Four
I take a walk through Amsterdam’s largest and most famous red-light district, De Wallen. Barkers standing in doorways beckon to the passersby. “Don’t be afraid of sex, girls. Sex is good,” they say to me and my female traveling companion as we begin to minimize the distance between our bodies and the red-fringed windows where women dance provocatively, silently inviting us indoors from behind the floor-length, neon-lit glass panes. The whole street seems to glow as if the colorless, inert gas of the neon signs has become unfixed, intermingling and intensifying as it meets the unraveling knots of anticipation, nervousness, arousal, and titillation emanating from bodies searching for sensation, photographic souvenirs, or giggles and something to gawk and point at. It almost seems cruel to walk down the street and not duck into someone’s door for service. Otherwise it begins to feel like a menagerie, window shopping, museumgoing. The exotic and the forbidden are on display here at an affordable cost, the neon glow seems to suggest. And you can touch.
The red and pink glow of neon in Amsterdam’s red-light district, or as locals call it “Rosse Buurt,” is a kind of antiwarning sign; it inspires or stirs within the beholder a culturally determined message about sexual labor, pleasure, and, in the instance of the foreign-driven market for sex work, an active and embodied form of sex tourism. As a young woman on her first trip abroad, I was more frightened than enticed by the barkers’ words, and I remember wanting to run, feeling overwhelmed by the lights, the words, the women, and what seemed to me the rift between what I then imagined to be my naive, respectable self and what the women performing their eroticism were inviting me to feel and do.
A visit to the De Wallen red-light district has become a must-see on any global tourist’s itinerary in Amsterdam. My desire to walk through the Rosse Buurt area in 1999 overlaps with the motivations of other tourists. Spurred by Amsterdam’s post-1960s reputation in the global imaginary as a site of sexual freedom and drug consumption, the curious window shopper goes to ogle and even take pictures almost out of a sense of obligation but rarely buys the sex for sale. Or expecting a cheap thrill—the thrill of scholarly distance—the amateur researcher, flaneur-like in her meanderings, takes a jaunt down the famous red-light district to get a holistic perspective of urban Amsterdam.1 Both of these tourist experiences can end unexpectedly; anticipating a privileged vantage point with which to survey, witness, and shop for sex, many tourists instead wind up feeling barraged by the incessant sales pitches of the sex barkers or by the women who hover near doorways and who, during the day or slow evenings, assertively call to pedestrians who clutch their guidebooks and cameras in their hands. Amsterdam’s red-light district has all the trappings of active sex tourism, a form of leisure travel that includes the pursuit and purchase of sexual entertainment and services, but, especially in the aftermath of Amsterdam’s conservative city government and its regulation of sexual labor, tourist jaunts through the district have become more akin to other forms of tourism such as museumgoing.2 The ethical and political concerns over each kind of tourist practice thus intertwine as travelers make the frequent decision to walk the De Wallen.
Sex tourism is a form of international commerce spurred by globalization, the consolidation of the city as a site where local tourist market and global economic forces intertwine, and the rise in transnational flows of people and things across national borders. As Thanh-Dam Truong has pointed out, sex tourism is a “marginalized form of commodization (sexual services) within a national industry (entertainment), especially dependent on, but with a dynamic function in, an international industry (tourism).”3 The passive practice of looking that dominates international tourist performances in the De Wallen district continues at other nearby sex industry sites in Amsterdam. Only a few blocks away on busy Damrak Street, and just in front of the Central Station, visitors to the Venustempel sex museum (Amsterdam’s Venus Temple) could pass an afternoon viewing its vast collection of sex objects while automated voices whisper naughty words, erect members emerge with the pull of a lever, and mannequins shoot their excitement at oncoming tourists in this fun-house atmosphere. They can even see an intricate model of the red-light district they may have just experienced in the flesh. Or they need not even venture outside the red-light district to participate in their voyeuristic performances: Amsterdam has two sex museums, and the second, lesser known and smaller, is located right in the heart of De Wallen.4
Amsterdam’s shift from tourism directed toward cultural heritage sites, such as the Anne Frank house or the Rijksmuseum, to the sites that make up what Elizabeth Bernstein has called postindustrial sexual commerce is a phenomenon unique to this urban locale.5 Yet attractions that advertise some sexual component increasingly play a critical role in the inflow of tourist dollars to all global cities, international and urban locations where globalized capitalism determined the development of consumption and the rise of certain commodity forms.6 When local or international tourists imagine going out for sex in these global cities, they most often conjure scenes of bars, sex clubs, sex shops, strip clubs, bathhouses, or rent-by-hour motels. Yet in the past twenty years there is a burgeoning institution in the world, a group of museums explicitly called sex museums, where people can imagine and perform their relationship to sexuality, not only with their bodies, but also in relationship to knowledge. In contrast to other cultural sites where a more interactive variety of sex happens, sex museums bracket a less dramatic experience of encounter with sex objects.
This chapter points toward an otherwise unacknowledged form of sex tourism that confirms the ever-growing reach of the sex marketplace as an economy that seizes on local, national, and international travelers’ desires to include some component of sex in their sightseeing itinerary. Even museums, sites often regarded as nonsexual, want to get in on the action. In the first half of this book, I showed how nearly all museums are and always have been sex museums insofar as they have historically used the allure of sex to market themselves as sites of leisure. In the late twentieth century, sex museums emerged and further illuminated how sex has always been used, albeit implicitly, to market museums as tourist destinations. In other words, sex museums render explicit more than just the sexual. I want to propose that we view sex museums as an extension of postindustrial sexual commerce that, like De Wallen, sometimes includes embodied pleasures but more often caters to a voyeuristic kind of sightseeing. Moreover, sex museums show us how sex and money constitute the architecture of many unexpected urban spaces that go beyond the ones locally marked or governmentally regulated as pleasure zones. In addition to what they display, the strategies that sex museum planners have used to carve out this niche market in the postindustrial sex industry demonstrate how specific kinds of sex permeate the public sphere in ways particular to late capitalism. This chapter exposes some of these strategies by examining the cultural histories of two sex museums in the United States—the Museum of Sex (MoSex) in New York and the World Erotic Art Museum (WEAM)—and pays specific attention to how their owners—Daniel Gluck and Naomi Wilzig—worked both with and against more intelligible forms of sexual commerce to keep their sex museum doors open.
Nevertheless, while sex museums collect and display pornography, they are rarely pornographic. The pornographic, as Linda Williams has defined it, describes a thing that is thought to inspire an on-the-spot mimetic performance of pleasure. It is, according to Williams, pornography’s tacit invitation to the viewer to mimic with the body that which the body is watching onscreen that exceeds the classical, linear, and realist style of most narrative cinema.7 This potential to exact from viewers the thing it shows pushes porn, melodrama, and horror into maligned or inferior categories of cinema. Museum displays of sex, whether deemed pornographic or not, are also maligned for their potential to elicit mimetic performances from museum visitors within a location that has a conflicted relationship to embodiment. Sex museums, as intellectual projects, tourist destinations, and businesses, seek to avoid the internal and external pressures that place limits or requirements on sexual display. Instead, they complicate normative tourist performances in museums by playing with the embodied potentials of showing sex. At their best, they perform a similar sort of “tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality”8 that plays out in museums that house temporary, sex-themed exhibitions. By simultaneously existing within a museum-tourism market and a sex-in-tourism global market, both of which encapsulate a well-known set of tourist behaviors that are particular to each market and that have historically been disaggregated from each other,9 sex museums intend to foster permanent public spaces for sexual exploration and construct what Victor Turner has described as a “meta-theater,” or “an interpretive reenactment of its experience.”10
Museumgoing, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has noted, is generally regarded as a form of “passive tourism” that emulates rather than replicates the embodied experience of travel.11 For her, museums bring the world to its audiences, rendering the building and each gallery into surrogate destinations for the real thing or a simulacrum for actual embodied experience. On the one hand, sex museums can be viewed as sites of passive sex tourism where visitors encounter a simulated experience of sex when they brush up against the traces of embodied, ephemeral, and erotic performances embedded in objects carefully curated in controlled and regulated environments. As public entertainment businesses, sex museums also combine traditional museum pedagogies with ludic recreation to redefine what sex means, and, in so doing, they redefine what it means to pursue sex as a leisure or tourist activity. On the other hand, they prompt a revision of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s concept of museumgoing as a performance of passive tourism. Sex museums, like Venustempel but also the other for-profit museums I discuss in this chapter (MoSex and WEAM), capitalize on the fleshiness of their subject matter to blur the lines between active and passive sex tourism. I want to mine the protean conceptual notion of sex tourism already in circulation by transnational sexuality scholars to show how sex museums figure into the sexual economy of the global city and into the paradigm of postindustrial sexual commerce, not necessarily or only as simulacra or surrogates for embodied sexual experience, but as another discrete but related version of sexual consumption that markets itself as a site for satiating the intellectual and embodied desires of tourists for sex.
But, while tourism is a form of leisure activity influenced by globalization and the marketing of global cities, it is also a complicated and heterogeneous form of embodied performance in which people “are at work making meaning, situating themselves in relation to public spectacle and making a biography that provides some coherency between self and world.”12 In line with performance theorists who have taken a dramaturgical approach to tourism studies to look at tourism as a performance and at display as a theatrical contact zone, I theorize, like Michael Bowman, that sex museum tourism “isn’t merely like a performance; it is a performance insofar as the sight/site is often composed of live bodies engaged in acts of ‘restoring behavior’ that are put on display for the tourists’ consumption.”13 In sex museums, as in most museums and tourist destinations, the spectator is not engaged in a passive performance of sightseeing. Rather, sex museum tourists are more like what Augusto Boal called “spec-actors”: they not only consume meaning; they are part of making and shaping the meaning of that which they consume.14
Tourists actively perform and make meaning in all kinds of tourism destinations, including sex museums. They do so not only on-site but also through what they bring to the travel destination: the horizon of expectations for what they encounter there and how they will feel about it. As is the case in all kinds of tourism, sex museum tourism incorporates “the cultural experiences . . . consumed in terms of prior knowledge, expectations, fantasies, and mythologies generated in the tourist’s origin culture, rather than by the cultural offerings of the destination.”15 Sex museum tourism as a sex-in-tourism experience shares essential components relevant to tourism studies such as advertising and publicity, real estate location, the tourist’s gaze, the privileged desire of those with means to travel, and the making of cultural otherness. Nevertheless, it is a tricky kind of sex-in-tourism experience that exists somewhere in the liminal space between passive and active sexual relations. Sex museum tourism more accurately describes a kind of tourism where everyday people decide (spontaneously or premeditatedly) to visit a sex museum amid their larger tourist itinerary. In sex museums, visitors pay to engage in a temporary relation with sex objects that supplements, rather than dominates, their tour of a city where they may or may not engage in other, more embodied forms of sex tourism.
For Profit
As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has argued, the global tourism industry is moving “from a product-driven approach to one that is market-led—and from creating an experience based on seeing to one based in doing.” This phenomenon places museums, so predicated on seeing, in the “rearguard of the industry.”16 For-profit museums, like sex museums, demonstrate an attempt to carve out an experience of doing within museum tourism that responds to this shift to a market-led approach in tourism as well as to changes in public prosex culture that have had a vast impact in the last four decades, including stimulating a conservative backlash.17 In this economic and political environment, the conventional mode of theorizing museumgoing as passive tourism requires rethinking. In the for-profit sex museum, a site that has one foot inside museum tourism and the other foot inside sex tourism, the tourist’s experience can become confused by the beholder’s own sexual desire and what she expects the sex museum to provide (one blogger to the New York Indian Community Guide went to the New York sex museum to add a “zing to the marriage” that would be “a little more sedate than a lap dance but a bit more stimulating than a Starbucks latte”).18 Spaces of live performance that are more explicitly interactive continue to do a better job of soliciting participation from patrons than sex museums. Yet these alternative sexual sites ask their publics to perform a variety of embodied and spatial adaptations that must occur in order to place sex—something both embodied and ephemeral—into the museum context.
Nevertheless, the inclusion of sex museums in the sex tourism industry is nothing new. Ever since the discovery of Pompeii and its sexual treasures, men of means on the Grand Tour flocked, as we have seen, to a special room—a secret museum—in the Museum Herculaneum in Portici to see amulets, lamps, plates, forks, and murals that depicted explicit and often humorous portrayals of sex.19 The Grand Tour became an obligatory ritual for young, elite European men and an educational rite of passage to manhood. In addition to the exposure to classical antiquity and polite society, sex tourism of many kinds was included in the standard itinerary. Tales of consumption and the purchase of “foreign” and “exotic” objects figured saliently in contemporary travel writing. The purchase and collection of exoticized bodies and things was built into the architecture of the Grand Tour, and a stop in Pompeii and the Museum Herculaneum was seen as essential to the journey.20 Men did not come to the Secret Museum to experience a sublimated or surrogate experience of sex; they came to learn about antiquity, and the arousal they may have felt there became a motivator that stimulated, not simulated, this form of learning. The burgeoning local city governments in charge of the objects’ upkeep and display charged a price to engage in this type of pedagogy. In other words, the motivating idea behind the 150-year-long obsession of young European men with all things Greco-Roman was sexual titillation. If the Grand Tour had not included this erotic component, neoclassicism, as we know it, would not have existed. Furthermore, the tremendous and ongoing influence of neoclassicism on art, literature, and politics would also have been diluted were it not for the Secret Museum at Naples. It was the pilgrimage to what was perhaps the first of all sex museums in the modern world that gave these Europeans a collective site for satiating their erotic desire for ancient sex objects.
Sex museums, then, have never completely fit squarely within a definition of museumgoing as an “as-if” experience, or what Steven Mullaney has called, in referring to Renaissance displays that functioned on the disappearance of what they showed, a rehearsal of culture.21 In one sense, sex museums can be viewed as rehearsals for more embodied versions of sexual experience, but, in another sense, the possibility for embodied interactions is always present and never disappeared. As in the Secret Museum, where men mingled with each other to fetishize sex objects, among them those that portrayed a different set of homoerotic norms, this activity could then inspire erotic experiences, such as paid and unpaid sex with locals.22 So too in today’s sex museums sexual performances of the live variety can and do happen, both inside and outside the museum. Going to a sex museum is an erotic experience in its own right.
While the Secret Museum was a lucrative business venture that successfully became a staple of the Grand Tour, sex museums today are part of the emerging for-profit museum market and are struggling to become must-see attractions. One of these museums, MoSex, bills itself as “the most stimulating museum in New York,” but it is only just beginning to make a profit. In the wake of former mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s efforts to clean up New York and the crippling effect these regulatory measures had on the vitality and safety of New York’s sexual urban cultures, there was much excited buzz about the opening of MoSex in 2002. The son of a Jewish refugee from Belgium and an Iraqi-born Israeli who settled in New York, the owner of MoSex, Daniel Gluck, used his training as a Wharton business school graduate and his experience as a successful software entrepreneur to found a museum that arose out of a brainstorming session with his colleagues in 1997.23 With the advice of these colleagues, Gluck decided to pursue MoSex as an ironic business solution that capitalized on Giuliani’s urban purification projects. He envisioned an anthropological and social history sex museum that he could differentiate from the erotic galleries and museums that had been part of Western European tourism since the Secret Museum.
MoSex is located at Twenty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, in the heart of what was once known as the Tenderloin District, a place of teeming sexual commerce. Today, depending on whom you ask, the area is called Koreatown (to those who continue to associate the area with the urban Korean business enclave) or the Flatiron District (to those with an investment in the gentrification of the area). The building that houses the museum was once a brothel known as the Reform Club.24 The area has become a rapidly gentrifying, commercialized hub just off the beaten track of tourists arriving from Penn Station and in walking distance from the now thoroughly Disneyfied Times Square.25 As a for-profit business that cannot seek aid from charitable government cultural programs, MoSex ironically became a potential site for replacing the sex tourism sites that formerly existed in the area.
“MoSmut.” That is what the director of the New York Catholic League, William Donahue (who was also instrumental in the censorship of Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly in 2010), unaffectionately called MoSex when it first opened in 2002. As with nearly all cases of individuals calling for censorship, Donahue never visited the museum before issuing his condemnation, which included his suggestion that MoSex include “a death chamber that would acknowledge all the wretched diseases that promiscuity has caused.” He continued:
Not for nothing has the New York State Board of Regents refused to recognize [MoSex’s] legitimacy, saying that its name makes “a mockery of museums.” We pointed out to the press that many of those who are either featured as heroes by the museum, or are in one way or another associated with it, exhibit pathological characteristics. Heroes include white racists (Margaret Sanger and Victoria Woodhull) and an advocate of man-boy sex (Al Goldstein). The historian advisory board includes a defender of sadomasochism (George Chauncey), an author who glamorizes prostitutes (Patricia Cline Cohen), a professor who argues that transvestites and “street queens” are pioneers (Martin Duberman), a scholar who has been implicated in research that gave pregnant women male hormones without their knowledge (June Reinisch) and a writer hailed as a “lesbian matriarch” (Joan Nestle). Those listed as “Friends” of the museum include pornographers (Betty Dodson, Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Vera), an ex-priest turned sexologist (Robert Francoeur), a minister who maintains that swinging is “family-forming behavior” (Ted McIlvenna) and an author whose understanding of the cultural corruption of Weimar Germany still allows him to defend decadence (Mel Gordon).26
As Donahue stated, the New York State Board of Regents did refuse to charter MoSex as a nonprofit museum, concluding that sex and museum in the same title made a mockery of the museum as an institution. Gluck looked past this rejection and spun it into a for-profit museum where he could use his talents as an entrepreneur. Always the savvy businessman, he also found a way to take in tax-deductible donations for the museum’s collection through his collaboration with the tax-exempt affiliate known as the Muse Foundation of New York. One of the main gripes of for-profit museums is that they are at a severe disadvantage in collection acquisitions because, unlike nonprofit museums, they cannot offer their donors a tax deduction.27 In 2010, the New York Times covered the story of a prominent New York dominatrix who donated a brushed-steel bondage machine that was subsequently put on display in the museum.28 She simply donated to the tax-exempt organization, located in the same building as MoSex, to receive her deduction. Legal concerns persist over whether the Muse Foundation operates for the sole benefit of a private corporation (which would render it illegal); in the meantime the MoSex collection has grown significantly by combining this method with acquisitions obtained through purchases.
As of 2012, the museum earned 70 percent of its revenue from admissions ($17.50; one must be eighteen or older to get in, but teenagers, as they are wont to do, sneak in occasionally), and it was expected to attract 200,000 paying visitors in 2013.29 The rest of MoSex’s income, as is the case for most for-profit museums, comes from retail sales, on-site restaurants or cafés (MoSex has a café called Oral Fix that may soon be expanding into a full-scale restaurant), and special programming and events. Gluck and his team are also currently in talks with product-development experts to discuss opportunities for brand extensions, and occasionally a big name corporation sponsors exhibitions, as was the case in the 2010 exhibition RUBBERS: The Life, History and Struggle of the Condom, which was financially supported by Trojan Brand Latex Condoms.30
A look inside MoSex’s gift shop, a sex shop–meets–museum front room that garners 30 percent of the museum’s total revenue, reveals MoSex’s for-profit business strategy; it also exposes the ways in which this sex museum creates embodied erotic experiences for its patrons through their engagement with the twenty-first-century for-profit business model.31 Gift shops are often regarded as the most commercial of museum spaces, but the MoSex gift shop is also a space where the desire to touch, to literally place flesh against object, can be partially satiated.
The sex museum souvenir, like all souvenirs, constitutes a memory, a remembrance, or a trace of what one felt, did, or witnessed in a particular sex museum. Museum gift shops provide the museum visitor with the props for remembering or re-creating part of the scene that they encounter inside the museum’s walls. At MoSex, the museum gift shop doubles as a sex shop where national and international tourists, browsers of sexual knowledge, and pleasure seekers can bring a piece of the sex museum experience home with them, but it is also a place where visitors perform the desire deferred because aroused by some thing in the gallery spaces where touch is typically prohibited.
“The manic flip.” This is how Jack, a MoSex staff member, described the way in which visitors handle the books in the gift shop. They see a lot of “wear and tear,” he humorously explained. For example, when the Playboy Fiftieth Anniversary book came out, “it fell apart in a week,” Jack says matter-of-factly.32 Now he shrinkwraps all the books to protect them from the desiring hands of MoSex museum visitors.33
Jack says that there are two main groups of people who spend time in the museum store: those who have never stepped into a sex shop before and those whom he described as “well-versed,” a perception he found evidence for in their attentive movements toward “the more obscure art books.” He went on to describe these visitors as more in touch with the “dark” or “fetishy.” He attributes the reason for substituting a museum gift shop for a first-time sex shop experience to the sex shop’s affective atmosphere, which he theorizes as “something very public.” In contrast: “Once you’ve stepped through the front door [of the museum], you’ve already made that choice.” Later he went on to explain that intentionality has a lot to do with the popularity of the museum store as a stand-in for a sex shop experience.
4.1 “Please do not touch, lick, stroke or mount the exhibits.” Signage at the Museum of Sex, New York, September 2006. Photo by author.
Like sex shops, MoSex’s gift shop sells dildos, cock rings, and vibrators but alongside museum catalogs, rare art and history books, and mainstream sex education literature and pornography/erotic art. In contrast to other sex shops, the museum store is, according to Jack, a “safer” option for the uninitiated. When I asked him, “Why do you think the shop is read as safe?” he answered, “Number 1, the word ‘museum’”; that is, the store gains a respectability under this nomenclature that sex shops cannot access. “If someone’s studying this [sex], then it’s OK that I’m studying it,” Jack elaborated, speaking for the visitor. He also described the experience of the museum gift shop in terms of not feeling “illicit,” again assuming the role of the visitor to say: “We don’t have to sneak into a dirty shop.” One goes to a sex shop intentionally to buy, say, a vibrator. At MoSex, however: “There’s just an element of it being very straightforward, but not making any pretensions that you’re going to get very excited or very turned on. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t.” The museum store, then, allows you to feel or claim surprise at discovering something you did not plan to purchase: the banal guiltlessness of an impulse buy, much like the purchasing of tabloid magazines, gum, or AA batteries while standing in the checkout line at the supermarket.
When I asked him about the relationship between the gift shop and the museum, Jack answered that he sees the shop as an “extension” of the museum. He admitted, however, that he would never call the store a sex shop as it lacks many of the products available at such locations. According to Jack, then, the MoSex museum store hovers comfortably between a typical museum gift shop and a sex shop (at one point he described it as having “gift shop elements” and “adult elements,” but he also discussed the novelty/bizarre aspect of some of the products, e.g., the booby noodles and gag gifts akin to goods sold at the once-popular chain Spencer’s). When customers start asking questions about products the shop does not carry, he always recommends other locations, particularly the sex shop Babeland (formerly known as Toys in Babeland) because, as he says, “they’re the best (sex) educators.” At the same time, he acknowledged that some visitors may use what he described as the safer environment of the museum store as a substitute for a sex shop experience.
Jack described MoSex as “a place about learning and broadening what you know” as well as a space that incorporates “that sense of exploration.” He asked, performing the visitor and entertaining the idea of displaced or deferred desire and where it might land after the MoSex experience: “What do I do with this information?” I asked him what he thought about the substitution of energy for information, to which he responded: “Sure, energy. Energy that arose in there [in the exhibition rooms] or wasn’t fulfilled in there.” When I asked him specifically about touch, or the desire to touch as it related to the museum experience, and how this might connect to ways in which visitors accelerated “the wear and tear” of gift shop books, he discussed the experience of being in any museum as one fraught with pent-up desires to interact with the materials on display. He attributed the popularity of purchasing tchotchkes and other cheap souvenirs at famous tourist sites to the desire to touch things in any exhibition setting. When I asked him to compare the desire to touch in any museum to the desire to interact with objects in sex museums, he explained that the desire to touch in MoSex is unique to the kind of museum it is and the kinds of artifacts it houses.
To take home the object of consumer desire and apply it to the body (again and again) for the sole purpose of pleasure exacts an erotic Marxist critique. Confronting a desire that is located not in the object but in the promise of the object to exact pleasure from the body perverts the political economy of the commodity as well as the so-Freudian-called arrested development of a sexually charged relationship between a person and a manufactured object. How the sense perception of touch operates in sex museums and especially in the gift shop shows how the event of going to a sex museum constitutes a particular kind of sex-in-tourism experience. Instances of touch that I witnessed in the MoSex store allowed patrons to experiment with new ways of presenting sexual subjecthood in public. Those museum patrons who use the MoSex gift shop, even those who choose not to enter the museum and prefer to use the “museum” of the sex museum to make reputable their desire for sex objects, refuse what Elizabeth Freeman has called the commodity time of the objects for sale. By purchasing and bringing home with them objects that might substitute for and not simply lead up to heterosexual intercourse, MoSex visitors attach themselves “to obsolete erotic objects and fetishes they ought to have outgrown,” and, by “repeating unproductive [and unreproductive] bodily behaviors over and over,” they refuse the logic of commodity fetishism and specifically its entrenchment in the ideology of a docile and useful labor ethic.34
Yet the Marxist critiques of commodity fetishism did not always or ultimately play out in all tourist performances of desire and touch in the gift shop. My conversation with Jack eventually turned to the desire to touch certain sex objects so frequently that they required urgent shrinkwrapping attention. These objects were typically those that included nude photographs of women posed in ways that embodied John Berger’s ways of seeing, such as three Playboy calendars divided into “Brunettes,”“Blondes,” and “Redheads.”35 On the display shelf, these commodities designed to hail heteronormative male desire retain their status as commodity fetishes, but those objects designed and marketed for nonnormative sexual practices and for women are also suspect.
The sex toy industry, from manufacture to retail, has capitalized on prosex or sex-positive feminism’s focus on pleasure as a human right, and MoSex’s gift shop is a temple to that capitalist appropriation. Sex-positive feminism is a form of third-wave feminism that has argued for the integral place of sexual pleasure in women’s lives. It emerged as a response to antipornography feminists and what Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter call the sex wars of the late 1970s and the early 1980s.36 In the twenty-first century, sex-positive feminism, like most forms of feminism, has been appropriated by mainstream culture, inclusive of the sex industry. Among sex-positive feminists there remains a tension about how to manage the focus on sexual pleasure as a component of women’s freedom. There are those who argue that unbounded sexual freedoms are essential to women’s autonomy, while another strong contingent views unregulated sexual freedom as a convenient appropriation of female sexuality by patriarchal and misogynist cultural forms (e.g., certain genres of pornographic film) that serve to reobjectify women without granting them sexual and social power. Others view sex-positive feminism as a movement that supports the circulation of sexual knowledge for informed decision making about one’s sex life and activities.37 In choosing what and more importantly how to market sexual material culture in the age of prosex feminism, sex museums constantly focus more on the right to consume than on the conditions of production.38 While sex museums, like other sex industry businesses, capitalize on a questionable definition of feminism and its intersection with female sexual pleasure, the mainstream sex industry’s recent focus on women as consumers and the branding of sexual identities for profit makes this clear: women are big business, and sex museums, where women provide half, if not most, of the revenue garnered from ticket sales, want in.
Women as Active Sex (Museum) Tourists
In her office hangs a painted rendition of Leda and the Swan. This is no mere imitation of any number of the classical and contemporary versions of the ancient Greek myth in which Zeus shape-shifts into a swan so as to seduce and rape Leda, who was later said to bear his children, Polydeuces and Helen of Troy.39 Naomi Wilizg, the owner and founder of WEAM, had the painter remove the passive ingénue and in its place insert her image. Wilzig is depicted as a dominant version of Leda with the Zeus-swan sitting on her lap, its long neck wrapped around hers, more like an albatross from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” than a sexual threat. Wilzig’s eyes stare out at the viewer, confident, composed, and at home with the now placid (and flaccid) swan. If indeed the swan still imposes on her painterly persona a burden or a challenge, it is one that she gladly accepts.
4.2 Naomi and the Swan, by Karen Rosenberg (oil on canvas, 2004). World Erotic Art Museum, Miami Beach. Courtesy of Naomi Wilzig
As in the painting, where the power dynamics of this ancient Greek myth have shifted, WEAM is likewise a testament to how Wilzig, a Jewish septuagenarian who has spent the latter part of her life traveling the world in search of sex objects, has transformed the course of the male-dominated history of collecting and displaying erotic artifacts for private audiences. WEAM, which opened in 2005 in Miami Beach, displays her four-thousand-piece collection. Only one other woman, the now deceased Beate Uhse, a German sexual pioneer and the founder of the Beate Uhse Erotic Museum in Berlin, has ever publicly directed the display of a collection of this magnitude. Wilzig is the self-proclaimed second-largest collector of erotic objects in the world, behind only a male collector in Paris who, according to Wilzig, avoids public identification for fear of potential damage to his political and economic clout. From my conversations with Wilzig at WEAM, it seems that this man, whoever he may be, performs a traditionally told story of erotic object circulation and display, one very much akin to what we saw in the discussion of L’origine du monde in chapter 1.
One day at a Paris antique market, Wilzig had just successfully discovered some items that she deemed erotic. After a previous unsuccessful trip to acquire erotic antiques, she had returned the following year with a sign hung around her neck on which a friend of hers had written in French: “I am buying erotic art.” “The notion even that a woman is asking them [the art dealers about erotic art] didn’t even enter their mind,” she explained to me. With the language barrier taken care of and her quest for sex objects hung around her neck, much like the Zeus-swan, for all to see, she noted: “This time dealers started beckoning me into their booths and started opening a drawer, opening a cabinet, reaching up high on a shelf, showing me things, and I started buying things.” In that way, she met the man who claims to be the world’s largest collector of erotic art.
He accosted Wilzig at one booth as she was negotiating with the dealer about a piece of art that was in her hand. Some of his friends had told him that there was an American woman wearing a sign who was buying up all the erotic antiques at the market. This upset him, so he went looking for her and found her. The ensuing dialogue, according to Wilzig, went like this: “He says ‘There you are!’ and I look up, not knowing he’d been searching for me and I said, ‘Yes, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I’ve been looking for you!’” She held in her hand a tall wooden figurine of a woman in a flimsy art deco gown. Covetously, the man turns to the dealer, saying: “‘Why are you selling that to her? You know I would have bought it!’ And the dealer answered him, ‘It’s been sitting here for six months, and you ignored it.’ But the fact that it was in my hot little hands intrigued him, . . . and I did buy it.”40
He was fascinated and perhaps a little angry that this female sex collector was usurping his potential acquisitions: “What are you doing here in Paris? What are you doing collecting erotic art? Women don’t collect erotic art. Who are you? Who sent you here?” he demanded of Wilzig in English. She told him that she had come with a tour of antique dealers who had been traveling together in the south of France. The dealers were taking continuing education courses that were required to keep their licenses, and on this particular journey they were studying the different trees that grew in France to study the woods (elm, pine, etc.) that had survived through their preservation in antiques. She went along with the group, and, while they were studying wood, she searched the flea markets for erotic antiques. The male collector asked if she had bought anything, and, when she told him that she had found twenty things, he acted surprised. She had been in Paris for only six days, and this man knew the tactics that must be undertaken, even for a male collector, to find those erotic pieces that were often hidden away from the general tourist and pedestrian population. He asked to see them, but they were already packed up in her suitcase in her hotel room awaiting the journey back to the United States. “I want to come with my lady friend to see your. . . . Can I come to your hotel room to see it?” he pleaded. Since he was not coming alone, Wilzig felt that it was safe to give him her hotel address. Back at the hotel, she explained:
I unpacked everything and laid it out all over the bed and maybe an hour and a half later he came, knocked on the door. He was there with his girlfriend. And he comes in, and he looks at the art, and the things I bought, and he’s in total awe. I didn’t know who he was, or what he collected, or how much he had. So it so happened . . . I said I was going back the next morning, but I was actually going back a day later. He says to me, “Are you staying in Paris?” I said, “I’ll be here one more day.” So he said, “I want you to come to my home, and see what I have. I’m having some people for dinner tonight, will you come?” I figured that was great; what was nicer than being invited into a private home in a strange country and get some of the taste and concept of how it is to be living in Paris. So of course I accepted. And meanwhile he called me the next morning, and he directed me to go to another dealer who had things for sale, which was very kind of him, and I went, and I bought some other small things. And that night I went to his home, and just as he was astounded by what I had bought, I was astounded by what he had. He was obviously the largest collector in the world, I only say in America. I don’t challenge him because I know he has more, so I say America, not the world.
At his home, she discovered that he worked in finance and was connected to major corporations and businesses in Paris. He was a wealthy man who had been collecting all his life; by comparison, Wilzig thought of herself as a newcomer who had been collecting for only six or seven years.
4.3 Erotic Japanese decorations. World Erotic Art Museum, Miami Beach. Photo by author; printed with permission of Naomi Wilzig.
Since her collection was originally intended as her home decor, Wilzig bought what appealed to her and developed a certain criteria for what she did and did not want: no “children,” no “hard” looks (“I wonder why anybody would want to look at a painting all day long of somebody that doesn’t look pleasant,” she explained), and objects that represented as many periods, styles, cultures, countries, and, of course, forms of eroticism as possible. She initially displayed them in her home, which became a monument to her sex-collecting travels. At first all she found were depictions of women and female nudes. “Anyone walking into my house would have thought I was a lesbian, right?” she joked with me. It was a harder quest to find male figures that she enjoyed seeing (another collection criteria was that the body in the image had to be attractive to her), and she was not only interested in male nudes. Finding those objects required more travel to different markets throughout Western Europe and to Israel (where she found a few items). She also discovered that she often needed to take a second look at an object: sometimes sex was hidden behind a mask, inside a cigarrette box, or tucked into a Japanese ivory strawberry from the 1930s that seemed simply decorative but contained a copulating couple within its delicate layers. In many ways, Wilzig’s interest in discovering how various cultures embed the erotic in the ordinary continues the legacy of the banal Roman erotic artifacts displayed at the Secret Museum. Her delight in acquiring artifacts that in some way mimicked the pursuit of hidden sex objects in general led to a collection that exemplifies how modern cultures install the erotic in everyday things, for moral purposes, at times, but mostly in humor and jest. Like Mary Weismantal’s study of Peruvian Moche sex pots, Wilzig’s collection traces how these sex objects contain within them multiple stories, values, and interpretations that are typically occluded by their literalness.41
Wilzig’s collection moves from paintings, sculptures, and these objects in miniature to the monumental: a large, wooden kama sutra bed with penises for posts; a red throne and ottoman, hand-carved and painted, upholstered in a red-striped silk, and reconstructed after a chair belonging to Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia; a room almost solely dedicated to Lady Godiva, who rode naked through the marketplace of Coventry after the Earl of Mercia promised to ease the tax burden if she did so. In addition to bronze statues and ivory and wooden plaques either depicting or dedicated to the naked aristocrat, the gallery also contains a Lady Godiva chocolate box, a Barbie doll on horseback, and a computer mouse pad silkscreened with a copy of an 1898 Lady Godiva painting by John Collier. All throughout the museum, Wilzig mixes antiques, high art, kitsch, and mass-produced items to cover the walls and vitrines of more than twenty galleries and corridors.
Numerous houseguests encouraged Wilzig to open up a museum to display her treasures. “How did I come to the museum originally?” she repeated when asked. “People who left my home when they saw this collection, their parting shot always was, ‘It’s so great. It’s so unique. It should be in a museum.’ That is what people said over and over again, and I smiled and said, ‘Yes, I know, I know.’” In 2005, she opened WEAM to garner admiration for her eclectic, and for some eccentric, sex collection, but she also invites the spectator to share in this prestige.
Wilzig encountered numerous challenges when searching for a space to house her vast collection:
I started looking for a location on my own. I tried to buy a piece of property in Tampa near where I lived that was in a distressed neighborhood. They didn’t want an erotic museum in town even though it would have been the focal point of revitalizing the whole area. . . . I went to St. Pete[rsburg] and found a location four blocks away from the [Salvador] Dalí Museum. After having Tampa turn me down I went to the city first. They said to go talk to Dalí. If Dalí supports you, we support you. If Dalí says no, we say no because we can’t conflict with Dalí. They are the main financial income source for the entire city of St. Pete. I met with the board of directors, the president of the board of directors, and the executive director. When we went into the office of the president of the board of directors, he had only one piece of art hanging on the wall. It was The Last Supper, and it wasn’t Dalí’s Last Supper. It was the religious, Christ, biblical version, whereas Dalí did a different version of it. It wasn’t even the Dalí version even though he was at the Dalí Museum [laughter]. I looked at the The Last Supper, and I turned to —— and said, “This guy, whoever he is, he is not going to give us permission.” And he never did. He was against us, so that took care of St. Pete.
She continued to look, this time in Miami, with little success: “I looked at a big store that was empty on Lincoln Road. The city said, ‘No. We want to keep Lincoln Road as family and retail.’ They wouldn’t give us permission. I went back to Las Vegas. There was a complete second floor, empty, in a small casino. There had been a magician’s show for twenty years that was closing. It was upstairs, it wasn’t on the ground level, but the land was owned by Hilton, and they said, ‘No.’”
WEAM now inhabits prime real estate on the second floor of an old office building at Twelfth Street and Washington Avenue. Only two blocks from the beach right across from the Hustler store, it also shares the vicinity with a number of strip joints and porn shops. For Wilzig, using erotic instead of sex in the museum’s name is a strategic means of distancing herself from these other businesses by deploying a more respectable and socially acceptable term to distinguish aesthetically valuable erotica (her business) from pornography. According to Wilzig, the difference between erotica and pornography is simple: “Pornography has one message: Let’s have sex.” When she defined pornography in this way, she obviously referenced a history of antipornography campaigns in the United States that demonized pornography as a dangerous cultural expression. As a woman with a museum dedicated to sex objects, using erotica or erotic to describe what she collects and displays nominally exempts her from the radical feminist claim that pornography promotes male violence against women.42
WEAM’s business strategy publicizes its collection, and in particular its much-loved owner, by selling itself as an erotic tastemaker, a place that may share the overwhelming feel of a porn shop in terms of the sheer number of things on display but primarily aims to educate the sex museum tourist about a pedagogy of taste. At WEAM, Wilzig’s main objective is to render sex objects tasteful and therefore displayable within a museum context and consumable by those who may not partake in other forms of the sex industry. The challenge is to distinguish her museum from its neighbors on a street that is one block from the beach and lined with sex shops and go-go clubs. One WEAM visitor explained the dynamics of Miami Beach and its relationship to WEAM in the following terms: “It’s a museum on the beach, and everything around you is about selling and making a dollar in this town. Everything is about being a playground where people come to spend money and then go home to their own regular lives.”43 Not surprisingly, then, Wilzig and I met a point of contention when I called her museum a sex museum. In Miami Beach, Wilzig encountered many obstacles to advertising her museum because of the inclusion of the word erotic in the title. Florida International University refused to put an ad in its paper, and airlines including American, Continental, and United refused to list WEAM in their in-flight guides as one of the “Things to Do in Miami.” For this reason, she explained to me, “I would never call my museum a sex museum. I’ve had enough problems with the word erotic.”
Creating a museum that aims to be an erotic tastemaker rather than a sexual attraction, like MoSex, assumes serious commercial risks, especially with a $15 price tag for entry. Any mixing of high and low elements disintegrates the fragile distinction, as in the seemingly innocuous decision to decorate the entrance to the museum with a neon sign spelling out WEAM in which every letter resembles either butts or breasts. In Amsterdam and other sexual sites, neon may be a useful cliché, a banal marker for sex as a nocturnal activity, but in the light of day at WEAM it can tip Wilzig’s respectable business into an association with other forms of sex tourism. “Like a good consumer, a victim of the western world,” says the travel writer Campbell Jefferys, “I associate neon with the sex industry. Is there any other use for neon? I’ve seen ‘Live Sex’ in pink neon enough to know that’s what it’s good for; advertising vices.”44 Those working behind the front desk at WEAM have been bowled over by how many people come in expecting something other than a museum. “All they see is the word erotic,” says Tony, a staff member. He attributed this phenomenon to the difficulty of having a museum in Miami Beach, where tourism primarily focuses on and around libido and alcohol, as he explained it. But the confusion also grew out of the ways in which WEAM furnished its front room. Referring to the pink neon sign that spells out WEAM as you step off the glass chandeliered elevator, he said: “If you see any movie with a strip joint or a brothel in it, you’ll see a sign like that.” He claimed that neon gave the wrong impression to visitors who already resist any “modicum of education” on the main strip of South Beach, which is fabled as a purveyor of sin and debauchery.45 Apparently, that small decorative choice provided the elusive clue that confused this space with other spaces where sex (of the embodied and ephemeral kind) happens, especially in the case of potential female patrons.
Wilizg tried to counteract this confusion with the display of “respectable” objects in the exposition room: to enter WEAM, guests need to ascend an elevator with a crystal chandelier before reaching the neon sign in a space that triples as the gift shop, the front room, and the ticket purchasing area. While tourist traffic has shifted since I spoke to Wilzig in 2006, at the time of my visit she expressed frustration with attendance and discussed the measures she had taken to prevent misconceptions about the museum:
Even today, this place should be full of people, but it’s not. People are still apprehensive about the word erotic art. They still don’t know that someone is not going to rape them or attack them or proposition them. [And then putting into words her impression of potential visitors’ fears:] “Maybe the people are parading around in the nude.” People are still apprehensive about coming. I just spent $25,000 to fix up the lobby, $5,000 in chandeliers for the hallways and the elevator, $20,000 on the floor to make it pretty so that they shouldn’t feel intimidated. It’s a rich and not a sleazy place. You know, doing anything and everything to make it more public.
According to WEAM staff, however, the import of the neon sign has won out and tipped the register to be more akin with other sexual locales surrounding the museum. While neon may have a marked effect on a choreography of nonentry at WEAM, the very inclusion of the word erotic, as Wilzig expressed to me, can also deter attendance.
While the glow of neon sends a gendered message about the spatial orientation of the museum, other objects send raced and sexed messages to potential patrons about who will be turned on and for what reasons in the space of WEAM. At WEAM, stepping off the elevator puts you face to face with the naked body of Marilyn Monroe in a famous Playboy image shot during her brunette/Norma Jean/girl-next-door period. Except for the erotic postcards and the neon WEAM sign bathing the room in a soft pink light, there is little else in the exposition room that announces the space’s status as a sex museum. As I spent a lot of time in the exposition room interviewing staff and visitors, I was privy to many visitors’ first few moments after stepping off the elevator. On one occasion, five women of color disembarked in boisterous laughter; they immediately saw the Marilyn poster and cried, “Oh, there she is!” as if her presence confirmed their preconceived ideas of who and what the museum would depict as erotic. On another occasion, two black women tentatively stepped off the elevator, looked around, and quickly decided that they were not the intended spectators for the scene. I overheard one woman tell her friend that this seemed like a “straight porn show.” Both summarily summoned the elevator and quickly left.
This moment of contact between the visitors, the photograph of a famous naked white women performing eroticism for the predominantly white male readership of a 1953 issue of Playboy magazine, and the uncertainty of what WEAM might display around the next corner created two different scenarios of friction. In the first instance, expectation was immediately confirmed on immersion into the exposition room. Expecting a museum predicated on male scopophilia, the visitors found the space intelligible (though potentially trite) and therefore safe enough to enter. Their experience in the museum’s other rooms either expanded or deflated those expectations. In the other instance, the juxtaposition between neon, Marilyn, and the women’s estimation of how their bodies related to the spatial dynamics of the scene created an overwhelming feeling of not being invited, not feeling welcome or able to enjoy what would be offered around the next corner. Just as likely, the mood of the room reminded them too much of other sexual spaces they had seen or heard about, spaces like the XXX shop, the strip joint, and the sex show, where white female performances directed at men might seem offensive, clichéd, or downright boring.
While sex museums are marketed toward all genders, women make up a large portion of their visitors.46 While other sexual display environments, such as women-owned, queer-friendly sex shops, anticipate female visitors and offer them a clean, well-lit space to explore their desires, few other locales exist where women can brush up against sex in public.47 While neon, like warning signs, can alert potential sex museum tourists to the location, it can also cause the museum to blend in with other sexual spaces that do not hail diverse feminine subjects into a recognition of their desires. As Wilzig discovered in her sex collector travels: “People think it’s an anomaly to have done that, they think it’s strange, why would a woman do it.” The same holds for female sex tourists. Eventually, Wilzig hopes to have as many women in the museum as she has on her walls. In the meantime, she sits in her office, a display in itself that ends the WEAM itinerary, and relishes the moments when, after having seen her collection, visitors knock on the door to thank her:
Like I said they come young, old, in wheel chairs, and invariably in a day someone, if not two or three people, stop to say, “Thank you for doing it. We never knew it existed. We appreciate that you did it.” Young guys who you think couldn’t care less to be complimentary to the older woman sitting there, but they stop by and want to tell me how much they liked it and how valuable they considered it. Old people will say that it was such an awakening to discover this and how come there couldn’t have been one sooner or, “We’re so pleased you brought it to Miami so that we could see it.” If I check out tomorrow, I know that I did a good thing, and I know that people appreciate it and that it was a valuable contribution to the art community here.
On April 7, 2015, Wilzig passed away at the age of eighty.
Selling Sex Museums
Sex museum–going is a kind of sex tourism that incorporates a variety of different performances—from collecting to displaying and viewing sex objects—that blur the boundaries between active and passive sex tourism. I borrow a question from Jane Desmond’s study of tourist sites when I wonder of sex tourists, “What are they buying and what do they want?”48 In the case of sex museums, the answers to those questions are numerous, and sometimes there are no answers at all as the for-profit sex museum with its unique mix of intellectual and embodied delights remains somewhat unintelligible to the sex tourist’s imaginary. For patrons seeking embodied sex, sometimes the promise of the sex museum is confused with more visceral pleasures. Yet visiting a sex museum is not without its risks and temptations.
The reputation of the museum and what side of the homo/hetero binary it allegedly caters to dictate the horizon of possible performances visitors engage in. Even if visitors do not verbally express their misunderstanding of the museum’s function, the guards at one sex museum told me they could immediately tell when someone misunderstands the sex museum as a particular kind of sex-in-tourism experience. These visitors (mostly men) buy their tickets, quickly deposit this ticket in the garbage (as one guard explained, “to hide the evidence”), enter through the turnstyle, and descend the steps to exit within five to ten minutes. These men, who are looking for transactional or public sex and are not (presumably) sitting on the political or religious Right and condemning it, have so internalized the stigma of their desires for this type of sex that they have become accustomed to looking for small clues and hints.
Visitors of all genders sometimes leave their phone numbers on the permanent collection of sex machines or have the occasional erotic tryst in one of the bathrooms. Every two to three months at another sex museum, a mature white woman in her sixties opens the front door only wide enough to allow her head and face to enter and be seen as she screams to visitors in the gift shop: “You should be ashamed of yourself, looking at child pornography! Does your wife know you’re here?! Does your husband know you’re here?!” The ticket seller explained to me that this woman had never entered the museum, her only exposure to its interior being the sonic landscape of popular club beats and the reddish hue of the neon lights behind the ticket counter. On one of the more rambunctious evenings at yet another sex museum, a tipsy woman undressed, playfully called herself a “live exhibit,” and was swiftly escorted off the premises by the security guards.
Others, like the MoSex visitors Rachel and Frank, expect to be provided with a little bit of both for their $17.50 entrance fee. Rachel and Frank entered the museum and moved through the galleries laughing, talking, and critically engaging with the exhibits. When they returned to the front room of the museum for our interview, which they had promised to grant me when they first crossed the museum’s threshold, I began by asking them: “What do you expect when you go to any museum, and how did this experience compare to that expectation?”
Frank. I think we expect it to be . . .
Rachel. I expect to be enlightened . . .
Frank. Enlightened, yes, that’s good.
Rachel. So, it’s definitely not what I expected of a museum or . . . a peep show, for that matter . . .
As they critiqued the museum for what it did and did not show them about sex, I found myself wondering how, given the opportunity, they themselves might organize a sex museum:
JT. Is there anything you’d like to see in a sex museum? For example, imagine you were creating a museum of sex. What would be first on your agenda?
Rachel. From a sociological standpoint [Rachel is a sociology graduate student], there are so many different facets. Let’s try a broad perspective and see how [sex] affects society, how it’s being marketed, and how it’s used to market everything from dishwashing liquid to, I don’t know, olives [she laughs]. Ya know? I would want to see the fact that we’re using it for these reasons, especially in this society, where it’s still so taboo. I mean, we’re still so anti-sex . . . as in “Why is it ok when it’s used to sell things, but it’s not ok to talk about it, to discuss it, to educate people?”49
As this conversation suggests, sex museums are spaces where binaries and boundaries get mixed up. Fitting comfortably neither in the traditional nonprofit museum genre nor in other spaces where sex happens (e.g., the peep show), sex museums are cultural sites of local, national, and international tourism that magnetize incoherent normative expectations of how sex should be staged. For-profit sex museums such as MoSex and WEAM provide two models of transgression that attempt to remain marketable within a business that uniquely overlaps with other for-profit and nonprofit museums as well as other sex industry sites. When they fail to do so, they not only risk redundancy; they can also reinstate the tourist gaze and the commodity fetishism of postindustrial sexual commerce that they want to avoid.
What seems clear is that, even in sex museums, when it comes to choosing whether to display sex in museums, which forms to display, and how to display them, the bottom line is no longer morality. Sex museums show us what decisions museums, especially for-profit museums but also nonprofits that borrow from the market-driven strategies and objectives of their for-profit colleagues, feel they need to make in order to survive in the age of market-driven tourism. While the global phenomenon of sex tourism is related to sex museums insofar as both represent intercultural encounters between sexual bodies, it is distinct from the sex museum context as the live aspects of sex tourism often trump the framing of sex as an anthropological, aesthetic, historical, or scientific pursuit. Sex museums play on but never promise explicit embodied pleasures for their visitors, and thus they suggest that we need a new category of liminal tourism that is neither active nor passive but rather an as-of-yet unlabeled form of leisure activity that expands what sex and the museum can and do mean.