Karley Sciortino: the sex blogger and Slutever presenter redefining sexuality

Sciortino – a real-life Carrie Bradshaw – uses humour, parody and satire to open up conversations about sex

In an early episode of Slutever, the new web series presented by 32-year-old Vogue columnist Karley Sciortino, viewers met sex doll engineer Matt, a goateed dude in cargo shorts who waxed soulful: “I don’t think the English language has enough words to describe love, enough words to describe affection, enough words to describe attraction.” It’s this humanity within so-called deviancy that delights and drives Sciortino, a woman who’s building a small empire on the reclamation of the word “slut”. As she writes in her newly published book, also called Slutever (subtitle: Dispatches from a Sexually Autonomous Woman in a Post-Shame World): “A slut is someone who has no moral obstacle between themselves and their desire to enjoy sex.”

On the afternoon we meet, in the well-upholstered hush of Manhattan’s Ludlow House (annual membership $3,200), Sciortino, blonde and with a big, gorgeous gummy grin, is serving up the impervious polish of a Whit Stillman heroine – pink satin mini-dress, black patent Mary Janes, a boxy cream jacket with gold buttons that may or may not be Chanel. It’s a femmey aesthetic that feels undercut with pastiche. As she eyerolls in one opening sequence to her Viceland TV show: “Ugh, life is so hard – between meeting my blog deadlines and performing my gender I barely have time to get anything done.” On set, she and her all-female team (excepting their “token male” cinematographer) called this pink fantasia of a boudoir “the brain room” – “which is not what it looks like,” she admits. It’s super labial, I offer. “Yes, exactly,” she laughs. “Sex is such a tense subject so I think that humour and parody and satire and being able to make fun of yourself are really disarming when opening up that conversation.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2FpZTX6