Museum of Sex Blog

If you’re going to confront sex and death – or at least the art world’s latest depictions of them – you might as well be naked.

Was Casanova more than just a pretty face? Smithsonian Magazine has just published my epic quest to separate fact from fiction in the life of history’s greatest lover. The man is so surrounded by mythology that many people assume him to be a fictional character (and maybe it’s hard to take seriously someone who has [...]

I revisited a marvelous gallery of historical erotica I discovered while researching The Sinner’s Grand Tour. Some of the photos were a bit too lurid to include in the post (at least without artful cropping) — I thought readers of the MoSex blog might appreciate them, however…

I’ve just done a series on “penetrating the Vatican” for Slate. A lot of Slate readers (presumably the vocal Catholics) seem to have taken umbrage that I refer to sex a lot in the story — either with hidden erotica from the Renaissance, medieval erotic tomes, the Showtime series the Borgias or the so-called “Joust of the Whores”…

Italian nuns have left quite a subversive legacy. This is thanks largely to the literary labors of Pietro Aretino, a Venetian author who is today hailed as the “father of modern pornography.”

Elisabeth Eaves, author of Wanderlust: A Love Affair With Five Continents and Tony Perrottet, author of The Sinner’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe (and our very own guest blogger!), will read from their work and discuss the intersection of lust and travel — past, present and future. Tuesday, July 26, 7 pm @ MoSex, [...]