Sex & Society » History, Pop culture, Safer sex: "What Dreams May Come? A Talk with Museum of Sex Curator Sarah Forbes"
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What Dreams May Come? A Talk with Museum of Sex Curator Sarah Forbes

Zandy Mangold
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  Mo’ Hands, Better Sex

Sex works best, at least sometimes, as multi-person endeavor. MoSex features a wide variety of mediums through which they showcase the subjects it highlights, and this requires a variety of expertise to bring off. In addition in-house curator Forbes, guest curators are sometimes brought in to helm specific exhibits. Ditto designers. MoSex also boasts a host of prestigious advisors, including primary advisors Stanford evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden; Marlene Zuk, biology professor at UC Riverside and author of Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex from Animals and Kees Moeliker, Curator, Natural History Museum Rotterdam.

“We create these large thematic exhibitions, so maybe an artist will contact us at one point not appropriate at that moment a year or two down the line, and there’s an exhibition that it’s perfect for,” Forbes says. “Sometimes they may not be making content in relation to sex, but their perspective might work with a given exhibit … We give artists a wonderful platform to create pieces to have conversations that other institutions may not be able to have.”

While other museums are feeling the clammy hands of the recession tightening their budgets, MoSex is actually expanding. Relying exclusively on patronage, they now have four galleries. “so when people buy tickets to them museum they’re not just supporting that one day and that one experience they’re really supporting having an institution of this type in this country,” where the goal is education, entertainment and mostly intriguing you enough to continue discussing the topics presented on the way out the door.

So what your mom said was true: If you study, pay attention and follow your dreams, you can get a spiffy job, too. There are such jobs as candy taster. Only now that you’re grown up … there’s better stuff than candy.


From Michael Sullivan's Sex Life of Robots, courtesy of the Museum of Sex

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Contributor: Craig Sorensen
Craig Sorensen  

No wonder she's got such a big, beautiful smile.

Cool job. Awesome article.

08/15/2010