Books
Books
The Guardian Picks the 10 Best Sex Guides Ever (Guess What’s #10?)

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 […]

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 […]

Toys
KEGEL WEEK: “Fifty Shades of Grey” Spikes Sales of LELO’s Luna Beads

  “Trust me?” he asks softly. I nod. He holds out his hand, and in his palm are two round, shiny, silver balls, linked with a thick black thread. “These are new,” he says emphatically. I look questioningly up at him. “I am going to put these inside of you, and then I’m going to […]

How To
KEGEL WEEK: An Introduction to Your Pelvic Floor Muscles (Meet Mr. Kegel)

  The following is excerpted from our first sex manual, The Big Bang: We don’t care if you’ve never been to a gym in your life; you simply must work out your pelvic muscles if you want to consider yourself sexually fit. Don’t worry, you won’t break a sweat. You can even start working them […]

Toys
50 Shades of Play: A Guide to the Toys in “Fifty Shades of Grey”

Say what you will about the literary merit of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, but you can’t deny the sexual curiosity they’ve ignited, the sexual knowledge they’ve imparted and the sexual delight they’ve given, where most readers are concerned. The result has been a boon for the sex toy industry, thanks to all […]

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 […]

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, […]

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
Top 10 Less Ambitious Sex Books

photo via flickr We’re suckers for a good Twitter hashtag — they can make everyone feel like a stand-up comedian for a few minutes (not to mention giving us all a break from reading what our colleagues ate for breakfast). We particularly loved the #lessambitiousbooks hashtag that was trending this week, and of course we […]