Writers
Pop Culture
Movie Critic Debbie Edelstein’s Review of This Summer’s New “Spider-Man”

What a critique of a summer superhero blockbuster might look like in a matriarchal world (inspired by David Edelstein’s sexist review of Wonder Woman): The only grace note in the generally clunky Spider-Man: Homecoming is its star, the five-foot-eight-inch, barely legal, English actor and dancer Tom Holland, who is the perfect blend of teenage day-dreaminess and balls. The 21-year-old […]

Celebrities
“Cult” Not “Author” Is the JT LeRoy Documentary You Should Watch

Laura Albert is pretending to be someone she’s not. Again. Or maybe she’s telling the truth this time. That’s the problem when someone lies so much to so many people: when should we start believing their stories about wolves? You probably know Albert better as JT LeRoy, the abused, abandoned, HIV-positive, gender-bending, teenaged, trick-turning, literary […]

Sex Poetry
Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Underwater Exploration of Androgynous Bisexuality

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was one of the best known, most beloved American poets of the second half of the 20th century. And “Diving into the Wreck” is one of her best known, most beloved poems. In 1973, Erica “Zipless Fuck” Jong analyzed it beautifully for Ms. Magazine: In “Diving into the Wreck,” the title poem, it is the […]

Sex Poetry
The Softer Side of Pushkin Poetry

Not only was Alexander Pushkin the father of Russian literature, he was also a very naughty boy. In the early 1800s, he wrote plays, poetry, novels, essays and also incredibly dirty erotica. In fact, in 2005 some of his adult verses were seized in a crackdown on obscene materials near Moscow. And in 2014, a Russian […]

Sex Poetry
Poem About Early 20th-Century Casual Sex by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in 1892, was only the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (in 1923), and she is famous both for her feminist activism and also for her bisexuality and open marriage: her husband of twenty-six years was a self-proclaimed feminist who took on most domestic responsibilities so she […]

Pop Culture
5 Reasons Why You Should Read “I Take You” by Eliza Kennedy

Have you met Lily Wilder? You should. She’s the seriously funny, seriously sex-driven, and seriously flawed protagonist of the novel I Take You by Eliza Kennedy, which is on sale starting today. Here are five reasons why you should pick up a copy right now… 1. I Take You is a straightforward look at female […]

Pop Culture
Sexing Up National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, which means that children across the nation will be forced to pen odes to the color grey, or to their pet, or to some other assuredly G-rated subject. Here at EMandLO.com, we prefer to steam up the windows a bit during National Poetry Month. Sure, poetry can rhyme, it can […]

Pop Culture
R.I.P. Günter Grass: A (Sexy) Excerpt from “The Tin Drum”

photo via Wikimedia Commons The German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass died yesterday at the age of 87. According to the New York Times, “He was a pre-eminent public intellectual who had pushed Germans to confront the ugly aspects of their history. … Many called [him] his country’s moral conscience but [he] stunned Europe when he revealed […]

Pop Culture
Erotic Deathmatch: Fifty Shades of Grey vs. 150 Shades of Play

This is the face the other Jamie makes when judging our book better than the one his movie is based on Jamie Maclean is the founder and editor of the Erotic Review Magazine, an intelligent and artsy London-based website dedicated to sex (and NOT the US-based Yelp for escorts of a similar name). So how could we […]

News
Em & Lo Named Among the Best 15 Sexperts of 2015!

  Yes, we just referred to ourselves in the third person. We can do that now, because apparently we’re officially among the Top 15 Sexperts of the Year! (And we’re only 14 days into it!) We’re rubbing virtual elbows with the likes of Dr. Ruth, along with long-time friends and respected colleagues Jamye Waxman and […]

Pop Culture
The Best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Love and Sex

photo via Wiki Commons Colombian novelist and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez died yesterday at the very respectable — but still heartbreaking, to his fans everywhere — age of 87. He is irreplaceable as a writer. In addition to bringing magical realism to the masses, he practically invented a new language for talking about love and sex […]

News
10 Things We Didn’t Know About Dr. Ruth

Photo via Dr.Ruth.com The article in the New York Times‘ Real Estate section this past weekend about Dr. Ruth’s three-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights proved her home to be exactly the sort of kooky, over-cluttered place that we’d expect from an 85-year-old, four-foot-seven woman who talks about sex for a living. But here are ten […]

Pop Culture
Kinky Poem of the Week: The World’s Guide to Beginning

You may recall that a month or so back, we were in New York City to receive an IPPY Award for our latest book, 150 Shades of Play: A Beginner’s Guide to Kink. While there, we met  Marty McConnell, silver medalist in the poetry category for her collection Wine for a Shotgun. When the poetry winners were each […]

Pop Culture
What We’re Reading: “Her” by Christa Parravani

Even if Christa Parravani wasn’t a friend of ours, we would be insisting that you check out her brand new memoir Her. It’s the heartbreaking, beautiful, compelling, and ultimately uplifting story of what happens when someone loses their identical twin. After Christa’s sister Cara was brutally raped at age 24 and a few years later […]

Pop Culture
Fifty Shades Parody Tells of Dungeons… and Dragons

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 […]

Pop Culture
Significant Objects Book Tells Stories About Thrift Store Junk

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 […]