A Jedi in New York: Day 4

Still here! Again, another short entry as it’s pretty late, once again, and we both need our sleep! My legs are exhausted from the amount of walking we’ve both been doing.

Today we went to the Museum of Sex (surprisingly work-safe – the website, anyway) as it was something that little bit “different” to the norm, plus it was somewhere that we could again use our New York Passes.

There are three exhibitions on at the Museum at present – The Sex Lives of Animals, Sex and the Moving Image and a selection from the Museum’s permanent collection.

First came the Animals section, which presented an interestingly “alternative” take on natural history and biology by focusing exclusively on the sexual behaviour of animals, mostly looking closely at unusual behaviour which in many cases, the curator describes, goes against Darwin’s theories of natural selection, against Creationism and instead presents a third possibility.

In practical terms, this meant we got to look at videos of animals masturbating, fucking every possible way they could and even some discussion on homosexuality in animals, including the story of the gay penguins And Tango Makes Three which got banned from many, many educational institutions. It was interesting and, yes, different, as expected.

On the floor above was the Sex and the Moving Image exhibition. As the name implies, this exhibition charted the use of sex (or lack thereof) in movies from the earliest black and white silent films, where sex was mostly implied (with the exception of “stag” movies – early porn films, very few of which have survived due to their illegality at the time, but some examples of which were on, err, “display”) through the more liberal approach that developed over the years, taking in (no pun intended) Russ Meyer and Deep Throat all the way to modern porn and celebrity sex tapes, contrasting hugely with how mainstream film deals with sexual encounters. There were also some shorter videos from Beautiful Agony (NSFW) showing different people’s faces during orgasm, and a selection of sex-themed commercials from over the years.

Then in the final room we had the selections from the Museum’s permanent collection, which included male and female RealDolls (sex dolls that run into the thousands of dollars due to their supposed “realism”) to a selection of sex machines, including a terrifying-looking one that was essentially a rubber cock attached to a Black and Decker drill.

So that was nice.

Anyway, we spent rather longer in the Museum than we had intended, as we’d originally planned to move on to Bodies… The Exhibition and also potentially to go and see Ground Zero later in the day. However, we’d also made plans to meet up with the fine gentlemen Papapishu and Regulus for dinner in St Mark’s Place at a Japanese joint called Kenka which is often filled with Japanese ex-pats, is very noisy, serves traditional Japanese food that isn’t sushi (which I’ve never had before, and which proved to be delicious, even the deep-fried garlic) and serves terrifying “specials” such as bull penis.

So it’s been a good day, only marred by the fact that Jane’s not been feeling too well off-and-on since last night. I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing her a big “get well soon”.