Mr. Pinup

If you think sex in the 21st century sucks, just be glad you don’t live in one of these scifi dystopias. When Big Brother is a peeping Tom and three-penised mutants are eligible bachelors, getting off is a turn-off.

Science fiction is filled with examples of folks who can’t get laid without total weirdness transpiring. We’ve divvied these themes into five categories, and here are some of our favorite post-eroticapocalyptic worlds.

via Screwtopia! The 5 Types Of Erotic Dystopia In Science Fiction – Romance 3000 – io9.

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June 18, 2009 | “I remember the moment I first became aware of aging,” says the novelist Kate Christensen, now 46, at a rooftop cafe near her house in Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I was 30. I looked down at my knees and the skin above them had become a little loose. And I thought, ‘And so it begins’!”

Probably the swiftest way to trivialize the work of a woman writer is to make a big to-do about how sexy she is in person. But Christensen, wearing no make-up and a fitted gray dress, has the easy and direct confidence of a person who feels good in her own skin. Her last novel, “The Great Man” (which won the PEN/Faulkner award), was about three women in their 70s and 80s — two widows and an embittered lesbian painter — who rediscover love, lust and ambition after the death of the “great man,” an artist who had always towered over them all.

In her latest, novel, “Trouble,” two college best friends in their mid-40s, Josie, a Manhattan psychotherapist, and Raquel, an indie rock star, meet up in Mexico City for a “Thelmita and Luisa”-style adventure. Josie has just informed her professor husband, Anthony, and her adopted daughter, Wendy, that she is moving out. Raquel is hiding out from the paparazzi (her most virulent pursuer is a Latina lesbian blogger known as Mina Boriqua) after having been vilified for dating an HBO star half her age, who also happens to have a pregnant girlfriend. The two spend five days in Mexico drinking sangrita and mescal, eating chorizo tacos and chilaquiles, hanging out with artists, and getting reacquainted with a new adult version of their younger selves. But while Josie is coming out of hibernation and reclaiming a sexuality she didn’t feel in her 20s, she doesn’t realize that Raquel may be going in a very different direction.

via Sex and the (fortysomething) single girl | Salon Books.

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• Anxious, Critically-Panned Manhattanite Wins PEN/Faulker Award [Struggling Writers] (gawker.com)

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: June 17, 2009

Gloria Vanderbilt’s new novel, “Obsession: An Erotic Tale,” which comes out next week, may be the steamiest book ever written by an octogenarian. And it’s one of very few volumes to arrive on the sex-book shelf accompanied by a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates, who calls it, “a remarkable tapestry of human passion — an interior world of highly charged erotic mysteries that teasingly suggest, but ever elude, decoding.”

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Gloria Vanderbilt, heiress and author.

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Little Gloria Was Happy Here (April 16, 2009)

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In other words, it’s not always clear what’s going on. “Obsession,” published by Ecco, is the story of Priscilla Bingham, the widow of a Frank Lloyd Wright-like architect who, after his death, discovers a cache of letters, wrapped in magenta grosgrain ribbon, revealing in considerable detail his secret, kinky sex life. The author of these letters is Bee, a mysterious woman who may be a figment of Priscilla’s imagination, or possibly Priscilla is a figment of Bee’s. Either way, the letters don’t leave much out.

“Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O,” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter,” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

via At 85, Gloria Vanderbilt Writes ‘Obsession,’ a Novel of Sex, Masks and More – NYTimes.com.

An adventurous English friend named Belinda, searching some years ago for sensual ecstasy in the East, once described finding a special salon in upcountry Thailand, where she was invited to allow herself to be restrained quite naked on a cedar table and have three young female attendants gently apply a sweet-smelling unguent to her more delicate parts. The trio silently withdrew, bidding my friend to keep still. Seconds later she heard a door slide open, then a rushing sound, and felt the air itself throbbing with movement. She was then swiftly overcome by pleasing physical sensations of an almost unbearable intensity.

She lifted her head slightly, and was just able to see why: portions of her body had become suddenly covered with thousands upon thousands of brilliantly colored captive butterflies. All of them were engaged in licking away the ointment with what felt, as she later said dreamily, like a million tiny tongues.

Things like this just don’t seem to happen in Dubuque or Stow-on-the-Wold. And as Richard Bernstein suggests in his provocative and intriguing book “The East, the West, and Sex,” it is tales like this that over the years have helped construct today’s notion of the East as a sensual and sexual paradise. Tales of the odalisque, the harem, the seraglio, the concubine, the geisha and the Kama Sutra have all become combined in the past century or so into a sweetly perfumed mélange of exoticism and eroticism, presenting “the Orient” as a realm of languor and loucheness, where concupiscent curds run in the streets and nostalgie de la boue is perfectly de rigueur.

via Books of The Times – Exploring Lands of Erotic Fantasy and Their Reality in ‘The East, the West, and Sex,’ by Richard Bernstein – Review – NYTimes.com.

Two of Gay Talese’s favorite books are at last back in print: “Honor Thy Father,” his 1971 study of the Bonanno crime family, and “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” his 1980 report about the sexual revolution. On Tuesday HarperCollins reissued both in trade paperback, with retro-looking black-and-white covers and new introductions (Pete Hamill for “Honor Thy Father” and Katie Roiphe for “Thy Neighbor’s Wife”). And for each book Mr. Talese has added a lengthy afterword updating the story.

“If you put as long into a book as I do, and then it’s out of print, it’s like all that time has been removed from you, and you don’t get any younger” Mr. Talese, who is now 77, said on Monday.

“Honor Thy Father” took almost seven years to write, he added, and “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” took nine. Part of why both books dragged on so long is that Mr. Talese, who once worked for The New York Times, is a perfectionist, an obsessive tinkerer and rewriter, and also a famously meticulous reporter and researcher who spurns devices like composite characters and faked identities. To write “Honor Thy Father,” he even moved in for a while with Bill Bonanno, who rose to the position of consigliere in his father’s empire, and while working on “Thy Neighbor’s Wife” he managed a couple of New York massage parlors and did a stint at a nudist swingers club in California. At the time not only his critics but even his wife questioned whether all this sex research was strictly necessary.

via Sex and Crime, Updated – Gay Talese Is Back on the Beat – NYTimes.com.