Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen

I love the honesty! Sex columnist, sex surrogate, art star, and the cutest elf I've ever had the pleasure listen to :) This book is hilarious, and actually opened my mind to a new dimension of human sexuality. Loved it.

Reverend Jen Miller has a long history of doing odd or shocking things. That might be especially peculiar in a reverend, but she (like myself) is legally a minister, via the Universal Life Church, which ordains anyone who asks, and (unlike myself) she uses the "Reverend" title in all she does, and responds to greetings such as "Hi, Rev!" For over a decade, she has hosted a monthly performance show called "Reverend Jen's Anti-Slam" which is sort of an amateur night for those who want to act weird in front of an audience. For such stars, she founded the Art Star Scene, which has a magazine that takes advantage of the acronym. She curates a Troll Museum in her apartment. She is well known to her fellow New York citizens, but she came to national attention when she took over from Grant Stoddard in writing the "I Did It for Science" columns at Nerve.com. She would do "sexperiments" on assignment, writing up each with a hypothesis, description of the experiment, a statement of results, and a conclusion. She had written for Nerve before, she was done with boyfriends and wanted lots of sex without strings, and she needed the money. Now her book _Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen_ (Soft Skull Press) collects the columns, fills them out with some autobiographical essays about what she was going through before this assignment came along, and in between the monthly columns, and what happened after the last one. The Rev is enthusiastic, charming, and funny. Her reports on her adventures are fun because she obviously had fun with them, and because they are titillating, and because no one else is going to wind up doing all the experimentation to which she has so selflessly submitted herself. She learned a lot. For instance, she learned how to clean a bathtub. Her first experiment was as a nude housecleaner; she was following a tradition, as this is paid work for certain ladies in New York. It turns out she did have to get good ones, because the first guy who replies to her ad says he is concerned "... that because you are going to be naked, you won't do a good job cleaning my apartment." For one assignment, she went to fellatio school. "In comparison to my fine arts education, a class in fellatio sounded useful." She finds a friend in her performance circle who agrees to let her test her newfound skills on him, but exhaustion and inebriation get in the way: "Even though I showed up for class on time and took abundant notes, it wasn't enough." After that assignment, she learned about "the wackiest fetish I'd ever heard of: _balloons_." And if this isn't strange enough, there is a dichotomy within the fetishists, between "looners" who were "poppers" and those who were "nonpoppers", the later getting off from playing with the inflatables and the former enjoying the satisfaction of the ultimate pop. The headmaster of the Princess Reform School teaches, among other things, bondage and sexual submission. "Unlike other reform schools

I really loved Rev Jen's book. I had read several of the pieces when they initially appeared online but those that I missed were a real treat to catch up on in this compendium. Not to mention the addition of a few shorter chapters that add some context about what was going on in her personal life at the time. There are scenes that I've recreated in my head from reading the book that make me burst out laughing just thinking of them. I won't give them away here, you've got to read it for yourself!

I had enjoyed Rev Jen's columns when they originally appeared on Nerve and was pleased to see them gathered together in book form as they are laugh out loud hilarious. I have read some of these essays five times. I have read them out loud at parties. I have read them over the phone to friends. There is an ineffable quality of pleasure in this book of someone who is wholly and truly themselves, who tries and succeeds, who tries and fails, who succumbs to the ordinary human need for love only to discover that love will leave you with a bruised coccyx in a ditch at someone else's wedding.

Live Nude Elf breaks the mold of sex writing and sex columns, not only because its author dons elf ears, lives on the Lower East Side, and is a self-proclaimed "art star," but because her wit, sense of humor, offbeat friends and mix of earnestness sans materialism are something we've seen unfortunately little of when it comes to sex writing. Based on her "I Did It For Science" columns for Nerve.com, Reverend Jen Miller gives her life story, as a misfit, artist, New Yorker and lover, without devolving into the same old clichés we've seen a million times. Miller can get away with saying something like her a--hole is "smiling," because she's already walked us through all the research she's done to get to that point. She tackles her assignments not like they are acts from another planet, but with genuine curiosity, whether it's working as a nude housecleaner or doing a stint on a porn set. The people she meets along the way are more than just "subjects" or fodder for her writing; they are given room, here, to be as crazy, funny, obnoxious, and sexy as they want to be. One of the most tender moments here happens when Jen is trapped inside a balloon at a fetish party. First, she's alone, then she's joined by a young man. "We stared at each other like we'd just climbed through a wardrobe and found Narnia. It was hard to believe the real world lay just outside the latex." What I liked best about this book is that Miller doesn't have an agenda. Though she certainly gains sexual skills along the way, she's not looking to offer sex advice or flaunt anything. She admits to being just as messed up about love as anyone else. After a breakup, she writes in a chapter entitled "I'll Never Wash This Vagina Again," about her broken heart. "I was lonely and he was a good lover. And a good lover, no matter how cruel, is hard to give up. I needed rehab for my addiction to Nick's penis." She dates musicians, enters her very own Sex Toy Olympics, hunts for rich older men and fresh young ones, watches the entirety of Sex and the City (the TV show), and learns to squirt. For much of the book, she has an affair with a bisexual couple (who both are into her, not so much each other). Love is as much as a part of Live Nude Elf as sex, and her artistic passion extends into the bedroom. This is an excellent, funny, wild, yet also heartfelt book. It's a far cry from Carrie Bradshaw and company, who I highly doubt would ever want to associate herself with being an "art fag." Reverend Jen is a sex columnist for all the freaks, misfits, and artists who don't give a ___ about Manolo Blahniks, who wouldn't buy them even if they could afford them (which they can't). Her humor is intelligent, rather than simply playing sex for laughs. Take this book to bed and you're sure to get off, in more ways than one.