Do we really need sex museums?

A popular erotic exhibition from New York's Museum of Sex is due to transfer to London. Dr Brooke Magnanti argues why such spaces, as 'fun' as they may be, are wholly unnecessary.

If you go down to Fifth Avenue, you're sure of a big surprise.

New Yorkers visiting the Museum of Sex there have lately been enjoying Funland: Pleasures and Perils of the Erotic Fairground - a kind of sex-themed amusement park where booby bouncy castles, penis races, and an orifice-strewn climbing wall all add to the experience.

Bompass and Parr, the art duo behind the exhibition, hope to bring Funland to London once its New York run is through. According to Old Etonian Sam Bompas, the work is more about the reactions it produces than the installations themselves. "It's gentle, it's got a British humorous approach to sexuality which is quite playful."

I have to wonder though, as fun as this admittedly sounds, is it necessary?

It's not the motives of the artists that seem off - art is, famously, whatever you can get away with. And why not. But rather, what are the motives of the people going?

It's odd how sex-plus-a-few-decades gets neatly recategorized from shameless to blameless. Consider the ubiquitous vintage images of Bettie Page, a fetish model who was controversial in her day but now has been subsumed into the cultural static. Back then, her career reportedly ended when hearings of the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce appeared to lay blame for a man's death during a bondage session on photos featuring her. Now, her image adorns everything from pint glasses to paper dolls.

When it comes to de-sexing the past, we've all been there - with an hour or more to spare in Amsterdam and wandering into the Sex Museum, tittering at sepia photographs of antique forebears getting it on (which bears more than a striking resemblance to sex now, surprise surprise). Meanwhile around the corner where real-life contemporary sex is taking place in the kamers (windows), a decidedly non-hilarious debate rages on that threatens to put the red light district in the past. And then what? A kamer museum? So we can laugh and point and stare at how people used to have sex?

Visitors to the exhibition in New York love it. "It's like adult fun," one attendee is quoted as saying. You know what else is also like adult fun? ACTUAL SEX.

Is this all there is - sex as a sideshow? A Benny Hill-esque view of human congress? Benny Hill has his place of course - sex is kind of ridiculous, which makes all the straight-faced opining on the dangers of having it so twistedly funny - but surely it needs no museum. Our entire world is, in its way, a monument to sex: literature and film, visual art and music are preoccupied with the getting of it, the withholding of it, what it can do, what it can't. We already live in the museum of sex; it's called life.