Books
Movies
Top 10 Reasons Why SECRETARY Is Better Than FIFTY SHADES

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 […]

Pop Culture
How Strangers Reached Out to Help One Lonely Guy

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. . . […]

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 […]

Movies
How Technology Fixes 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 […]

News
It’s Not You, It’s Your Clutter

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 […]

Pop Culture
The Original “Fifty Shades of Grey”

In my senior year of high school, I 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 […]

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 […]

Celebrities
25, a New Erotic-Fashion Mag

Model Anja Rubik’s new editorial endeavor just launched: 25 Magazine is a high-end fashion magazine, out biannually, that’s dedicated to the erotic perspective of women. In an interview with New York magazine, Rubik explained the sex concept: It was bothering me how the world is nowadays – how we approach nudity and sexuality and beauty. I thought it was […]

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, […]

Pop Culture
A New Look for Lolita

Lolita, such a great book. So deserving of a great cover. One blogger held a contest. Now it’s being turned into a book, with designs from both contest entrants and solicited pieces by well-known designers. Read the rest of this post on SUNfiltered  

Pop Culture
Our Friend’s Great New Sex Manual, “Great in Bed”

The other night, we went to the book launch party for the new sex manual, “Great in Bed,” at the SoHo Babeland in NYC. It had been years since we’d seen our old friend and former coworker, Grant Stoddard, but he was his typical funny, charming self as he and his co-author — Kinsey sex researcher Debby Herbenick, PhD — […]

Memes
Top 10 Dirtier Books

photo via Flickr A few weeks back we jumped on the Twitter hashtag #lessambitiousbooks bandwagon, with a list of our Top 10 Less Ambitious Sex Books (The Joy of Dry Humping, Slight Hangup About Flying, etc.). This time around we figured we’d create our own damn hashtag — #dirtierbooks — so that nobody could accuse […]

Movies
The Slow But (Hopefully) Steady Erosion of Gender Stereotypes

Stop the presses! A detergent commercial with just a normal dad doing laundry. For our book club, we’re reading the 2003 novel “We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver.* I, Lo, knowing nothing about the book or its author, began reading and was amazed that a male author could create a female narrator that […]

Pop Culture
Fucking James Franco

photo via Flickr Kickstarter.com is a funding platform for music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative projects. If a project doesn’t reach its stated funding goal before time runs out, no money changes hands. One art project that just met its $2000 goal before its closing date this coming Saturday thanks to over 100 backers is “Fucking James Franco,” a […]