Writers
News
Do Spoiled Children Grow Up to Be Bad Sex Partners?

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 […]

Pop Culture
Is Sex Impossible to Capture on Paper?

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 […]

Pop Culture
What We Talk About When We Talk About “Fifty Shades of Grey”

This may be sacrilege to say, but we can’t seem to muster any interest in reading the new, best-selling erotica novel that everyone’s talking about, Fifty Shades of Grey. After all, even the author admits that it’s not that good! For SM erotica, we’d rather stick with a classic like Story of O. Yeah, yeah, […]

News
What If Your Sex Ed Teacher Wanted You to Enjoy Sex?

photo via NYTimes.com We were big fans of Laurie Abraham’s even before she stopped by our book club recently and drank red wine with us while we interrogated her about her book, The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples’ Therapy Group. She’s a smart and thoughtful (and funny) writer […]

Personal Essays
Confession: Top 10 Worst Things About Studying Sexuality in College

Our contributor Abby Spector, who is majoring in Feminist/Gender/Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University, confesses the downside of her chosen field: Picture this: it’s a Sunday night. You’re lonely. However, instead of watching romantic comedies and listening to Joni Mitchell, you have to read about the beauty of the female orgasm. Reading about great sex is […]

Vids
Genesis Finally Makes Sense

Writer/performer/artist Merrill Markoe visited the Creation Museum in Kentucky last year and absorbed all the “proof” there that the world was created just 6,000 years ago and that dinosaurs walked among humans. As if through divine intervention, it suddenly, recently dawned on Markoe how to help the museum make their case. So she created this […]

Pop Culture
Books – Affection: A Memoir About Sex Addiction and Monogamy

Affection: An Erotic Memoir by Krissy Kneen is a story of compulsive sexual exploration, sex addiction — and, ultimately, blissful, married monogamy. Australian author Kneen was raised by a group of protective and eccentric women who forbade any and every expression of sexuality… and we all know where that leads. We chatted to Kneen about […]

Research
How to Study Sex Without Being a Sucker

image by Caveman_92223 As regular readers of this blog will know, one of our pet peeves is when scientific research about sex and love gets twisted and “re-interpreted” and boiled down and sexed up to make a juicy magazine or newspaper headline. (And yes, we have definitely been guilty of this tendency ourselves, at times. […]

Pop Culture
Books: Our Bodies, Our Junk

You wait your whole life for a book making fun of hippie seventies sex manuals and then, boom, two come along in a month — what are the odds? But only one of them includes the top five pastry-related euphemisms for female genitalia, and only one of them includes a suggested list of effective safe […]

How To
How to Pitch a Sex Story

Media Bistro recently asked for our input on their advice piece, “How to Tell Sex Stories” — it’s part of their “How to Pitch” series (pretty handy for freelance writers who sign up for membership). They talked to many sex and relationship writers and editors, so there just wasn’t room for a lot of our […]

Pop Culture
10 Reasons Why We Love Samantha Bee

She posed in a bee costume for the cover of her new memoir, i know i am, but what are you? And still manages to look kinda hot in it. She’s a fan of pubic hair. “Our body looks weird without it,” she told The Frisky. “Vaginas don’t look that nice to me without it. […]

Pop Culture
Books: Every Rose Has Its Thorn

We really should have some kind of back-stabbing, cat-fighting (or at least pillow-fighting) relationship with Erin Bradley — author of the new book Every Rose Has Its Thorn: The Rock ‘n’ Roll Field Guide to Guys — seeing as she picked up where we left off at Nerve.com. She’s been their advice lady now for […]

Pop Culture
Books: You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up

When we reviewed the book The Husbands and Wives Club: A Year in the Life of a Couples Therapy Group a few weeks back, we wrote: “Here are five couples who reject — albeit under the firm hand of a skilled therapist — the notion that there are only two acceptable narratives when it comes […]

Books
Everything You Wanted to Know About Marriage But Were Afraid to Ask

Neither one of us ever read Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love (soon to be a movie starring Julia Roberts) — we were both faintly annoyed by the idea of being along for the ride while some over-analytical divorcee worked through her problems on paper. But then Curtis Sittenfeld’s review of Gilbert’s Committed: A […]

Pop Culture
Katie Roiphe Vs. Steve Almond

Last Sunday, in a big NYTimes think piece, sexual mores writer Katie Roiphe accused Dave Eggers and his fellow male American literary contemporaries of being too into cuddling. It sounded pretty. And it’s hard to resist the compulsion to bow down to the almighty New York Time Book Review and just assume it’s not quite […]

Pop Culture
Jonathan Littell Beats Off Stiff Competition at Bad Sex Awards

The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell Turns out we were wrong in our Roth prediction — this year’s Bad Sex Award ended up going to Jonathan Littell for his novel The Kindly Ones. Other fancy-pants runners up included Paul Theroux, Nick Cave, Amos Oz, and John Banville. The judges said very nice things about Littell’s […]