Animal Sex Lives and Videotape

When you think of the Flatiron District, its wholesale shopping, its long surpassed skyscrapers still reaching heavenward, rarely would you have had occasion to consider the morality of homosexual dolphins, the predatory instincts of bears, or to ponder the reproductive imperative of ants. But thanks to the Museum of Sex‘s latest exhibit “Sex Life of Animals” you may find yourself doing just that.

It begins innocently enough: slightly flirtatious manner, revealing clothing, subtle innuendo. In 15 minutes though we are in an orgy in Death Valley, fondling naked Realdolls, watching Looners erotically busting balloons, Gainers suggestively eat cake, engrossed in Robot reproduction, we are watching Pam and Tommy do, what we imagine Pam and Tommy do, in just another 5 minutes we are lost, like foreign tourists, asking directions on our own sexual road-map.

Our minds think back to simpler times. I was 16, she was 18, it was a cool summer’s night, we were in love. Flickering candlelight cast long foreboding shadows against the back wall as we undressed. Cruelly, ridiculously, she played Madonna’s greatest hits as we lay together, forever coupling my first time with “Like a Virgin.”

Such innocence has no place here, not the Museum of Sex, not in modern New York, when the Puritans set sail from Plymouth covered head-to-toe in frilly knickers, wide-brimmed hats and God’s honest truth, one imagines that this compendium of kink is exactly what they were fleeing.

Laid out across three floors, the MOS covers everything we wanted to know about sex but never knew to ask, Jungle Quest anyone? Film, photography, art, politics, disease, contraception, it flicks between erotic ‘how-to’s’ to parental ‘don’t-do’s’.

Ever wanted to be wrapped like a thanksgiving Turkey, apple in mouth, legs bound to your body, then stuffed in a mock oven? Maybe Cannibal play is for you. Ever wanted to dress up like a frontier pioneer and ride your mate like a Blackpool pony? Ponyplay, I’m just saying. Ever wanted to dress head-to-toe in latex like a living doll? Ok now that’s just strange. Ever wanted to dress up in leather gimp gear and have mock-doctors inject an obscene, leg-crossing quantity of fluid directly into your scrotum? Medical play is just a google away.

[Some images after the jump are mildly NSFW]

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