Sex & The City: A Critique and A Dream for Modern Escapism
Eyes wide and mouth agape. That was my expression when I rounded the corner at 5th avenue and 27th street and saw the Museum of Sex for the first time. I was twelve years old. My older sibling was with me at the time.
‘There’s a museum of sex’, I exclaimed.
‘Yes, Gawain. We’re in New York you know,’ they teased.
‘Can we go?’
‘You’re not old enough, you’ll have to wait till you’re eighteen.’
They smiled playfully at my forlorn discovery that, like most fun things in life, the Museum of Sex came with an age restriction.
Over the next couple of years, the Museum of Sex became a running joke between me and my sibling and so naturally on my eighteenth birthday they bought me a ticket. Did the experience live up to the six years I spent fantasizing about it? Well, not really. It was titillating, but on the whole I found it a bit crass. The museum, with its life-sized model of three deer engaged in a menage-a-trois and videos of panda porn, seemed more geared towards shocking its audience than educating them.
I no longer live in New York but every now and then I’ll acquiesce to the demands of my friends and family that I come home. December, being the holiday season, happened to be a prime time for such demands and so, faux-leopard-fur-coat in hand, I sauntered back to the bitter temperatures of my home state. While New York is home to a million different attractions, the question of what to do can be insurmountably difficult at times. I figured that after I’d worn through my usual repertoire of activities (breakfast for dinner at Veselka, a dérive through the MET, a beer and shot combo à la dive bar) I’d need to find another source of entertainment. After an hour or so of scanning the internet and sifting through the ‘Going Ons About Town’ section in The New Yorker without anything even remotely piquing my interest, I was resigned to think that New York had suffered a horrible death in my absence and that my best option was to stay at home with a facemask, a glass of dry red wine, and my copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Then it hit me. What was the Museum of Sex up to these days? While perusing their website, I came across an exhibit entitled ‘Superfunland: Journey Into The Erotic Carnaval.’ The description boasted an experience that was carnal, freudian, and indulgent. Sign me the hell up.
To accord with the expected debauchery of the exhibit, I planned an outfit that would convey my readiness for the verboten: A transparent, lacy black top layered over a sparkly maroon turtleneck, snakeskin-patterned trench coat, oversized cream-colored trousers, and a pair of black leather shoes. As I made my way over to 27th and 5th, the place where only twelve years before I had stared helplessly at a world of adult pleasures I was not allowed into, I grinned nostalgically.
“Superfunland: Journey Into The Erotic Carnival” at the Museum of Sex.
Once in, I ascended four flights of stairs to the start of the exhibit. I entered a waiting room in which there were various pictures and dioramas that illustrated carnival events like ‘cooch shows.’ The first part of the exhibit was a circular room with a curved screen where spectators were given a brief history of the carnival, also known as the Bacchanalia—festivals that celebrated freedom, intoxication, and ecstasy and allowed its participants to break away from the puritanical doctrines that governed everyday life. While the video was educational, it was hardly what I had expected for an introduction to an exhibit such as this. The atmosphere created by the room and the video made it feel like I was transported back to the mundane gymnasium where I had school assemblies in elementary school while some speaker drawled about a topic no one really cared about.
The second room was a kaleidoscopic tunnel that had six videos from different carnival attractions and world fairs. This was slightly more exciting than the first room but the effect was more or less pornographic in the sense that I didn’t learn much other than what a naked body looked like, which I already knew. As my friend who was with me at the exhibit also observed, ‘this room feels like it was designed with the intention of promoting instagram photo ops.’ Her argument was redoubled when, after everyone started to exit, we noticed a couple staying behind to take photos of one another on a professional-grade camera.
I was similarly disappointed by the rest of the exhibit. The next three floors contained a variety of erotic games and experiences such as a bouncy castle made up of inflatable tits, a ‘wack-a-cock’ style game where the cocks came out of gloryholes, a county-fair style bull ride, and a biometric kissing booth in which participants could measure their compatibility. This is fun, I thought to myself, but this isn’t art. These rooms had the desultory energy of a middle school dance in that everyone involved moved awkwardly from one corny amusement to the next; I even heard Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend” playing at one point.
“Superfunland: Journey Into The Erotic Carnival” at the Museum of Sex.
The one thing that somewhat aroused my interest was the ‘Tunnel of Love’, an immersive “4D” experience that had its viewers sit on chairs that vibrated and pulsed during a four-minute long video of, well, I’m not exactly sure what it was, but there were a lot of naked bodies involved. We even got sprayed in the face by mist at certain points to signify the orgasms happening on screen. This experience, albeit more artistic than the rest of what I saw, still fell prey to pedestrianism. As I was waiting in line for the experience, I heard someone walk out and say ‘I need therapy now.’ Despite this probably being a joke, what this person said resonated with me because it reminded me of my impression when I first visited the Museum of Sex. Namely, that it was more fixated on the shock factor rather than cultivating a space where an educational dialogue about sex could take place.
Ultimately, the most exciting part about this experience was planning my outfit. Far from paying homage to and resurrecting the experience of the carnival, this exhibit pantomimes it. Instead of immersing its viewers in a vision of Dyonisian ecstasy, what this exhibit gives us is short, eruptive, and unsatisfactory “pleasures.” In other words, it's a paradigm for bad sex.
The exhibit, however, wasn’t a complete disaster. All the staff members were great and it gave me some things to think about. One of them being whether or not it was even possible to resurrect the traditions of the carnival in our day and age; And if it was, where would we have to go to find it? My mind was immediately drawn to the nightclub scene in Berlin. After relaying this to a friend the other night, she told me that Berlin wasn’t even worth considering due to the fact that it doesn’t just have a scene, it is the scene. The scene has become inextricable from the city’s essence. The point of the Bacchanalia is to break away from the quotidian patterns of life for a short period of time. ‘It’s supposed to exist as a separate thing,’ she told me, ‘it’s not supposed to coexist with the city itself.’
Maybe it’s not about resurrecting the traditions of the carnival in their entirety, but incorporating certain features of it into our ritual hedonisms. One of my favorite clubs in London, the city where I’ve expatted for the last two years, is Paper Dress Vintage. It’s a vintage store by day and a live-music venue/dance-spot by night. Adorned in satin and lace, its night-time inhabitants cut shapes to DJ sets spun on vinyl. Another club I like is Bossa Nova Civic Club in Brooklyn. This club lends itself to a chill atmosphere where its inhabitants, dressed in animal prints and leather, pulse under the synchronicity of techno, steam, and multi-colored lights. While these spots may not be as grand as the carnival traditions of the past, they still interrupt the mundanity of everyday life and cultivate spaces committed to creativity and release. Both these venues seem to say ‘We’re here to have an unpretentiously good time and that’s it, no bullshit!’
Paper Dress Vintage via Zigpix
The modern age, with its abundance of creative platforms, mass-distribution of erotic fantasies, and legalization of certain drugs, has made bacchanalian escapism all the more easy. So when the question arises of where the modern day carnival can be found, we may not have to look any further than our own home. The carnival has become a multifarious affair. As long as what we do to blow off steam allows us to distance ourselves from the world in a way that doesn’t become too all-encompassing or self-medicating, we can conjure our own private carnival; Whether that means dancing to techno until five in the morning or splitting a bottle of natural wine or a joint amongst close friends. If I’ve learned anything from the Museum of Sex, it’s that sometimes the path to get somewhere is more exciting than the place itself.
The carnival isn't a destination but a journey that allows us to take a step back and enjoy the experience in front of us. It’s less about shocking people and more about exploring the limits of individual and collective play. It’s not a room full of raunchy games nor is it a naked body on a screen, but an event that transcends material boundaries and celebrates the thing we tend to lose sight of the most. That is, the present moment.