and Psyche, by Canova — cold marble can sizzle; or Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, about a woman seduced by two octopuses while searching for pearls, and, boy, those octopuses look like they have magic tentacles that titillate. The possibilities for a museum devoted to sex are endless.

I’ve written about the Museum of the Dog, dinosaurs, MAD magazine, and the South African singer Tyla’s sand dress, epoxied on her wet, bare body for the Met Costume Institute gala. Now for the vibrators, dildos, lingerie, floggers, paddles, and porn.

The first gallery, mostly from the museum’s permanent collection, dives into fetish culture, or equipage and appurtenances, and art with randy themes or subjects. Seeing a critical mass of such items, and in a museum setting, startles but doesn’t appall. There’s Raphael and the Fornarina, a 1968 etching by Picasso that shows the pope in a chair as he ogles, with little left to the imagination, a couple playing in bed. Persian painted illustrations were common in aristocratic households in what’s now 17th- and 18th-century Iran and India. They came in pornography but also how-to books. Shunga, or Japanese erotic art, like The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, from 1814, was high-end porn, not unusual. It’s lascivious and also beautifully designed. The text that surrounds the figures in Dream is very randy indeed. No “Don’t Try This at Home” disclaimer.

I’d develop this section of the gallery further with better impressions of the prints and more elaborate paintings, both for aesthetics and to make the point that much of this material was created by first-rate artists for elite consumers and homes and not trash to be found in Dick’s Porn Dungeon.

At points — the Vac-U-Lock lifelike dildo replacing a blade on a Sawzall — my jaw slacked. Six available speed settings! It wasn’t the loungewear, like the red robe designed for Hugh Hefner that shocked, or a Playboy cover, colorful pasties, packs of sexual-enhancement supplements made for the Asian market — among them one illustrated with Bill Clinton’s pudgy mug — or even a Slick Willie sex toy. Wild cherry edible underwear unslackened my jaw with a giggle. The Sawzall spooked me the most.

Floggers exerted the feel and look of compliance through pain. Since we live in America, a business in Herndon, Va., made a bundle producing, marketing, and selling whips for passion, with a glitzy illustrated catalogue offering a choice in materials. Hamilton Beach, maker of blenders, can openers, coffee grinders, and other kitchen gadgets, produced electric vibrators and sold them in department stores as offering health benefits through electric waves. Anti-masturbation devices, looking very painful indeed, grew from Victorian-era fears that self-love could lead to blindness and insanity. Paddles advanced S&M trends, as did leather cuffs, ropes, and harnesses. And don’t forget dolls. And masks. And rubber or inflatable sex partners. All on the scary side, but I’m a tough guy, not entirely accepting of whatever floats your boat, but holding the view that one’s home is one’s castle. Surely AI is on the horizon.

The museum’s temporary exhibition, Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in American Cults and Communes, explores 20 communities through close to 300 works of art, photographs, film clips, textiles, artifacts, and printed matter. It’s a fascinating angle on sexuality, desire, and reinvention, never done before in a museum and probably a unique American story. The Shakers and the Oneida Community are well known to Vermonters, since they thrived for a short time in northwestern Massachusetts and rural New York, not far from our little postage stamp. Cults driven by too much or too little sex? Vermont’s were hippie-driven, back-to-nature movements infused with pot and, here and there, a doomsday cult. They were more libertarian than groups such as the Source Family, the Church of All Worlds, the Unarius Academy of Science, and Father Divine. Though the subject is not my cup of tea, the show is well done and educational, a curious stroll back to the Age of Aquarius.

The Puritans notwithstanding, many of the early English émigrés to our shores were land speculators and seekers after commodities, more materialist than religious. Neither this cohort nor the Puritans were celibate. The Shakers came here in the 1780s, believing in celibacy but also equality between men and women and the renunciation of most forms of gratification, though they might have invented bebop. They expressed devotion through work, good business practices, and minimalist furniture. Of course, though converts were welcomed, the sect went extinct. A few pieces of furniture are in the show, lovely and chaste.

The American Moravians weren’t celibate, but sex was ritualized. Village elders coached the bride and groom, preparing them for intimacy, and wedding-night consummation took place in a private, specially built blue cabinet. Very weird. The Public Universal Friend was both a person — the gender-non-conforming spiritual leader born Jemima Wilkinson in 1752 — and a movement. The Friend, who believed in no pronouns, prescribed sexual abstinence, egalitarianism, free will, and abolition of slavery.

Then, starting in the 19th century, there was the free love Oneida Community. Love and sex were to be shared community-wide on an equal basis. Exclusive relationships were called “sticky love” and deplored. In the 1870s, the Oneida followers practiced an early form of eugenics, communally raising 60 supposedly perfect children. Other children were parked with their parents and marginalized in favor of “scientifically bred” superhumans.

The Oneida community’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was born in Brattleboro, Vt., in 1811. He believed in utopianism and extreme selflessness and, I’d argue, was Vermont’s first socialist. Noyes eventually fled to Canada, becoming its first socialist while his family stayed in America and founded Oneida Limited, America’s biggest producer of silver and stainless flatware, some fancy and frilly. Objects made by Oneida and marketed by its company contradict Noyes’s devotion to selflessness. How fast and how thoroughly cults are inverted.

I enjoy visiting Hancock Shaker Village, not far from my house. It’s a Shaker history-and-lifestyle museum and it’s charming. The Shaker aesthetic isn’t for me, but I’m used to it and chalk Shaker celibacy up to idiosyncrasy. It’s not ideal for nation-building. Seax-Wicca, blending Saxon nature mysticism and witchcraft, is a tougher sell. Spellcasting, lunar rituals, and covens can get you into trouble. As a long-ago volunteer fireman, I have to say they seem overly fond of pyres. The Shakers, Moravians, and the Oneida Community were entrepreneurial, go-get-’em, hardworking Americans who aimed at prosperity. Wiccans seem to spend lots of time howling at the moon and pounding herbs. Here, Utopia gets into trouble, since Seax-Wicca and the Church of All Worlds are so entwined with 1960s environmentalism. Other movements, such as the Utah-based Summum, draw from Egyptian and Gnostic beliefs and seem closer to sex cults.

Though it’s fun to learn about the dozen or so groups that the exhibition profiles, I would’ve focused on fewer and gone deeper. One narrow theme is celibacy. Some of the profiled cult and commune members believed that sex was all about creativity and pleasure. Celibacy was a path to purification and a restoration of fallen mortals to the world of Adam and Eve.

Why am I not surprised that Los Angeles figures in an exhibition about cults and communes? The L.A.-based Source Family was a 1960s phenomenon whose members believed in organic vegetarian diets, communal living, and utopian ideals like social justice, peace, harmony, and polygamy. Its founder — a jujitsu star and Hollywood stuntman who changed his name to Father Yod — followed a yogi and a swami, had a band, an organic vegetarian restaurant, a commune, and 14 wives. Among the Mrs. Yods were Lovely, Venus, Astral, Galaxy, Prism, and Harvest Moon. The commune features in Annie Hall when the Woody Allen character orders alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast in the Source Family’s Sunset Strip restaurant.

The commune, we learn, grew from the restaurant and its mantra of healthy eating, freedom-questing, consciousness, and love. According to the documentary The Source Family, Yod thought he was god. He was a mini-Mao, a self-made multimillionaire, bank robber, money launderer, sex fiend, and also a magnet for young, lost, bourgeois people. Dionysus would have envied him.

The topic of sex in American cults and communes is vast since there were so many. The exhibition doesn’t consider the Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, the Manson Family, or the People’s Temple — Jonestown — since their stories involve violence. Sex was the least of their delusions. Just one of these groups would blow up everything else in the show. One problem, too, for Utopia is that the art and artifacts don’t compel. After walking through a gallery of dildos, plugs, whips, and masks, a simple Shaker chair doesn’t excite. That said, the cultists and communards, dressed for the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, are works of art in themselves.

Daniel Gluck, the founder of the Museum of Sex, graduated from Wharton and made some money in the software business in the 1990s. At Penn, he grew to admire Camille Paglia, whom I admire for her broad-mindedness — and bloody-mindedness — as well as her war on academic boundaries and her talent in drawing from high and low culture. Sex is as essential an instinct in us mortals as thirst and hunger. A friend suggested to Gluck that he start a sex museum as a tourist attraction, a bit of a joke, and a parody of stodgy art museums. There were sex museums in Europe, but they were strictly touristical, and Gluck wanted something serious. Sex and the City, the first episode of which was in 1998, was a quick and enduring hit. Gluck bought the Fifth Avenue building in what was then a gentrifying but still seedy hood.

Establishing the museum wasn’t easy. The New York State Board of Regents wouldn’t grant it the title “museum,” claiming that doing so would undermine and ridicule the long-understood notion of a museum as edifying. That meant trouble getting nonprofit status. The museum is a for-profit operation. Its popular name — MoSex — never took off. Soon after the museum opened, in 2002, New York’s Catholic League called it the “Museum of Smut” and “a mockery of museums,” condemning its celebration of the racist abortion goddess Margaret Sanger — on that point I’m with the Catholic League — but 2002 is a generation ago, and most of its rhetoric now seems blue-nosed. It’s probably best, in any case, to be for-profit.

Since then, the museum doesn’t seem to have had any collisions with the Catholic League. It’s been in the news for sex harassment — visitors who grope — and, a few weeks ago, because a male staffer said a female staffer persistently showed him naughty photos of herself, and what a hefty young lady she is, what impressive tattoos, and is that black lingerie suitable for a New York winter? Visitors have claimed they were injured in a bouncy house of inflated breasts, not in the galleries but in the game room of the museum’s Carnal Carnival bar.

Other exhibitions the Museum of Sex has done over the past 20 or so years include Looking at Andy Looking, with the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, examining intimacy and voyeurism in Warhol’s work. Modern Sex: 100 Years of Design and Decency looked at the phenomenon of the sexpert and the graphic design and promotion of male and female hygiene products. Cam Life was about cam and web chat, bleeding-edge forms of autobiography. The museum also did a show about Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, the seminal porn movie and probably the first porn movie to go marquee. They’ve done lots of single-artist shows. Its first exhibition, NY Sex, tackled how New Yorkers transformed sex in America — with Christine Jorgensen, Mae West, the Stonewall riot, and Robert Mapplethorpe among the stars.

I didn’t spend much time in the Carnal Carnival bar. It offers games I’d try only if there were a medevac helicopter nearby. The games came with the price of admission — $38, with no senior discount. My visit almost didn’t happen. It was a challenge for someone as low-tech as I am to buy a ticket, since it involved scanning, barcodes, and disclosures on the museum’s part and mine — sexually explicit objects and text were on view, and I was over 18. More scanning and beeps. I had help from a nice staff. Otherwise, I would’ve lost patience — a case of museumus interruptus. There were moments when I was simply too shy to go a step further, but I soldiered on. They have a proper shop with how-to books, the latest in vibrators, but — and I asked — no Christmas ornaments. The place is well worth visiting, and it’s open most days until midnight, hours past my bedtime. The museum opened a Museum of Sex last year in Miami. It’s doing well…