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Photo by Ellen Stag
Lux Alptraum
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Photo courtesy of Moss Beauty
Rhonda Coleman
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Illustration by Chris Williams
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"So, where is the vagina?"
Sitting on the couch of Lux Alptraum, several guests take turns answering this most basic sexual question with a plastic model of the female reproductive system. Some of them, actual adults, fumble.
Nearly two years ago, Alptrauma writer, comedian, and sex educatorbegan screening the outdated sex-ed videos she'd collected during her time as an after-school sex educator. Once a month at New York's Union Hall, Alptraum's The Wonderful World of Boning is a little Dr. Ruth and a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Alptraum and comedian friends riff on her ever-expanding collection of awkward short films, which span discussions of HIV in the eighties, and fifties films that address sex in absurdly oblique terms.
"They're these 'Don't have sex!' movies that are these weird little soap operas where nobody mentions sex," Alptraum says, "but girls will talk about, like, 'Oh no, we're going to go too far!'"
At a recent tour stop at Chapel Hill's Local 506, Alptraum screened a few short films, including Disney's The Story of Menstruation and the feature-length PBS production What Kids Want to Know About Sex and Growing Up. Sometimes these movies pack extra surprises, like a sixteen-year-old Dave Chappelle rapping about HIV and AIDS in one short, or a preteen Ashanti wondering, indeed, what kids want to know about sex.
Alptraum enjoys poking fun, but part of The Wonderful World of Boning's mission is reconciling the numberous ways people learnedor more often, didn't learnabout sex in school, from parents, and from peers.
"Even in the best of circumstances, we're still very misguided a lot of times," she says.
Her adult audiences generally arrive too late in life to learn much new stuff, but Alptraum hopes to affect how we approach sex talk among ourselves and with the next generation. The comedic element softens the blow and makes it easier to open up and ask questionswhich, in turn, should lead to better sex for everybody. Allison Hussey
Next Up: Craigslust
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Craigslust
I'm sorry if you've never scrolled through Craigslist's Casual Encounters, a bastion of lusty advertisements for sex of all sortsman for man or man and man for man, trans for woman, woman for couple, and so on. The postings, almost always explicit and lewd, are often hilarious, sometimes even intentionally so. They can be tragic and poetic, revealing unintentional biases or traumas, desires and demons of the person behind the keyboard.
Between February 1 and February 3, I read almost all the few thousand new posts on the Triangle's Casual Encounters boards, chuckling, sighing, and clicking away about as fast I could scan. These are the ten sentences that sent me into fits.
From one young couple in search of another for a "full swap": "After long time are back to cl. We are free whole weekend and we can definitely plan meeting up in downtown. She loves clubbings so we can do that."
From a Southeast Raleigh man looking to get rewired: "Looking for an electrician that likes to work naked/nude."
From one proud Durham homeowner: "Must have big dick. I have loud. And my own house."
From a "bull" in search of his "first cuck/hotwife couple": "I am a bit round about the gut, not fat so much as a barrel shape around the midsection, but despite this(Which I am currently working on getting rid of), I am almost literally the perfect weight for My height and all of My chubbly is almost evenly spread out."
From two thrifty dudes looking for one woman: "Not looking for a 'professional', if you know what I mean."
From one woman to another, hopefully: "Looking now for a fat clip to slurp!"
A 47-year-old man, looking for a married housewife: "Please Please be real, no spam."
From a Smithfield fella looking for "hot soapy shower sex"and socks: "mild to wild the wilder the better
I keep ur underwear an socks"
From a dude with a particular interest: "Lookn for men with hair shoulder"
From the amazing pickup line department: "Never appeared on America's Most Wanted nor an episode of COPS"
Next Up: The Hair Down There
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The Hair Down There
Rhonda Coleman was just trying to get a drink at Carrboro's Orange County Social Club when she encountered her new nicknameThe Vagina Lady.
"But it's so incorrect," Coleman says, protesting with a laugh. "It's the vulva. It's like being an ass man, but you get called the asshole man. It's the wrong part."
However anatomically inaccurate, the handle was telling for Coleman, then in the midst of creating a lookbook of pubic hair sculpting options that she called The Vagina Catalogue. Many of the women at the bar's patio table were clients at Moss Beauty, the women's salon Coleman started in 2010 after a stint spent waxing at the nearby Moshi Moshi. That time proved pivotal for Coleman, an Oklahoma native who admits that she was a tad homophobic before she moved to Chapel Hill and had so many close vulval encounters.
"People would say, 'Do whatever you think looks good,' and I would think, 'I'm not thinking about your pussy like that.' I was worried that people would think I was gay. None of it was cool," she remembers. "I thought I could make things less conversational by making a poster people could point toa visual menu."
That idea had unintended consequences: She began to see that this was the one chance woman had to talk about the topic. She found that process empowering, so much so that she decided not only to launch Moss Beauty (Moss being her euphemism for pubic hair) but also to turn the poster into a full book.
"It just started healing me," she says. "I started liking myself better. These seven years have helped me grow into who I am. I am no longer homophobic."
Those earlier hesitations she had about being so intimate with privates have changed completely. She's even started selling sex toys at Moss Beauty and is building a website, www.ladypositive.com, to serve as a more honest emporium for them. This outlook and approach stem from the people who have come to trust her.
"Through the back and forth with my clients, I've learned things. We don't talk about Kim Kardashian or the latest gossip bullshit, or the weather," Coleman says. "We talk about pretty intense stuff. People share a lot with me. We talk about sex. We talk about the way their vulva looks." Grayson Haver Currin
Next Up: Linked In
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Linked in
Most people consider relationships to be an exclusively coupled affair. That's just how things work, right?
But remaining indefinitely locked to one other human might not suit your preferences. As a therapist who specializes in counseling for nontraditional relationships, Durham's Sheffa Ariens has seen a lot of this.
"Polyamory recognizes that people's hearts get involved and that love, romance, and true intimacy can be a part of that," says Ariens.
Monogamy preferences and practices vary greatly, Ariens says. Some people prefer complete monogamy. Others engage in ethical nonmonogamy, an umbrella term referring to a relationship format that involves more than two partners, where everyone involved is aware of the arrangement. Some are exclusively polyamorous. Many others operate somewhere in between.
These relationships can take almost any form. It can be as varied as multiple people living and raising children together, having friends who are lovers, or even a partner-condoned arrangement involving a once-a-year romantic fling with an ex. In any case, approval, understanding, and honesty are paramount, says Ariens. With its focus on feelings, polyamory involves far more than just sexy fun and games.
"It really is like a graduate-level course in relationships," she says. "Any issues you've had with honesty, with communication, with conflictthose kinds of things are going to be exponentially more complicated in a relationship with more than two people."
If you're interested in pursuing a non-monogamous relationship, Ariens recommends starting with the book More Than Two: An Ethical Guide to Practical Polyamory. And online, OKCupid now allows couples to connect their profiles, making it easier for them to find other interested partners and vice versa. Allison Hussey
Next Up: The State of Sex
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The State of Sex
Are there any good North Carolina-centric sex positions, any novel arrangements named for state celebrities or geographical features? Surely, someone crafted "The Jesse Helms" in the eighties just to spite that prudish old tool, right? And Mount Mitchell has been the highest point east of the Mississippi since, well, before recorded history beganthere's got to be a pun there, right? Guess not.
To rectify the situation, we offer these eight potential Tar Heel sex handles. We're not really sure what they mean, how they work, or who they're for, but hey, use your imagination.
1. The Coal Ash Dump
2. The Phil's Berger (alternate: The Renee's Ellmers)
3. The Cardinal Sin
4. The Pulled Pork Sandwich
5. The Tar Hole
6. The Tyler Hansbr-O Face
7. The Hog Lagoon
8. The Cam Newton Read Option
This article appeared in print with the headline "Sides of Sex"
