Making Love or Having Sex?

Once in awhile a reader asks a question so deceptively simple it becomes profound. That was the case this week when someone asked me to explain the difference between “making love” and “having sex.”

First, I am still amazed that people ask me such questions, as if I am a wise man on a mountain top. I am most certainly not as the briefest of glances at my personal history would suggest. Second, it’s not like there is an official position on such matters, or some august body that adjudicates this stuff like the Academy Francaise. But I suppose by virtue of writing a column I have become a kind of ex-officio go-to guy.So all I can do is give an opinion. Space prevented the book-length dissertation I had in mind, but I did want to communicate that these are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Brian Alexander is the author of American Unzipped. Also check out his Sexploration column on MSNBC.com.

Art Or Porn?

Kinsey Parses the difference

By Brian Alexander

Is it porn or is it art? Or could it be art that also happens to be porn? What if it’s abstract and barely recognizable as anything having to do with sex, but the title uses the word “tit”? (Insert seventh-grade boy giggle here…)

I’ve been writing about sex for awhile now and still don’t have any answers to these questions, at least no answers that don’t sound like some convoluted undergraduate philosophy course. That’s dangerous because aside from one art history class in which I spent two semesters looking at slides of ancient Greek statues, the windows in Chartres cathedral, and post-modern drip paintings, my education in visual aesthetics came entirely from what I could learn by watching late night reruns of the Honeymooners and from Playboy.

So I was especially happy to talk to art historian and museum curator Jennifer Cahn. Cahn was given the enviable task of selecting works of art for the fourth annual Juried Art Show at the Kinsey Institute (yes, the sex research outfit) which starts May 29 on the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington.

Cahn claims no special expertise in the art of sexuality or in erotic art or in porn. She knows her art, but she comes to the special purpose of the Kinsey show with the eyes of an outsider. So when she was confronted with 700 entries — the most ever for the show — and asked to pair that down to a more manageable number based on her own criteria, how did she do it?

“I had no limitations imposed by Kinsey,” she told me. “I reveled in that.” As the curator for the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, in Texas, she does have restrictions often imposed by parents of the school students who tour the museum so the freedom to choose art depicting sexuality was freeing. “I would look at a picture and fantasize what would happen if I showed that here,” she said of her home base, “and how quickly I would lose my job. But to me there was something daring about putting those inner thoughts and desires and anger out in a visual form that I really enjoyed.”

Ultimately, though, she had to choose and she confessed that her criteria were necessarily subjective. Art that seemed commercial, slick, tended to slip into porn in her judgment.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time with people who work in the “adult” industry in the great Los Angeles exurb, and not one of them has ever said they were making art. They’re trying to make a buck. Some try to do it with more craftsmanship than others and skill ranges from expert to woeful, but nobody says they make art. On the other hand, I have seen performance artists doing exactly the same things you can see in your average porn movie — and more — and they say they are making art.

Though I can’t say with any real authority if they are correct, I do think it might be helpful if those school kids who go to Cahn’s museum in Texas could see some art that deals with the erotic and with sexuality. That way, maybe when they grow up, they’ll be better equipped to make the distinctions.

Want to know more about art and sex? Read Brian Alexander’s recent MSNBC Sexploration column.

Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped. Looking for America Unzipped? Great! Ex/Urb supports independent bookstores. To find one (hopefully) near you check out the American Booksellers Association store directory.

Marriage & Sex

Why, oh why, don’t they go together?

Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped

In this week’s Sexploration column, I answer questions from two married people whose sexual problem is that they aren’t having any.

One is a woman, and one is a man and here’s the weird thing: the guy isn’t getting any and he’s fine about it. So is his wife, he says. They haven’t had sex in seven years. It started going south, he says, when they had children. (Yes, shocking.) Still, he claims they are very happy.

The second is a woman and she’s not happy. Not at all. Her husband has to be cajoled and wheedled, though before the marriage, he seemed like every other horny man. They have kids, too.

Marriage and children are very bad for our sex lives. Nobody ever tells you this, of course — survival of the species and all — but it’s true. Studies prove it and they’re run by smart people, some of whom are Scandinavian. If you don’t want to read those studies, you could go by the sexless marriage jokes that are a cliched staple of TV comedy. (Why is it that Homer and Marge are the hottest married couple on TV?)

There could be many reasons why marriage and children wreck your sex life. Aging, that call you received from your son’s third grade teacher about the little matter of his preoccupation with his penis, the knowledge that termites are using your deck as an all-you-can-eat buffet, just aren’t very sexy. But habit, boredom and a kind of “taking for grantedness” can play a big role, too.

One way we take each other for granted is by taking ourselves for granted. The aggrieved woman’s husband now weighs over 300 pounds and has a host of health problems. She doesn’t say what sort of shape she’s in, but I do receive a lot of emails from men saying their wives have taken that long, sweet dive into Kripsy Kreme oblivion.

It’s pretty tough to feel sexy when your own body is falling apart and it’s pretty tough to feel that urgent gotta-have-it when your lover looks like a Beluga (unless you’re into the whole BBW or BBM thing). Sure, another thing everybody says is that you’re supposed to “accept” each other no matter what you look like, and complaining about your spouse’s weight smacks of shallowness. But come on. Really? Hundreds of emails every month from men and women tell me we would rather have the svelte, fit partner we dated than the pillowy person balancing popcorn on the belly that we have.

I saw a quote from Donald Trump not long after he married the latest Mrs., and he said that he didn’t think marriage should be work. That’s fine for Donald; he can simply trade in. But the rest of us drones have to work at it. Judging from what readers tell me, we might start by cutting down on the carbs, following some of the grooming advice in fashion magazines that we smugly mock, and redefining exercise as that thing that makes you sweat and isn’t jalapeno nachos.

Besides writing the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com, Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped.

Sex Through the Ages

(and a little bit about Honda, but that’s not too important)

By Brian Alexander

Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped

You’d think that since the technology of vibrators is now approaching that of NASA rockets — you can now plug them into your computer and cede control to a partner in Moldova, or program them to buzz along with, say, the William Tell Overture like that damn Honda Civic Musical Road — that we’d know pretty much all there is to know about the science and psychology of getting off.

No, Ma’am. Hardly. A hundred years from now, some schlub of a sex column writer will look back and get a good giggle at the myths we propagated.

There’s a long history of this sort of thing, one I explore in my MSNBC Sexploration column of April 23. A fellow by the name of Wilhelm Fliess stars, because he was a man of science, a medical doctor, what we would call an ear, nose, and throat man today. Which explains a lot, because Fliess was a friend and intimate confidant of Sigmund Freud who helped convince Freud that our genitals, especially female genitals, were linked to the nose.

In 1897 he published a monograph called “The Relations between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect” that elaborated on his theory of “nasal reflex neurosis.” The nuances of that idea are too complex to go into here, but suffice to say that if nasal congestion had half the impact on sex as Fliess said it did, we’d all be addicted to Flonase.

While the theory makes for a funny story now, it had disastrous results when Fliess and Freud actually put it into practice on Emma Eckstein. Fliess operated on poor Emma’s nose, very nearly killing her and leaving her mutilated for the rest of her life.

It was no accident that Emma was a woman. Female sexuality has long intrigued male doctors and scientists partly because men have long been both fearful and excited by the idea of female desire and orgasm. Men have come in for their share of goofy medical advice when it comes to sex, and I explore that in the same column, but more often it’s been women who have borne the brunt of medicine’s misadventures through the ages.

Even so, a lot of bad advice had beneficial fallout. Though Victorian-era “marriage” advisors got a lot of the medicine wrong, they actually helped women gain more control over their bodies. Whether programmable vibrators are a step in the same direction remains to be seen. Either way, at least we’ll be entertained.

What Musical Road?

Really, what’s most important here is Brian Alexander’s MSNBC Sexploration column of April 23. Obviously. But we know many of you may end up curious about the Honda Musical Road mentioned above. In case you missed it, this was a quarter-mile section of Avenue K in Lancaster, CA (about an hour from L.A.’s San Fernando Valley). The inventive people at Honda cut grooves into this section of desert highway so that the reverberations from driving over it sounded like The William Tell Overture. Although it was said that the musical road was in the middle of nowhere it must’ve been somewhere because there were locals. And these locals complained about the noise –err music. The Musical Road was paved over in 2008. But, of course, the project is fully documented on Utube:

Full Honda behind the scenes utube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRiJlEte9l0

Looking for Brian Alexander’s America Unzipped? Great! Exurb supports independent bookstores. To find one (hopefully) near you check out the American Booksellers Association store directory.