Sex in the Museum: My Unlikely Career at New York's Most Provocative Museum by Sarah Forbes

Author:Sarah Forbes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781250041678
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Exhibitions, like relationships, were opportunities to immerse myself in something new. And just like relationships, exhibitions are a lot of hard work.

With Kink officially launched, it was time to start planning the next exhibit: Sex and Design/Design and Sex. Three years into my tenure at MoSex, I found that talking about sex toys was almost second nature. I appreciated the array of historic sex toys I’d been exposed to such as carved ivory dildos (even strap-ons) from the 1700s as well as my personal favorite, a box of “laughter devices” or warai do-gu from early-twentieth-century Japan. This bento box of sex contained dildos, cock rings, and a wide range of sexual “accessories,” skillfully handcrafted from buffalo horn, tortoiseshell, and wood. MoSex’s own vibrator collection dates back to 1911, but in fact the earliest mechanical vibrator—a steam-powered contraption, the Manipulator, that took up a whole room—was invented by Dr. George Taylor in 1869. As cumbersome and perhaps comical as some of these items are, they serve as a tangible reminder that the pursuit of pleasure is timeless. Nevertheless, instead of looking toward the past, as so many of our exhibitions had, I was interested in capturing something in the current sexual zeitgeist: a revolution quietly taking place in the sex industry, one that was producing high-end luxury sex toys that were as technologically inspired as they were beautiful.

One of the museum’s previous exhibitions, Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews by Timothy Archibald, had been my indoctrination, my first introduction to the world of sex inventors.

The first sex inventor I met was Alan Stein, creator of the ThrillHammer, an antique dentist chair wired to reach vibration speeds of up to 6500 rpm and rotation speeds of 150 rpm. Before joining the museum’s collection, the ThrillHammer toured the United States, including a stop at the Chicken Ranch, one of the famous legal prostitution houses in Nevada. It was test-driven by many, many women on its way.

It’s not just a glorified sex chair. The ThrillHammer allows the movements and speed of the machine to be controlled remotely by another person. It is an incredible early example of teledildonics, loosely defined as the integration of computer-controlled technology with the goal of helping achieve sexual stimulation and orgasm. There’s a camera and monitor attached to a mechanical tentacle that wraps around the machine like an arm. Video footage of the user’s full body streams so the machine can be controlled remotely, from the next room or across the world. In my first year working at the museum, we had teamed up with Dorkbot for a tech showcase event in which a live model engaged with the machine while footage was streamed from New York to a huge tech conference in San Francisco. Journalist Violet Blue was behind the ThrillHammer’s controls in San Francisco.

After working on the sex machine exhibition, I couldn’t read about emerging technologies, video games, or even 3D and HD televisions (for the record, some body parts are not best seen in such close detail) without thinking about a sexual application.

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