Jaunted

At $14.50 (minus $5 with the coupon on their site), MoSex, as the cool kids abbreviate it, is a relative bargain compared to other city attractions like the Met or the Circle Line. (No kids' prices, since you have to be 18 to attend.) What you see at the museum, however, can vary pretty wildly depending on the exhibits: With three rooms, it's currently showing two special exhibits, with the third room reserved for items from the museum's permanent collection.

"Kink" is a "hands on" exhibit about expressions of human sexuality, from high-heel fetishists to "furries," or people who enjoy dressing up as animals. You can touch and pick up a riding crop, or peer inside a model city which makes a normal woman look 50 feet tall.

In case you have trouble organizing what you see, a floor map relates kink to kink.

Upstairs, "Action" used the museum's video archives to depict a history of sexuality as depicted onscreen, from "stag films" and the Hays Code to celebrity sex tapes and depictions of gays and lesbians. Film buffs could stay in this exhibit for hours, watching the multiple horizontal and vertical video screens.

The blue lights which light this exhibit must be a reference to a common euphemism for porn films, which used to be described as "blue movies."

The crowd at MoSex was younger than at most city museums, but overall quiet and respectful. "Wow"s and "Look at that"s were murmured about the exhibits, but the one time I heard outright laughter was amongst the crowd watching a Sinclair Institute instructional video at the tail end of the "Action!" exhibit. And really, if you can't laugh at a real-life couple, fully dressed, proclaiming to the camera that they like to play country music in the bedroom, what can you laugh at?

The permanent collection objects represented a small, and discombobulated, selection of sex artifacts. Try to guess what this one is.

Overall, MoSex took us about an hour and forty-five minutes, and we enjoyed our visit. Still, don't write it into your New York City travel plans until you know what the exhibits are; you can be open-minded without being interested. Oh! And what you just saw was billed as the World's First Internet-Controlled Sex Machine. Too bad it was out of order! But between us, it was a little too "dentist chair" to be hot.

Check out our Sex Travel Map.

Related Stories:
·Museum of Sex Website [Official Site]