Reverend Jen Miller has a long history of doing odd or shocking things. That might be especially peculiar in a reverend, but she (like myself) is legally a minister, via the Universal Life Church, which ordains anyone who asks, and (unlike myself) she uses the "Reverend" title in all she does, and responds to greetings such as "Hi, Rev!" For over a decade, she has hosted a monthly performance show called "Reverend Jen's Anti-Slam" which is sort of an amateur night for those who want to act weird in front of an audience. For such stars, she founded the Art Star Scene, which has a magazine that takes advantage of the acronym. She curates a Troll Museum in her apartment. She is well known to her fellow New York citizens, but she came to national attention when she took over from Grant Stoddard in writing the "I Did It for Science" columns at Nerve.com. She would do "sexperiments" on assignment, writing up each with a hypothesis, description of the experiment, a statement of results, and a conclusion. She had written for Nerve before, she was done with boyfriends and wanted lots of sex without strings, and she needed the money. Now her book _Live Nude Elf: The Sexperiments of Reverend Jen_ (Soft Skull Press) collects the columns, fills them out with some autobiographical essays about what she was going through before this assignment came along, and in between the monthly columns, and what happened after the last one. The Rev is enthusiastic, charming, and funny. Her reports on her adventures are fun because she obviously had fun with them, and because they are titillating, and because no one else is going to wind up doing all the experimentation to which she has so selflessly submitted herself.
She learned a lot. For instance, she learned how to clean a bathtub. Her first experiment was as a nude housecleaner; she was following a tradition, as this is paid work for certain ladies in New York. It turns out she did have to get good ones, because the first guy who replies to her ad says he is concerned "... that because you are going to be naked, you won't do a good job cleaning my apartment." For one assignment, she went to fellatio school. "In comparison to my fine arts education, a class in fellatio sounded useful." She finds a friend in her performance circle who agrees to let her test her newfound skills on him, but exhaustion and inebriation get in the way: "Even though I showed up for class on time and took abundant notes, it wasn't enough." After that assignment, she learned about "the wackiest fetish I'd ever heard of: _balloons_." And if this isn't strange enough, there is a dichotomy within the fetishists, between "looners" who were "poppers" and those who were "nonpoppers", the later getting off from playing with the inflatables and the former enjoying the satisfaction of the ultimate pop. The headmaster of the Princess Reform School teaches, among other things, bondage and sexual submission. "Unlike other reform schools," The Rev writes, "which are devoted to making bad students good, Princess Reform School is dedicated to making good students bad." To make up for this degeneracy, her next experiment was quite wholesome, a day of simulated motherhood, tending a baby. The Rev does not have a sensation of her biological clock ticking away, but was able to borrow a friend's baby for the day, and borrow the friend for comprehensive advice. Of the baby, the friend says, "After all, it's the result of sex," so it wasn't too much out of place in the experiments. She helped out in making a pornographic movie, not as a star but as general factotum. An actress needed her shirt slit in a more alluring fashion, and the director asked The Rev, "Can you run to the store and get some scissors? You'll get wardrobe credit." She reflects, "I was excited, though it wasn't like I'd be getting a wardrobe credit in a Merchant Ivory period piece. I'd be getting credit in a movie where the actors are naked ninety-eight percent of the time."
There are many assignments here. She tried in one experiment to watch all 96 episodes of "Sex in the City" in a row. She learned to be a stripper. Then there was the time she observed as her lover had relations with a jar of mayonnaise. She experimented with her G-spot. There was also instruction and practice in tantric sex, which she applied with a guy who seemed like her perfect boyfriend and they did indeed achieve a deep and mystical tantric union. Then he dumped her, causing a depression from which she had difficulty emerging. "So I tired to do drugs. A friend gave me a box of pot cookies. I ate one, got the munchies, and ate the rest. Then I thought I was dying and had to call an EMT, who diagnosed me as being `really stoned.'" There are good jokes on every page here, accounts of very strange fun, and even when things are depressing or degrading, a delightful sense of adventure and optimism, and a loving devotion to the odd characters to whom she introduces us.
