Sex Carnival

A tongue-in-cheek odyssey through the sex capitals of the world. The applause is near-deafening as crowd favourite Tristan Taormino makes her way to the podium to pick up her award. “Oh my God! This is so wonderful,” she gushes, all the while trying to hold back tears. “Buttman, you gave me a chance when no one else would, and the next thing I knew I was the subject of a gang-bang, and now this… I just want to thank Mom and Dad.”

Welcome to the world of Sex Carnival — a whimsical, eye-opening record of one man’s travels into the bold new world of porn. Bill Brownstein provides a guide for the uninitiated and the bewildered, a hands-on intro for anyone who wonders why the porno biz has become so mainstream in just the last few years.

Brownstein’s global travels take him from watching Tristan and other sex superstars accept their trophies at the annual porn awards ceremony in Las Vegas to witnessing the weekend shopping sprees of Dutch families as the kids push their grocery carts through the biggest sex supermarkets on earth. He takes us from dungeons and dragons pleasure chambers in New York to a different kind of pleasure — the rough trade in Hamburg. And along the way, he stops off to catch some lap-dancing in Montreal and all kinds of unexpected action at the sex bars of Paris.

Sex Carnival is no definitive history of porn. Instead, this book is fun. Brownstein gives us a lively account of our obsession with the business of sex, an odyssey of one man’s encounters with a universe of titillation that is fresh, original, naughty, and very bizarre.