Grandma's Sex Museum

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2006.

Miami's South Beach is famously sexy. Everywhere you look there's glistening, touchable skin, and every impulse that goes with it. But some of SoBe's steamiest scenes aren't in the clubs. Lots of images -- naked celebrities, people doin' it with game birds and women straddling airplanes -- gather in a more discreet location, overseen by a 71-year-old grandmother.

On a corner building in the heart of South Beach, a small neon sign quietly advertises the "World Erotic Art Museum," and inside is most of the $10 million erotic art collection of Naomi Wilzig, who has been hunting down images of our glorious sex lives for the past 15 years. She used to collect garden-variety antiques until that fateful day when her son asked her to find something a little more blue -- not in color -- for his apartment. She took up the challenge and found a new thrill in the world of sexy old things.

"You have to choose to see it. You've got to ask for it," Wilzig tells me via telephone, explaining that antique dealers generally don't put the racy stuff in their displays. "It was a challenge to find it, and it was an awakening that it exists, and that it's beautiful … and a shame that it was hidden."

Hidden no longer, since Naomi made her collection public last fall. "We're not pornographic," Wilzig notes, and she's right. Walking through the museum, the spirit wasn't titillation but celebration. It was actually downright cheerful. There was some great art -- as well as the campy, cute and kitschy -- but from the depictions of Adam and Eve to the bracelet of Bettie Page, it was all so fun. Wilzig's collection takes the sensuality we all explore behind closed doors and celebrates it out in the open.

A Day-Glo psychedelic image of the Beatles -- naked -- greets you as you enter. In an area devoted to Asia, there are three sizes of dildos from China, circa 1800; a case full of netsukes -- Japanese ivory carvings of copulating couples (along with some serious genital close-ups) -- dating from 1900 to 1950; and a 1980 Indonesian carving of a man "shielding his eyes from his oversized penis."

Speaking of big schlongs, there's the sculpture used as a murder weapon in the movie "A Clockwork Orange," with a balance mechanism inside that makes it actually rock. Suggestive ceremonial masks, imaginative teapots, sweet and playful paintings -- there's something of the nudge-nudge, wink-wink variety to make everyone smile.

What does it take to stand out among hundreds of such sexy pieces? Behold: the Kama Sutra bed. I don't know that I've ever seen anything so elaborate outside the Vatican. The four posters of this massive eight-piece creation by German roofer Dieter Sporleder are shaped like penises (peni? sadly, I seldom need to refer to them en masse). The rest of the bed, made from ybyraro wood, is hand-engraved with 138 images from the world's most beloved how-to book.

The museum also has a number of panels from Japanese shunga, or pillow books (illustrated sex manuals). One pillow book was among Wilzig's original finds for her son, as well as a bronze statue depicting a menage a trois.

I get an idea of Wilzing's personal taste when she speaks with pride about her collection of images of Leda and the Swan, depicted in porcelain, bronze, ivory and silver.

"People ask, 'What's sexy about a woman and a bird?' It's a Greek myth and a subject that has captured imaginations throughout the world," Wilzig explains. Yes, there's the usual mythology stuff -- seduction, murder, illegitimate children -- but in the art itself, Wilzig sees images of "complete innocence and complete sexuality."

Many people wouldn't put those two concepts together, but Naomi Wilzig has a collector's eye, and when it comes to real finds, I guess it takes one to know one. Leaving the museum, I wonder: If this collection had been amassed by a 30-year-old man, would I have been intrigued enough to hotfoot it to Miami from Orlando, ASAP? Doubtful. Older women presenting sex -- whether it's technical, and brought to you by Dr. Ruth, or art and aesthetics, brought to you by Naomi Wilzig -- just feels more credible.

Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, Fla.

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