SHOULD SEX MUSEUMS BE CLASSIFIED AS MUSEUMS?

Natalie Shykoluk AGAD 226

One of the arguments raised in the assignment is that sex museums are simply a form of cultural tourism or entertainment, subscribing to the genre of popular culture. In order to examine the validity of this notion, we must first ask ourselves if these attributes are found in other reputable museums. For example, many museums around the world rely on revenue derived from cultural tourism to help sustain their operations. They even market their exhibits through tourism bureaus and advertising. Renowned museums, such as the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art, exhibit popular or pop art and cultural artifacts. And, museums today are looking to create engaging and entertaining exhibits and programming that appeal to diverse audiences. For these reasons, sex museums and real museums cannot be differentiated based on these attributes. Perhaps a better question to ask is whether we consider the history of and the human experience of sex a valid topic of study and contemplation. Traditionally, museums were established for the enjoyment and enlightenment of the upper and middle classes, as well as to show off personal collections. Many museums were created in the Victorian era, a time period known for its puritanism and strict class and cultural hierarchies. Until recently, these museums were seen as repositories of knowledge and providers of information (i.e., an ivory tower), rather than having a synergetic relationship with other parties in how knowledge is created and disseminated (Alberta Museums Association, 2001). We as a society have become less prudish in the past 50 years, although as many of the sex museums in the assigned reading demonstrate, humans have documented their sexual behaviour and interests for thousands of years. Sex is an important part of being human and, as museums are dedicated to understanding and documenting the human condition for present and future generations, it is only natural that there would be museums dedicated to sex.

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Not all sex museums are motivated by profit, as we can observe with the Museum of Sex, New York City, and the Museu de lerotica, Barcelona, which are not-for-profit institutions. Many of the sex museums listed in the reading are for-profit, as are many non-sex museums across the globe, especially small, private museums which dont meet the criteria of a museum according to the International Council of Museums. Like small, private museums, some sex museums collections are amateur and hold little public value. Other not-for-profit sex museums employ curators and trained educators (Malone, 2011), and have built their collections and exhibitions using the expertise of learned professionals. We can reason that because a museum is about sex, it doesnt necessarily mean its collections are amateur. The media has a part to play in how we see and value sex and other non-traditional museums. Using words like kinkiest and sexiest to describe a museum (Martinez, 2010) only serves to attract the wrong kind of attention. Of course, to attract visitors a museum may need to step out of old-fashioned methods of advertising. However, this terminology simply reinforces the idea that sex museums outside the sphere of real museums; rather, they are places on the fringes of society that cater to the publics basest needs and interests. To change public and scholarly perception, not-for-profit sex museums might benefit from highlighting their similarities to other museums and not using provocative language. If museums want to distance themselves from the ivory tower image and celebrate human diversity, they need to embrace many ways of seeing the world, including through sex museums. Sex museums and more traditional museums share many commonalities: education, entertainment, documenting human history and diversity, and preserving collections and the human experience for future generations. Therefore, unless one is set on the idea that all museums must be non-for-profit, focused on established exhibition categories (e.g., the natural world, ethnography, the Classical era) to be real, then sex museums can be seen as part of the postmodernist trend towards recognizing that the public is made up of many diverse groups who are keen to articulate their needs (Reeve and Woollard, 2006:5).

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LITERATURE CITED: Alberta Museums Association (2001). Standard Practices Handbook for Museums, 2nd ed. Museum Excellence Series: Book 1. Edmonton, AB: Alberta Museums Association. Malone, T. (2011, July). If I Dont Have An Erection When Im Visiting a Museum, I Know Its No Good. PMC Magazine. Retrieved 15 September 2012 from http://pmc-mag.com/2011/07/museum-of sex/?full=content. Martinez, M. (2010, March). Visit the Worlds 12 Sexiest Museums. ABC News Explore. Retrieved 15 September 2012 from http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/worlds-kinkiest-sex-museums/story? id=10081617. Reeve, J. and Woollard, V. (2006). Influences on Museum Practice. In The Responsive Museum: Working with Audiences in the Twenty-First Century. Lang, C., Reeve, J., and Woollard, V., eds. Abingdon, UK: Ashgate Publishing Group.

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