If years of shakeout have proven anything, it's that the two things people want most on the Net are sex and search engines. On March 15, Nerve, the Web journal of "literate smut," will deliver both, with the launch of a selected and annotated index of the most arousing and curious sex sites, from sleek bondage forums, to nudist manifestos, to unabashedly Photoshopped galleries of celebrities in the buff.
Called NerveLink, the database of thousands of sites will be a core element in a major expansion of the stylish webzine. Nerve made a splash by positioning itself as the Olympia Press of online erotica last June, delivering edgy, pulse-pounding prose and photographs by brand-name littérateurs and artists such as Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plachy, Andres Serrano, and Poppy Z. Brite.
The upgrade will be paid for by a recently completed round of financing, which scored the publication US$100,000 from such investors as Steven Johnson of FEED, The Nation editor Andrew Shapiro, and India Cutler of the King Cutler Group, a high-tech investment banking firm. Other additions slated for the site - which opened its doors on June 26, 1997, the day the Communications Decency Act was dealt a fatal blow by the US Supreme Court - include an interactive forum called the NerveCenter, featuring live chat and threaded discussions moderated by authors Mikal Gilmore and Lisa Carver.
The NerveLink index will be edited by Jack Murnighan, whose books column, "Jack's Naughty Bits," serves up weekly provocations from literature with taglines like, "Dante learns that reading erotica can get way way too hot." Murnighan, who is writing incisive entries for sites compiled by a team of 30 netsurfers, is particularly beguiled by some of the Net's more outré offerings, such as a site for aficionados of images of women trapped in quicksand, and one for extremely short men seeking affairs with exceptionally tall women. The task facing his team, says Murnighan, is to "filter out huge amounts of schlock from the vast undifferentiated morass out there."
With the expansion, Nerve will join the ranks of sites that levy a fee for access to premium content, granting those willing to pay US$3.95 a month entry to the "members' gallery," featuring more graphic images than are offered on the open site.
In just eight months, the Silicon Alley-based publication has become emblematic of the cultural mores undergoing a sea of change as the Net weaves itself into daily life. As a gauge of its acceptance, the New York Times wrote about Nerve, but declined to specify the URL, in keeping with the Times' ban on pointers to adult-oriented Web addresses.
Though many of Nerve's intimate memoirs and cultural critiques would work fine on paper (a print magazine is on the drawing board, and a book is slotted for publication by Broadway Books this fall), Salon sex columnist Courtney Weaver thinks the Web was the perfect environment for Nerve to find its audience. "On the newsstand, it would have gotten pigeonholed with Playboy, Penthouse, and the Wet Pussy Journal, and the complexities of the subject would have been overlooked," Weaver says.
If the renaissance of self-publishing in the digital era hadn't come along, says Nerve founder and editor Rufus Griscom, "it could have been years before the publishing industry woke up to the ways attitudes towards sex are changing."
Among the shifts that Griscom observes is an increasing acceptance of images of women in active sex roles, and a recognition that women - especially young women - are eager, discerning consumers of erotic content. Among the site's readers, one-third are women, with that proportion rising to 50 percent in the 18-25 age group.
Unlike the coeds-in-cashmere showcases that catered to the Hefner generation, Nerve doesn't shy away from including images of men in sex scenes. And homosexuality, Griscom believes, is coming to be seen as part of a continuum of human erotic response.
"Our philosophy is one of polysexuality. There's less of a need now for those kinds of distinctions and niche groups," he says. While publications like Cosmopolitan are perennially running cover stories on "10 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life," Griscom says, "We don't want to fix people's sex lives. We want people to examine their sex lives - their humanity and vulnerability."
The secret of Nerve's success, Griscom contends, is walking a fine line. While drawing five million page views a month with such fare as Charles Gatewood's spike-shod dominatrixes, Nerve has been able to sign up such decidedly straight-laced advertisers as CBS SportsLine, CNET and CDnow by keeping certain images - like Richard Kern's women bound in rope - behind the members-only firewall.
When a major corporate sponsor offered to buy ad space if Griscom would throttle back on such taboo-testing exhibits as Serrano's "History of Sex," Griscom declined. "We've succeeded because we have an edge," he says.
Steven Johnson of FEED says he invested in Nerve because the site's business model was unusually sensible for a Web venture. "Rather than raise $100 million and hire 300 people, they stayed lean and grew along with their traffic."
Johnson also believes that the tone of the writing on Nerve is perfect for this moment in the evolution of sexual attitudes. "It's smart people, talking honestly about their own lives in sexy ways, without becoming gauzy art-theory erotica, and without heavy cultural diatribes," he says.
