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Urge: Naked World
Thai cock-cutting catastrophe
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By Hank Hyena
[12/07/99]

Urge
Thank heaven for little girls
Underage-looking aspiring starlets are lining up for the chance to make $2,000 a day in the flourishing imitation child-porn industry.
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[12/04/99]

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Unhappy meal
How to eat yourself to death.
By Mary Roach
[12/03/99]

Urge: Naked World
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By Hank Hyena
[12/03/99]

The culture of secrecy
Docs make mistakes, but proposed regulations to make them talk about it won't change that scary fact.
By Dr. Jeff Drayer
[12/02/99]

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Nowhere is this irony more striking than in the case of Courtney Weaver, author of "Unzipped," a book based on her former Salon column of the same name. Unlike so many of her fellow sex scribes, who cavort through the darkest and brightest corners of the human libido and fashion themselves as experts, Weaver has never claimed to be an authority.

Even now, after having visited dozens of dens of iniquity and shared cocktails with scores of fetishists, call girls, strippers and horn dogs of all breeds, she denies the mantle of sexpert. Instead, hers has been the work of a stranger in a strange land. And although she mined the extremes of sexual culture, she has preferred to explore the sex lives of the lumpen libidos: her friends, her family and any Jane or John Doe that would open up their otherwise Gap-filled closets and allow her a peek at their skeletons.

Peering stoically at the many facets of human desire, she's kept a dogged diary of her years as a tourist in the kingdom of Eros. Even in chronicling her own love life, she approaches her subject with a mixture of bemused detachment and an abiding sense of astonishment.

Now with the release of her first book, she opens her life and those of her intimates once again, offering a Pandora's feast of modern-day sexual and romantic imbroglio. From Jemma, her self-assured friend who has chosen to become a slave, to Marie, her wickedly honest hairstylist and recently divorced mother, to Harriet, her best friend and devotee of "The Rules," to her own turbulent, less-than-noble sexual escapades, Weaver spins a portrait of late 20th century single life as vivid and addictive as our own friends' secret lives.

At a neo-bohemian cafe, filled with overfed freelancers, in San Francisco's Mission District, Weaver ate a Cuban beef sandwich and talked about her new book, telling her friends' secrets and her waning nymphomania.

When you first started writing, did you ever imagine that you would become a new genre of writer known as a sex writer? You started doing it right when it sort of became this new genre.

No. I was completely naive on that score. I was just telling these stories that women and men were talking about. And trying to just talk about it in an honest way that wasn't so smarmy and marginalized. But the column was never only about sex. It was usually sex as a lens to look at other issues. Like relationships, interactions, sexual politics, lives, expectations. Sex was like the springboard. I never saw myself as a sex writer. If anything I was like a ... I don't know, a relationship investigator.

It's not that I think sex is so interesting in and of itself. But what's interesting is all the psychology and the interactions that go behind it.

Yeah. In the beginning, you were sort of mining the really personal parts about your own life. Was that easy for you? Or was it sometimes difficult?

In the beginning it was always really easy. Because that's the way I had always been, and I had never been coy about it. It was coming from this position like, well, I've talked about this all my life, and my parents have talked about it and my friends have talked about it and everyone I know talks about it all the time. So writing about it is not so surprising or weird or outre. But after a certain amount of time, it has to shift because you can't keep mining the same sort of ground over and over again.

You have to actually go out and have life experiences and have some knowledge, some self-awareness of what you're doing. And be able to think about it. And if you're talking about it all the time you're not really thinking about it. You're not learning anything new. It was time for me to stop putting the lens so much on myself and my friends and step back.

Next page | I just can't step back