SHAKING blog

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Memo to Adam Moss

Fine, I admit it: I never enjoyed reading about the comings and goings of Amy Sohn's vagina. In the mid-90s, Sohn had a column in The New York Press, don't remember what it was called, but it was something to the effect of, "Take My Vagina... Please!" In truth, though I was never particularly thrilled by reading about the ins and outs of her lady lips, there was the element of prurient fun in seeing where the dewy body of a recent Brown grad would go that did keep me interested. Her column read like a diary entry, you got the feeling that these adventures really were just a part of her life, and she could chronicle the secret lives of perverts because she really was one herself. So despite the fact that it would make me shiver, I read the column often because I felt like she was part of an interesting scene that, as a single New Yorker on the make myself, I wanted to know about.

Cut to 10 years later: Sohn, married, living in Brooklyn and about to burst with baby, is STILL writing about the proclivities of "sexy" New Yorkers in New York magazine. And you know what? The column is FAR more disturbing to me now. Why? Well, for example this week she writes about Stay At Home Dads, a group known as SAHDs, saying they're finally getting the respect they deserve. Right. Okay, but here's what's really SAD -- though I believe Sohn does know a great number of people still having sex, her columns now read like homework assignments. The exuberance of a young woman having all sorts of sex in all kinds of positions and places has been replaced by a 30something mommy-to-be who thinks a man wearing a baby Bjorn is hot. EWWWWW!

Ewwwwww.

Over the past few weeks, Sohn's "Mating" column has discussed: "Clique warfare in new-mommy circles," "infertility doctors and drugs," "the internet hookup culture." Excuse me, but WTF? Though I'm sure she's becoming an expert on this mommy biz, this does not a sex column make. At this point she's writing softly-reported articles for a parenting magazine. How bout that scoop on internet dating, eh? It freaking sounds like she's an anthropologist on Mars with a revelation like that. Sadie, didja hear that? The young people are hooking up on the internet. Seriously, what's next? How to make a necklace from an umbilical chord? Breast pumping chic? Sex between feedings?

I call on you, Adam Moss, editor in chief of the much improved New York magazine to make this stop. Or, at least if you're not going to fire her boring, anti-sexual pregant patootie and hire someone who's still actively part of the urban sex scene, at least get someone interesting to make a comment when you run a picture like this of Owen Wilson... or is it Ellen DeGeneres?:

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