America Unzipped

As award-winning journalist Brian Alexander uncovers, fringe experimentation has gone suburban. Soccer moms, your accountant, even your own parents could be turning kinky.

Stunned by the uninhibited questions from ordinary people on his msnbc.com column, "Sexploration ("My wife and I have have heard that a lot of couples in their thirties are playing strip poker... as well as skinny-dipping with other couples/friends. Any idea if this is a fashionable trend or has it been going on for some time and we never knew it?" or "I am interested in bondage and hear that there are secret bondage clubs somewhere. Can you help me find them?"), Brian Alexander was driven to understand Americans' desire to get down and dirty—especially in an era where conservative family values dominate.

To find out what people are really doing— and why a country that suffered a national freakout over Janet Jackson's breast was enthusiastically getting in touch with its inner perv— Alexander set out on a sexual safari in modern America. Whether mixing it up at a convention of fetishists, struggling into his own pair of PVC pants for a wild night at a sex club, being tutored on dildos by a nineteen-year-old supervisor while working in an adult store, or learning the surprising ways of Biblical sex from an evangelical preacher,Alexander uses humor and insight to reveal a sexual world that is quickly redefining the phrase "polite society."

Gonzo journalism at its funniest and kinkiest, America Unzipped is a fascinating cultural study and an eye-popping peek into the lives of people you'd least expect to find tied up and wearing latex.

Brian Alexander. America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction. New York: Harmony Books, 15/1/2008. First Edition. Hardcover. 304 pp.