There is so much sex on the New York City subway now. Have you noticed? Sometimes, train stations are just coated in phallic cactuses. They jut out in every direction, advertising a company called Hims that sells not plants, but pills to help treat hair loss and erectile dysfunction. Within train cars, an ad for the linens company Brooklinen shows three pairs of feet tangled together under a sheet.
There are so many more. The Museum of Sex. Breast Augmentation. When did this start? Where is it going? Do we really need this much sex on the subway? And what do we tell the kids? In the s, the subways were perhaps the least sexy place in New York, unless you were turned on by dirty, broken things. In , the M.
Gunn, from Philadelphia to improve the system. At first, Mr. Gunn focused on the most serious problems: derailments and dangerously hot cars. But eventually he got around to cleaning up the interiors. By , the eyesores of the previous decade — broken windows, trash all over the floor — were all but gone.
A graffiti artist told The New York Times then that he barely had time to take a picture of a finished tag, or signature, before a worker popped up to scrub it away. Three years later, the M. A new class of advertisement soon emerged to fill all those empty spaces.
They were to feature eight embracing couples, some of them nude to the waist. The organization received bomb threats that specifically cited the ads, said Krishna Stone, then a volunteer with G. Hot 97 ads used sex to sell an image of the radio station. In , the companies that advertise on the subways frequently blur the distinction between these very different categories of ad. The M. Before , even if the M.
