Sex
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Magic Gardens: The Rumpus Interview With Viva Las Vegas
Viva Las Vegas’ saucy new memoir Magic Gardens is about stripping in Portland, Oregon during the 90’s when the “stripping as performance art” trend was taking hold and pro-porn feminism was a fledgling idea.
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“I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.”
Supportive moms, special dances, harassment, unprepared school admins, gay straight alliance groups, and living a life “nearly incomprehensible to earlier generations of gay youth.” Benoit Denizet-Lewis, author of America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life, explores the world…
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Sex, Death, Facebook
I do not know this boy. He’s a friend of a Facebook friend—some girl I hated in high school, and friended so I could see how wrong her life had gone.
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Recession Sex Workers #3: The Passion of Apollo
The third in our series of interviews focusing on sex work during the recession.
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Because It’s Their Work
Last week I was reading a review by Arvan Reese of two films, Hot & Bothered and Bill & Desiree, on a website called SexGenderBody. I found the review via @TonyComstock, who made the latter film — which I’m sure is great! — but…
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Kubrick’s 1961 Lolita is the First 70s Movie
The other day I read a rambling but entertaining essay over on Bright Lights Film Journal, called All Tomorrow’s Playground Narratives, which analyzed Kubrick’s Lolita in terms of — well, approximately anything that occurred to the guy, it would seem.…
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Recession Sex Workers #2: Mandy Morbid’s Sex and Death Funhouse
I met Mandy Morbid while working at Cheetahs in Hollywood, a bikini bar that attracts broke slackers with a soft spot for suicide girls and strippers who don’t think they’re strippers.
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“The Sexualization of Violence” and Comic-Con
There’s no easier way to recruit a legion of mortal enemies than to say something unflattering about the culture of comic books, but I’ve decided that I have nothing to lose today. Well, maybe I have something to lose, because…
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Women’s Growing Love of Porn Is Changing the Market
“When everyone tells you that what you might be curious about, or even secretly like, is wrong, bad, sleazy, and shameful, you don’t have to cast a line very far to land a set of inhibitions.” So writes author and…
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Audacia Ray’s New Reading Series
Audacia Ray is an admirably prolific activist, author, blogger, director and producer. She was formerly Executive Editor at $pread Magazine, co-founded the Sex Work Awareness advocacy organization, is Program Officer for the Online Communications and Campaigns division of the International…
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Wallace Shawn On Writing About Sex
“Various people who have liked me or cared about me — people who have believed in my promise as a writer — have hinted to me at various times in my life that an excessive preoccupation with the subject of…
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David Cronenberg’s First Feature Film
I watch movies so people will show me the things that make me flinch, question myself, curse the heavens, and want to enroll in primal scream therapy. I don’t think I read for the same reasons. But movies, I feel,…