A selection of the world's best sex museums

jasonnewman

All in the best possible taste
If you've come to snigger you may be disappointed. The new breed of sex museum takes its subject seriously. Oliver Bennett picks 10 of the best

The Observer
Sunday February 9 2003

Last autumn, New York's Museum of Sex opened. It isn't a world first, because such museums have proliferated across Europe since Amsterdam's Venus Temple opened in 1985. Indeed, bidding for Polynesian penis sheaths and Ming Dynasty dildos must now be fierce at the world's auction rooms. But New York's museum is one of a new breed of culturally savvy sex storehouses. Last year, Australia gained its first sex museum, which is similarly high-minded.

So where is Britain's sex museum? German porn baroness Beate Uhse had hoped to open a branch of her Berlin version here, but then she died. Now Daniel Gluck, director of New York's Museum of Sex, says he has an eye on London. But perhaps we need a local entrepreneur: possibly someone unemployed, who understands our peculiarly smutty approach to the subject. How about the Hamiltons, or Prince Edward? Or, better still, the star of the 'Confessions' films, Robin Askwith?

Meanwhile, here is a selection of the world's best sex museums (beware: surfing these sites may be inadvisable at the office.)

[ 本帖最后由 jasonnewman 于 2007-7-31 00:25 编辑 ]

jasonnewman

New York
Museum of Sex

Not only does it have a groovy NY acronym - 'Mosex' - but founder Daniel Gluck boasts an 'academic, multi-disciplinary approach', underlined by co-founder Alison Maddex, girlfriend of Camille Paglia. Gluck wants the museum to be nothing less than the 'Smithsonian of sex', backed by posh supporters such as columnist Arianna Huffington.

There are permanent exhibits on the burlesque tradition, sexual subcultures such as the gay disco scene, and lashings of sadomasochism, the end being to 'explore the development of modern attitudes about sex and sexuality'. But it will not take money from the adult entertainment industry, hoping instead to be a 'serious sex museum'. More for chin-strokers than the pocket billiards brigade.

· 233 Fifth Avenue at 27th Street, New York (00 1 212 308 5991)

Canberra
National Museum of Erotica

Opened last spring in Australia's capital, cheekily coinciding with the launch of the nearby National Museum. Has the usual mix of the ancient and improbable - erotic nutcrackers, Chinese foot-binding shoes - but is put together in New Age 'sex-positive' spirit and, like NY, promises to stir more than the trouser snake. Get this: it even aims to 'provide a focus for the nation's erotic soul' and show the 'erotic roots of Australians'. Cripes. Best website of all the sex museums.

· 37a Northbourne Ave, Canberra (00 61 2 6230 5022)

Barcelona
Museo de la Erotica

Slap bang in the Ramblas tourist artery, this sexy museo was started by a Danish businessman in 1996 and lures an annual quarter of a million punters. Modelled on Berlin's sex museum, it has the repro Kama Sutra prints beloved of the genre, as well as African wood-carvings and bawdy fifteenth-century European illustrations. But its unique proposition is a small collection of graphics by local lads Picasso and Miro. It also has a fearsome-looking erotic chair; you'd have to be desperate to sit on it.

· Ramblas 96, Barcelona. Open daily, October to May, 11am-9pm; from June to September 10am-midnight (00 34 93 318 9865)

Hamburg
Erotic Art Museum

Hamburg's infamous Reeperbahn demands a sex museum and, sure enough, in a corner halfway down the smutty strasse lies the Erotic Art Museum. Created by property tycoon Claus Becker, it hosts four storeys of highbrow sexual art, including work by Otto Dix and Jean Cocteau, and a thrilling collection of eighteenth-century French erotic prints. It's a spin-off from an earlier establish ment, also in the St Pauli district, and has a bookshop where you can indulge in the Sally Bowles-was-here atmosphere. If you require real sleaze, acres of it lies nearby in Europe's biggest industrial sex quarter.

· Bernhard-Nocht Strasse 69, Hamburg. Open daily 10am-midnight (00 49 40 3178 4126)

[ 本帖最后由 jasonnewman 于 2007-7-31 00:27 编辑 ]

jasonnewman

Amsterdam
Sex Museum/Venus Temple

As befits Europe's capital of the skin trade, Amsterdam has two competing sex museums. This one, on Damrak, the divey strip between the station and Dam Square, is the best. Has copies of Indian temple sculpture, pulsating Aubrey Beardsley penises, fun eighteenth-century engravings by Austrian 'orgy artist' Peter Fendi and flickery nineteenth-century films, alongside historical ethno-smut such as ivory dildos and Maori copulation carvings. Opened in 1985, this is the original sex museum. Bizarre touch: a life-size moving sculpture of a flasher.

· Damrak 18, Amsterdam. Open daily, 10am- 11.30pm (00 31 20 622 8376)

Erotisch Museum

Amsterdam's other sex storehouse benefits from a location in the red light district, but is not as strong as Damrak's effort, although eye-catching artefacts include an early clockwork vibrator and erotic drawings by John Lennon presented to Yoko Ono. Bizarre touch: a theatre with mushroom-shaped chairs in front of television screens showing a pornographic cartoon of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs .

· Oudezijds Achterburgwal 54, Amsterdam. Open daily, 11am-1am, Fri and Sat until 2am (00 31 20 624 7303)

Copenhagen
Museum Erotica

Wonderful Copenhagen, home to the Louvre of sex museums. Bang in the city's retail heart, this accomplished attraction was founded in 1993 by Ole Ege, a legendary film-maker almost solely responsible for the Danes' randy reputation. Collections 'illustrating the history of erotic expression' - paintings, sculpture, postcards, photos, magazines, films and sex toys - plus a chance to study the sex lives of famous Danes including Hans Christian Andersen: giving new meaning to fairytales such as Babes in the Wood . Concludes with a video wall of porn so explicit that it'll either get you hot and bothered, or help you lose your lunch.

· Købmagergade 24, Copenhagen. Open 1 May to 30 September, 10am-11pm and 1 October to 1 April, 11am-8pm (00 45 33 120311)

Paris
Musée de l'Erotisme

This sex museum has a great location in Pigalle, in an old cabaret close to the Moulin Rouge whose belle époque glam our is more than a little ragged around the edges now. Opened in 1997, it is well aware that hardcore is locally available, so offers a cultural, defiantly non-masturbatory romp through the ages. Global artefacts include African fertility fetishes and gay Aztec pictures, while much of the rest is contemporary 'erotica'. Bizarre touch: before the World Cup, the museum had a show that incorporated footballs into pornography.

· 72 Boulevard de Clichy, Paris. Open 10am-2am (00 33 1 4258 2873)

Berlin
Beate Uhse Erotik-Museum

You'd expect a sex museum in the German capital to be frank, and it is. Opened in 1996 by the late Beate Uhse - a turbocharged Teutonic Ann Summers, described as the 'Queen of the Rubber Willy' - it's one of the German capital's top 10 most-visited tourist attractions, with 3,000 sex objects over three storeys, including carved Indonesian phalli, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sex paintings on silk, nineteenth-century Chinese brothel tokens and 20th-century Chinese porcelains. Prefer smut? Go to the first floor sex shop - it's all part of the same operation.

· Kantstrasse and Joachimstallerstrasse, Berlin. Open 9am- 2pm (00 49 30 44 886 0666)

Shanghai
Museum of Ancient Sex Culture

A romp through China's sexual undergrowth, the MoASC is a historical collection of 1,200 objects gathered by the campaigning Liu Dalin, a pioneer of sex research at Shanghai University and a fascinating fellow. He has written 43 books on sex and conducted a massive survey of sexual behaviour in modern China which found that less than 17 per cent of couples kissed during sex. Drawing from 6,000 years of horny history, his artefacts include special masturbation chairs for men, 'beauty chairs' for women that raise the hips for intercourse, and a mask to be placed on the sex organs after death.

· Open 10am-6pm, 1133 Wu Ding Lu, Shanghai (00 86 21 6230 1243)

jasonnewman

The one in Shanghai has already been moved to somewhere in Jiangsu or Zhejiang, I remember.