The Museum of Sex Somehow Convinced Me That Carnivals are Sexy Instead of Scary

It’s officially spooky season, we can deny it no longer – and why would you want to?! I finally busted out all my favorite sweaters and am preparing to wear chic, oversized scarves a la the forever iconic image of Lenny Kravitz with his delightful, goldenrod-yellow behemoth.

Yes, the leaves are turning and bustling about as the cool tide of wind blows through. County fairs are a distant memory, a sweet summer reverie in this new season. We’ve moved on from cotton candy and Ferris wheels to pumpkin patches, apple picking, and haunted hayrides. Well, the collective We has moved on – but it appears as if the Museum of Sex still has carnivals on the mind.

Corn dogs and carneys are typically the first things to come to mind when the word “carnival” pops up. But is there some alternate universe in which the subversive, divergent existence of carnival culture is rooted in something slightly… sexier?

According to the Museum of Sex’s new exhibit Super Funland, it’s not an alternate reality at all. Through a series of educational and hyper-Instagrammable installations, MoSex walks visitors through several floors of fantastically reimagined bacchanalia complete with super sexualized carnivalesque games . I won a plush vagina and a banana. It was silly and fun.

The museums curators have a signature ability to uncover the sexuality in everything - from punk to feminism to medieval Europe and further backwards from there. They don’t shy away from the facts and material culture that make your most sexually freewheeling friend blush. It’s refreshing and important work.

Its also work that, in a very timely manner, goes hand-in-hand with many of my recent and ongoing projects. I’ve embarked on a personal research journey investigating how we (and by “we” I mean me, but I do think it is inherently a universal quest) rediscovering the mystical, primordial identity we are stripped of in adolescence. That’s a time when we simultaneously emerge into our sexuality and begin to feel shame surrounding it.

I wont get too deep into that now, though. Here are some fun photos from Super Funland!