By Xeni Jardin
Jon Traven does not look like a sex-machine inventor. He looks like a cowboy.

But the divorced Christian homesteader from Idaho is one of many makers of garage-built erotic devices featured in Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews, a book by Timothy Archibald that documents the secretive subculture of hobbyists whose creations bear names like The Thumpstir and The Gangbang.

“Here I am, this divorced Christian guy, not promiscuous at all, and here I am with a sex machine,” reads Traven’s monologue in the book. “It was an idea I came up with in the last year or two of the marriage, as a last-ditch attempt to save whatever we had … our sex life, if nothing else. She actually pushed me for a divorce before I could finish it and give it to her.

“I will require anyone ordering a machine from me to provide proof of marriage and a signed statement of intent to use only within that marriage. Kind of like a gun dealer that requires proof of age and proof of passage of a firearm safety test before selling someone a firearm. Sexual arousal is a doorway to a person’s very soul and isn’t to be messed with lightly.”

Archibald shot Sex Machines on a medium-format Hasselblad camera, relying mostly on ambient, natural light. The resulting aesthetic is unstaged and unblinking. It’s as if you’ve stepped into the kitchen of the Hide-A-Cock’s inventor, and the machine were there staring right back at you — from between a Pop-Tarts box and a half-eaten bag of Tostitos. Think American Gothic with giant mecha-dildos replacing pitchforks, or a Norman Rockwell print of the dirtiest thing that ever crawled out of an id.

(more…)

The Museum of Sex exhibit about his book opened on November 11 and will run until Jan. 3rd.

[via violet blue]

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