Dec. 16, 2008 Sex, pornography, masturbation, Donald Sutherland's buttocks -- for 11 years, Nerve.com has treated such topics not as material for padlocked diaries but as fodder for sexy-smart cultural coverage. The online magazine features searing personal essays and fiction -- with contributions from such marquee writers as A.M. Homes, Rick Moody and Jonathan Safran Foer -- alongside regular sex advice from a variety of professions (last week it was glassblowers) and an array of artful nudie pics. Now, some of the best of this "literate smut," as the online magazine originally billed itself, can be found in the new anthology "Nerve: The First Ten Years."
Beyond just bringing legitimacy to sex writing and online photography, Nerve has turned the sex-segregated worlds of erotica and pornography into one coed Brooklyn-hip orgy -- and the nauseating clichés and mechanical in-and-out of either genre are not welcome. (Neither are the trite Carrie Bradshaws or Julia Allisons of the world.) The site has given birth to Nerve Personals, a matchmaking service for urban singles that helped make online dating cool, and the über-hip parenting site Babble. The magazine has also launched several media careers, like those of former sex and relationship columnists Em & Lo and writer Grant Stoddard (whose memoir "Working Stiff" is based on his popular sexual guinea-pig column "I Did It for Science").
But while Nerve has successfully introduced conversations about money shots and smelly bodily functions into the literate mainstream, the last thing the magazine wants is to do away with shame entirely. After all, shame is part of what makes sex interesting. That couldn't be clearer in the new anthology, in which the magazine's co-founders, Genevieve Field and Rufus Griscom, write: "We prefer to gnaw on [taboos] like squeaky dog toys." That brazen delight in sexual embarrassment is apparent even in the book's packaging. The muted colors of its cover, which features an unabashedly naked woman reclining in bed, is wrapped in a hot-pink plastic book jacket. (The effect is similar to slapping a glittery Playboy logo on the cover of the Kama Sutra.)
Inside, the happy dissonance continues: Touching essays about being a 28-year-old virgin ("Innocence in Extremis," Debra Boxer) and having sex with an HIV-positive partner ("Fear Factor," Paul Festa) are sandwiched between photos of a literal sex machine, penis puppetry, golden showers and a young woman cavorting around naked alongside her silver-haired grandmother. There are also lighthearted articles (for example, a confession of sexual fantasies about NPR by Salon's Sarah Hepola), and photographs that, unlike mainstream porn, are jarring in their familiarity (bare feet touching just beyond the edge of a blanket and a woman's toes tugging down a man's pants). The anthology is rounded out by pieces by celebrated authors like Alice Sebold and Chuck Palahniuk and interviews with Norman Mailer and Mary Gaitskill.
The book, which is also available online in its entirety, challenges readers to hold in harmony all of the conflicted thoughts and feelings that it arouses. One moment, I was in slack-jawed awe at a brilliant essay by Lucy Grealy about using sex to overcome a physical deformity; the next, my face was scarlet as I quickly flipped past a photo of a woman boldly holding a mirror between her legs for my viewing pleasure. At times, I felt like I was reading an X-rated New Yorker; at other times, like I was flipping through Hustler. The book made me feel alternately like a well-rounded intellectual and an embarrassed adolescent -- and, often enough, it made me squirm in my seat for reasons that have very little to do with shame.
It's sex in all of its various incarnations: innocent, dirty, ugly, beautiful, moving and hilarious. As Griscom, now CEO of Nerve's parent company Material Media, writes in the book's preface, sex "is a crucible human experience, sometimes humbling, other times triumphant, in which we push up against the limits of sentience and quite literally the limits of ourselves, the places where we end and others begin."
Salon spoke with Griscom, who has two sons with his wife, Alisa Volkman, co-publisher of Babble, from his office in New York about the anniversary collection.
In the book's preface, you write that Nerve is a reaction to the sad extremes of the smut spectrum: pornography and erotica. Why hasn't either genre managed to get it right?
Most sex writing and photography -- either on the porn or erotica side -- has a very narrow objective, which is to arouse people. It's an important service, and there's nothing wrong with it. But turning people on, particularly men, is just not very complicated. It's kind of like making lampshades. That's not what we wanted to do.
It's hard to write well about sex. It's also hard to take truly original photographs of naked people. There's a minefield of clichés and euphemisms out there.
Nerve has managed to attract some literary lions over the years. Why do these people want to write about a topic with such huge potential for failure and embarrassment?
I think a lot of great writers are attracted to the challenge. Of course, we've had some cases where people have brought pieces to us and then said, "You know what? On second thought, I just can't publish this." We have also had quite a few writers publish under pseudonyms. Many people haven't gotten over the embarrassment factor. It's in those moments when you have to sort of massage writers into gathering the confidence to put themselves out there, where I feel most proud of the writers themselves, and happy that we've been able to provide a venue for them.
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Is there a particular piece that stands out in that respect?
One that comes to mind is Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Body." Lucy, who later died, wrote a piece about her struggles with jaw cancer, and about how she went through a period of wearing shorter skirts and being more risqué. [She wrote about] how she grappled with the relationship between her sexuality and her disfigurement, and it was one of these pieces that took a lot of courage to publish. It's a very powerful few thousand words.
What makes sex writing good?
I think what makes sex writing interesting is the fact that we still -- despite all these many decades of sexual liberation -- struggle with taboos and a sense of guilt and shame over parts of our sexualities. One of the ways Nerve has always been different from the pro-sex contingent is that we think the taboos are what make sex interesting. Sure, if you get rid of all the taboos, you'd have a lot more people having a lot more sex, but it would be much less interesting to write about. It would just be another form of calisthenics; the reason it's more than that is the shame and taboos.
All the best pieces we've published deal with what I refer to as the blush zone. If either the writer or editor loses their ability to blush, then it's boring and they should get out of the business. Appreciating and teasing out the subtleties and complexities of the writer's relationship to internalized taboos and their own sense of shame is the beauty of the exercise. If they can simultaneously throw in some humor and some poignant revelations about the human condition then that's a masterwork. That's the Holy Grail.
Beyond just bringing legitimacy to sex writing and online photography, Nerve has turned the sex-segregated worlds of erotica and pornography into one coed Brooklyn-hip orgy -- and the nauseating clichés and mechanical in-and-out of either genre are not welcome. (Neither are the trite Carrie Bradshaws or Julia Allisons of the world.) The site has given birth to Nerve Personals, a matchmaking service for urban singles that helped make online dating cool, and the über-hip parenting site Babble. The magazine has also launched several media careers, like those of former sex and relationship columnists Em & Lo and writer Grant Stoddard (whose memoir "Working Stiff" is based on his popular sexual guinea-pig column "I Did It for Science").
But while Nerve has successfully introduced conversations about money shots and smelly bodily functions into the literate mainstream, the last thing the magazine wants is to do away with shame entirely. After all, shame is part of what makes sex interesting. That couldn't be clearer in the new anthology, in which the magazine's co-founders, Genevieve Field and Rufus Griscom, write: "We prefer to gnaw on [taboos] like squeaky dog toys." That brazen delight in sexual embarrassment is apparent even in the book's packaging. The muted colors of its cover, which features an unabashedly naked woman reclining in bed, is wrapped in a hot-pink plastic book jacket. (The effect is similar to slapping a glittery Playboy logo on the cover of the Kama Sutra.)
Inside, the happy dissonance continues: Touching essays about being a 28-year-old virgin ("Innocence in Extremis," Debra Boxer) and having sex with an HIV-positive partner ("Fear Factor," Paul Festa) are sandwiched between photos of a literal sex machine, penis puppetry, golden showers and a young woman cavorting around naked alongside her silver-haired grandmother. There are also lighthearted articles (for example, a confession of sexual fantasies about NPR by Salon's Sarah Hepola), and photographs that, unlike mainstream porn, are jarring in their familiarity (bare feet touching just beyond the edge of a blanket and a woman's toes tugging down a man's pants). The anthology is rounded out by pieces by celebrated authors like Alice Sebold and Chuck Palahniuk and interviews with Norman Mailer and Mary Gaitskill.
The book, which is also available online in its entirety, challenges readers to hold in harmony all of the conflicted thoughts and feelings that it arouses. One moment, I was in slack-jawed awe at a brilliant essay by Lucy Grealy about using sex to overcome a physical deformity; the next, my face was scarlet as I quickly flipped past a photo of a woman boldly holding a mirror between her legs for my viewing pleasure. At times, I felt like I was reading an X-rated New Yorker; at other times, like I was flipping through Hustler. The book made me feel alternately like a well-rounded intellectual and an embarrassed adolescent -- and, often enough, it made me squirm in my seat for reasons that have very little to do with shame.
It's sex in all of its various incarnations: innocent, dirty, ugly, beautiful, moving and hilarious. As Griscom, now CEO of Nerve's parent company Material Media, writes in the book's preface, sex "is a crucible human experience, sometimes humbling, other times triumphant, in which we push up against the limits of sentience and quite literally the limits of ourselves, the places where we end and others begin."
Salon spoke with Griscom, who has two sons with his wife, Alisa Volkman, co-publisher of Babble, from his office in New York about the anniversary collection.
In the book's preface, you write that Nerve is a reaction to the sad extremes of the smut spectrum: pornography and erotica. Why hasn't either genre managed to get it right?
Most sex writing and photography -- either on the porn or erotica side -- has a very narrow objective, which is to arouse people. It's an important service, and there's nothing wrong with it. But turning people on, particularly men, is just not very complicated. It's kind of like making lampshades. That's not what we wanted to do.
It's hard to write well about sex. It's also hard to take truly original photographs of naked people. There's a minefield of clichés and euphemisms out there.
Nerve has managed to attract some literary lions over the years. Why do these people want to write about a topic with such huge potential for failure and embarrassment?
I think a lot of great writers are attracted to the challenge. Of course, we've had some cases where people have brought pieces to us and then said, "You know what? On second thought, I just can't publish this." We have also had quite a few writers publish under pseudonyms. Many people haven't gotten over the embarrassment factor. It's in those moments when you have to sort of massage writers into gathering the confidence to put themselves out there, where I feel most proud of the writers themselves, and happy that we've been able to provide a venue for them.
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Is there a particular piece that stands out in that respect?
One that comes to mind is Lucy Grealy's "Autobiography of a Body." Lucy, who later died, wrote a piece about her struggles with jaw cancer, and about how she went through a period of wearing shorter skirts and being more risqué. [She wrote about] how she grappled with the relationship between her sexuality and her disfigurement, and it was one of these pieces that took a lot of courage to publish. It's a very powerful few thousand words.
What makes sex writing good?
I think what makes sex writing interesting is the fact that we still -- despite all these many decades of sexual liberation -- struggle with taboos and a sense of guilt and shame over parts of our sexualities. One of the ways Nerve has always been different from the pro-sex contingent is that we think the taboos are what make sex interesting. Sure, if you get rid of all the taboos, you'd have a lot more people having a lot more sex, but it would be much less interesting to write about. It would just be another form of calisthenics; the reason it's more than that is the shame and taboos.
All the best pieces we've published deal with what I refer to as the blush zone. If either the writer or editor loses their ability to blush, then it's boring and they should get out of the business. Appreciating and teasing out the subtleties and complexities of the writer's relationship to internalized taboos and their own sense of shame is the beauty of the exercise. If they can simultaneously throw in some humor and some poignant revelations about the human condition then that's a masterwork. That's the Holy Grail.
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