In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Joy of Sex (1972), the Guardian’s Observer just chose the top 10 best sex guides ever. A friend of ours on Facebook gave us a heads up about the list, saying they saved the best for last. Yes, we’re honored to say our illustrated guide SEX: How to Everything is #10! And we feel so privileged to be included alongside the likes of The Kama Sutra, Ovid’s The Art of Love and the late 60s classic Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). Here’s what they had to say about why you should really check out  SEX: How to Everything – we couldn’t agree more!:

SEX: How to Everything: A sex guide for the Agent Provocateur generation, this handsome 2008 coffee-table volume was written by sex columnists Emma Taylor and Lorelei Sharkey and explicitly shot by A-list photographer Rankin. New Yorkers “Em & Lo” were described in this newspaper as “real-life Carrie Bradshaws, the Trinny and Susannah of blow jobs”. Their unisex but especially female-friendly book was full of hip, witty and mischievous tips on foreplay, intercourse, oral, anal, fantasy, role-play and sex toys. It was also adapted into a 10-part TV series for, naturally, Channel 5.

 
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You’ve got to give the Fifty Shades of Grey books credit. The erotic trilogy by E.L. James has single-handedly made BDSM mainstream (now everyone knows what a safe word is), been a boon to the sex toy industry (hello, love beads!), and improved the sex lives of many a long-married couple (a chapter a day will keep the couple’s therapist away!). But that doesn’t mean the series is without its faults, or that there aren’t better depictions of BDSM relationships in popular culture — or at the very least, one better depiction. The 2002 indie film SECRETARY, a Sundance favorite, blows FIFTY out of the water, if you ask us. Here’s why.

10.
Grey was here first. E. Edward Grey is the name of the dominant boss played by James Spader in SECRETARY. Almost ten years later, E.L. James names her dominant lover Christian Grey. Perhaps it was an homage.

9.
It’s an award-winner. FIFTY may be a record breaker (it’s the fastest-selling paperback of all time) and a crazy money maker (E.L. James’s net worth is apparently a cool $15 mil), but it’s never going to win any literary awards. SECRETARY was nominated for a Golden Globe (best actress in a musical or comedy) and three Chlotrudis Awards (best actor, actress and adapted screenplay), among others; and it won an Independent Spirit Award (best first screenplay) and a Gotham Award (breakthrough performance, Maggie Gyllenhaal), among others.

8.
More likable protagonist. With all her Oh my!s and the countless Holy shit!s and all the submitting to the whims of her controlling stalker boyfriend, Ana Steele can get a little cloying. Without any magical qualities (like a scent, only detectable to vampires, that makes them swoon), Ana just isn’t convincing as The One to turn a control freak (in and out of the bedroom) into the marrying kind overnight. Especially not with that unruly hair! The flaws of Lee Holloway, on the other hand, are not only believable, but relatable (to a certain extent), and make her a sympathetic character. Plus, it’s really hard not to like Maggie Gyllenhaal.

7.
More believable love interest. A 27-year-old gazillionaire with impossible abs (and ne’er a single crunch to be found in all three books) and a million employees who has time to get both a sailing certification and a pilot’s license falls head-over-heels in love with a naive, dorky virgin utterly devoid of charm and can give her her first orgasm ever from nipple play alone??? Yeah right. Much more realistic is the socially awkward, emotionally sensitive Lee and her creepy-seeming and ultimately conflicted love interest — both of whom are pretty normal looking. Plus, this Grey actually does do sit-ups.

6.
No gratuitous product placement. FIFTY SHADES is a marketing agent’s wet dream: Apple, Audi, Blackberry, Converse, Louboutins, Neiman Marcus, Twinings….we could go on (E.L. James sure does). It’s the most shameless thing about the books! (And these brand-names aren’t dropped in a knowing, ironic way, a la Bret East Ellis. Nope, just lazy writing. Either that or E.L. James figured that these brand names would be comforting and homely and relatable amidst all those butt plugs and spreader bars.) Admittedly, it’s been a while since we’ve watched SECRETARY (we’re catching up when it airs on Sundance all this month — click here for the schej), but the only brand we can recall is Cosmo magazine, and it’s referenced in a characteristically cheeky way.

5.
More honorable origins. SECRETARY was based on a short story by literary power house Mary Gaitskill. FIFTY was based on online fan fiction, which was based on the Y.A. Twilight series by Stephanie Meyers.

Read the top 5 reasons why SECRETARY kicks FIFTY butt…

SECRETARY airs on the SUNDANCE Channel throughout Sept 2012 at the following times:

• 8:00PM FRI, SEP 7
• 1:45AM SAT, SEP 8
• 8:00PM TUE, SEP 11
• 1:20AM WED, SEP 12
• 10:00PM SUN, SEP 30
• 3:50AM MON, OCT 1

Last October, when Jeff Ragsdale, an out-of-work actor and stand-up comedian, got dumped by his girlfriend — the kind of breakup that puts your heart through the blender — he decided to crowd-source his loneliness. He posted flyers all around Lower Manhattan that read, “If anyone wants to talk about anything, call me. . . Jeff, One Lonely Guy.” His cellphone number was listed at the bottom of the flyer in little tabs that strangers could tear off — anyone who’s visited NYC will be used to seeing these kinds of flyers offering dog-walking services or futons for sale, etc.

In the months that followed, Jeff received tens of thousands of calls, texts, and voicemails. Someone took a photo of the flyer and posted it online and One Lonely Guy went viral — and international. He got calls from Spain, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Taiwan, and Australia. He answered his phone all day long, speaking to as many people as he could.

After the first month he started saving the conversations, and eventually published them in a book, Jeff, One Lonely Guy, that mixes the strangers’ messages with essays about his own struggles. Some people called to offer help or solace, others called to confess crimes or sexual fantasies, still others wanted therapy for their own problems — breakups, addiction, abuse, dysfunctional families, and so on. Jeff says, “I became a relationship counselor, a sex therapist, a probation officer, a confession booth. I found that people just need someone outside their inner circle to talk to, who’ll just listen and won’t judge.”

We asked Jeff to put together some of his favorite breakup advice that he received as a result of this project. The following all arrived via text or voicemail from complete strangers:

718-XXX-XXXX
It’s a big world out there though, Lonely Guy Jeff, and there are friendships to be found on every street corner! . . . May I suggest a book club? . . . Maybe take up an activity like bowling. . . . What you say?

Felicia, 15, (845-XXX-XXXX)
I wanted to tell you how happy I am after adopting a shelter cat last week. His name is Aleister, after Aleister Crowley.

Henrietta, 27, Texas (956-XXX-XXXX)
I think a marriage with a prisoner might be the best. They can’t hurt you as much as the dude in your bed who can torture you.

917-XXX-XXXX
Relationships are best with no-contact orders.

321-XXX-XXXX
Did you ever try going out, Jeff? Clubs? Bars? The library? The park? The supermarket? Gas station? I’m out of places.

973-XXX-XXXX
I went out with this guy for eight months. He came over for the last time, looked around, then left. . . . Guys are really weird sometimes. . . . I smoke a lot of weed and just chill.

Richard
Do you have any fantasies that you didn’t get to explore in your relationship with Kira? . . . There’s life after a breakup. . . . That’s a tough one. . . . Are you into cross dressing?

956-XXX-XXXX
Ruined. . . . Think my ex is already talking to someone else and we’ve been only broken up for a month and were together almost 3 years. . . . Time doesn’t do anything. . . . It brings in more pain.

011-86-XXXXXXXX-XXX
I broke up with my girl last month. I lost my lover but I’ve got precious memories. Win a few, lose a few. That’s life. Right? From a Chinese lonely man

Jack
I don’t fall in love. I love jazz.

Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered

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Fifty Shames of Earl Grey is on sale now

The web is littered with Fifty Shades of Grey parodies, but we think that “Fanny Merkin” (a.k.a. Andrew Shaffer, author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love) is the first one to get out a book-length parody. Yes, he wrote an entire novel that’s pretty much a line-by-line parody of Fifty Shades — it digs fun at the sex scenes, at the brand-name dropping, at the writing, at the murmuring, at the meandering inner monologues, and most especially at Anastasia’s various inner voices. It’s called Fifty Shames of Earl Grey and yes, there’s a grey tie on the cover.

Earl Grey’s awesome deep dark secret is that he’s not nearly as kinky as he thinks he is. He wants to spank Anna Steal and she’s kind of like, ” That’s it?” Other dark secrets include: he rocks out to Nickelback albums, he has a man-crush on Tom Cruise, and he thinks that Italian food doesn’t get any better than the Olive Garden. Oh yeah, and the kind of role-playing games he likes involve wizard hoods and sorcery, and the only dungeons he’s familiar with are the kind that come with dragons.

We weren’t sure we’d find a novel like this particularly funny — after all, the original Fifty Shades parodies itself pretty well. And it’s almost too easy to make fun of, so why bother? But once we started flipping through Fifty Shames of Early Grey, we couldn’t stop. Here are a few of our favorite bits…

• When Anna Steal first shows up to interview Early Grey, the receptionist hands her a security badge that reads VIRGIN. And when Anna approaches the elevators, she says, “We don’t have elevators in Portland. This will be my first elevator ride. How do they work, exactly?”
• Anna has an “inner guidette” who speaks with a thick Jersey accent. “I can tell it’s her,” Anna muses, “because when she talks inside my head there’s this weird echoey sound.”
• HOLY MOTHER EFFING SPARKLY VAMPIRES IS HE HOT.

Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered

RELATED ARTICLES FROM EMandLO.com:

• The Original Fifty Shades of Grey
• A Guide to the Toys in Fifty Shades of Grey
• Sales of Toys Soar Thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey

A few weeks back — in a post about how clutter can be as big an issue in relationships as money or sex — we mentioned a forthcoming book, Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Everything. Well, the book just came out yesterday! So we’d like to tell you a little more about it.

Significant Objects began its life on eBay, as a sort of literary and anthropological experiment: the editors (New York Times Magazine writer Rob Walker — you might remember his awesome “Consumed” column – and Em’s old friend Josh Glenn of HiLoBrow.com) wanted to see if attaching a fictional backstory to a thrift-store tchotchke would increase its value (turns out it did — they split the proceeds between the writers and a number of charities).

The objects were divided into four categories of significance: fossils (“Bears mute witness to a vanished way of life.”), evidence (“Implicated in a crime or public event.”), totem (“Offers wisdom from the natural world.), talisman (“Magical, lucky, and/or alive.”), and idol (“Intense complication lends it an aura.” ) Bet you never thought of any of that last time you were in a Salvation Army store! The book also organizes the stories and objects into groups that will be more familiar to thrift-store shoppers, based on the items’ original intended use: novelty items, figurines, kitsch, toys, etc. The editors then crunched data to see how the categories affected the final price. You can read more about the process involved on their website here.

The editors ended up with more than two hundred miniature stories and chose a hundred of their favorite to publish in a book. The writers range from bloggers to first-time authors to bigger names like Nicholson Baker, Jonathem Lethem, Neil LaBute, Curtis Sittenfeld, Matthew Sharpe, and Luc Sante. And for the record, author fame didn’t necessarily result in a higher eBay profit. The book is a significant object in itself — it’s published by Fantagraphics and is gorgeously designed and organized.

Here are some quotes from a few of our favorite love-related stories in the book (though you can pretty much open the book at random and found an awesome story — it’s the most attractive bathroom book you’ll ever own):

“Again, it’s not that I’m unhappy, but I will say that when I open the drawer of the dressing table where I keep these little dogs, they’re such an unsettling reminder that sometimes just seeing them, my breath catches.” — Curtis Sittenfeld, writing about a spotted dog figurine and a woman who may or may not have married the wrong man.

“ALL AMERICAN NECKING TEAM, the pin read. It was hard to reconcile the words with my father.” — Susannah Breslin, writing about a necking team button and a man trying to imagine a time before he was born — and a father who may or may not have been just like his son.

“He is not the only person I have loved whose constitution was at war with his calling, but he handled it rather better than some.” — Shelley Jackson, writing about a crumb sweeper and a werewolf who was allergic to dust, dander, and dogs.

Significant Objects is on sale now. You can read more at SignificantObjects.com.

Read the rest of this post at SUNfiltered

MORE ARTICLES FROM EM and LO:

• It’s Not You, It’s Your Clutter
• The Original Fifty Shades of Grey
• Technology Fixes for Classic Fairy Tales

While Em was reading her daughter a bedtime story the other night, it occurred to her — because she has read the same stories hundreds of times and thus it is possible to think about potential posts for this blog while reading — that a swift exchange of contact info would have been a much easier way for the Prince to stay in touch with Cinderella. And if the Prince and Cinderella forgot to exchange digits before midnight, then a few minutes of Internet stalking — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et al — would have fixed that. It’s perhaps not quite as romantic as visiting every woman in the land with a missing shoe, but it’s a lot more convenient. Also, less gross. (Hello, Athlete’s foot. Google that, Prince Charming.)

Anyway, this got us wondering how many other fairy tales could be swiftly solved — or ruined, depending on your take — by technology:

Beauty and the Beast: If the Beast had just signed up for an online dating site like OKCupid, he and Belle could have fallen in love over the Internet while they talked about books and reading and romance… before ever exchanging photographs.

The Little Mermaid: Instead of saving the Prince from a storm and dragging him to the shore, she could have just cued up SPLASH on his Netflix account and he would have dived in looking for her, faster than you can say “Daryl Hannah in a fish suit.” Of course, if she did stupidly trade in her voice for a pair of legs, she could have always turned to the ultra modern technology of writing to spell it all out for him.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: If the Prince had taken just one goddamned CPR class in his entire life, then he would have known to check her airway and he would have found that piece of apple lodged in her throat. We’re partial to a Prince Charming who knows the Heimlich Maneuver, but maybe that’s just us.

The Emperor’s New Clothes: If you don’t believe a small child in the crowd who says you look ridiculous with no clothes on, perhaps you’ll believe a YouTube video that’s going viral with three million (and counting) hits.

The Princess and the Pea: Four words for you, sister: Sleep Number Memory Foam.

Rapunzel: We have seen the mountains men will scale and the rivers they will cross just to get laid. We have also seen the remarkably creative technological feats men have achieved just to make masturbation feel like getting laid. And so we refuse to believe that a motivated young man wouldn’t figure out a way to get into that tower. As it were.

Little Red Riding Hood: Either Little Red Riding Hood would be traumatized for life after these events… or else some kind soul would help her work through her issues with a little modern therapeutic BDSM-tinted role-play.

Read the rest of this list on SUNfiltered

photo via flickr

When is an item a significant object worth collecting or displaying on the mantlepiece — or saving to sell on eBay at a later date — and when is it clutter? And if it’s clutter, is it threatening your relationship? The subject of household clutter has been on our minds lately. Em was at a reading last week for the forthcoming book Significant Objects, a literary experiment that began its life on eBay. Basically, the editors (New York Times Magazine writer Rob Walker and Em’s old friend Josh Glenn of HiLoBrow.com) wanted to see if attaching a fictional backstory to a tchotchke would increase its value (turns out it did). We’ll write more on the book itself when it comes out next month.

Anyway, in an interview in the Home & Garden section of the New York Times, Glenn talks about the project and explains why he actually doesn’t have an abundance of objects, significant or otherwise, lying around his house (and he’d have a convenient excuse, as he and his editing partner raided flea markets and charity shops for the Significant Objects project): “I’ve been reading way too many women’s magazines for a client. And I think this is what they’re saying: ‘Stress causes cancer. Clutter causes stress.’ So, basically, clutter causes cancer.”

So that was a little tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but therapists and the Wall Street Journal have his back. According to a recent article, clutter is as common a marriage issue as sex or finances, but it’s just not talked about as much because people feel silly or petty bringing it up. Because, really, how do you tell someone that their overflowing in-box or their sprawling collection of nodding dogs is a threat to your marriage? (Okay, maybe the latter should be a given.)

Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered

In my senior year of high school, I (Lo) read “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty”, the first in a three-book series by vampire-genre goddess Anne Rice (who was a fave of mine at the time) writing under the pen name “A. N. Roquelaure.” Except instead of vampires, she was playing around with fairy tale characters in a crazy BDSM world with bondage, whips, suspension, sticky-itchy honey-glazes on genitals, you name it! Her Beauty trilogy from over 25 years ago was the original “Fifty Shades of Grey” series, filled with kinky sex on almost every page — except Rice’s was actually well written and, if memory serves me correctly, a lot more hardcore.

Penguin Plume has just reissued the series with new covers and a new preface from Rice, in which she kind of can’t help but point out how she was here first, satisfying the dark fantasies of women long before Christian murmured ”Come for me, baby” and Anastasia did as she was told (and really, who can blame Rice). But my favorite parts of the new preface involve Rice defending the sexuality, sexual fantasies, and sexual agency of women:

As a feminist, I’m very much supportive of equal rights for women in all walks of life. And that includes for me the right of every woman to write out her sexual fantasies and to read books filled with sexual fantasies that she enjoys. Men have always enjoyed all kinds of pornography. How can it be wrong for women to have the same right? We’re sexual beings! And fantasy is where we can do the things we can’t do in ordinary life. A woman has a right to imagine herself carried away by a handsome prince, and to choose for herself as she writes, the color of his hair and eyes, and imagine his silky voice. She has a right to make him as tall as she wants and as strong as he wants. Why not? Men have always allowed themselves such fantasies….

People are much more comfortable today admitting and talking about what they enjoy in fiction and film. Much more. People are “out of the closet” about sexuality, period. The whole world knows women are sensual human beings as well as men. It’s no secret anymore that women want to read sexy fiction just as men do, and there’s a new frankness about the varieties of fantasies one might enjoy. So many clichés have been broken and abandoned. And this is a wonderful thing.

The image below is me (in my Annie Hall hat) posing for my high school yearbook editors photo on the steps of the New York Public Library — the theme of our yearbook that year was the written word, so all of us editors used our favorite books or whatever we were reading at the time as props. The original paperback cover of “The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty” back then was a lot more subtle, despite the naked lady in a blindfold; it gave the impression of matoore litooratoore. Speaking of, I also wrote an English paper my junior year in high school on D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover.” And I wonder how I ended up a sex writer.

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Is it possible that bad parenting could lead to bad sex? Could spoiled and selfish kids grow up to be spoiled and selfish bed partners? A recent article and book review in The New Yorker, “Why are American kids so spoiled?” got us thinking along these lines.

The basic question that journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wants to answer is, How did children become the miniature bosses of the household, doing nothing and expecting everything — even past college age. Kolbert talks about “a generation of kids who can’t, or at least won’t, tie their own shoes,” and how this has given rise to a new genre of parenting books — The Price of Privilege, The Narcissism Epidemic, etc. The latest title in this field is Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest. Author Sally Koslow writes, “Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and over investment. … [They inhabit] a broad savannah of entitlement that we’ve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain.” Her advice?  ”The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father.”

For the record, neither Kolbert nor Koslow talk about what kind of adult sex partners these children — or overgrown children — turn out to be. But we can’t stop thinking about it. That guy who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his parents’ money to get a college degree then returns home to his childhood bedroom so he can sit on his parents’ couch and drink their beer… How much do you want to bet he’s not exactly the first to offer cunnilingus?

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To quote Woody Allen, “Pizza is a lot like sex. When it’s good, it’s really good. When it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.” Writer John Banville (he won the Booker Prize for his awesomely beautiful and lyrical novel The Sea back in 2005) would agree. And he goes one step further, saying that because of this, it’s impossible to write well about sex. Meaning: because men, at least, tend to enjoy most sex, no matter how bad it is, there is this inherent disconnect: they can’t write about it because they have no idea what just happened. Was it good, was it bad, was it the same-old-thing, was it earth-shattering? All they know is that they had an orgasm and it felt pretty cool. And as Tolstoy didn’t really say, good sex is all alike; all bad sex is bad in its own way. The latter is worth reading about; the former is just bad erotica.

“I am never quite sure what bad sex is,” Banville said in an interview with the U.K. newspaper The Telegraph. “I am not sure I that have ever any bad sex. It has always seemed to me wonderful. I always felt incredibly lucky that a woman would consent to engage with me in this extraordinary act.” He goes onto say, “What people feel they are doing is so discontinuous with what they are actually doing… The spectacle of sex is never very dignified, but when you are engaged in it it seems transcendently sublime.” Okay, so maybe the man can’t write sex scenes, but clearly he’s pretty freakin’ eloquent on the topic of sex! Man, we wish he’d at least try to write about sex.

So what do you think: Do women write better sex scenes than men? Does bad sex make for better writing than good sex? And what are some of your favorite sex scenes in literature?

Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered