Fifteen Minutes: Touching a Nerve.com

Reading Nerve--the Web's most publicized venture into erotica--in a dorm room is dangerous. There's little you can say in self-defense when caught reading "Nine and a Half Months: Bernadette Noll Can't Get Enough Pregnant Sex" at 3 a.m. But this is the type of embarrassment for which Nerve's contributors and editors have no concern; their Web site (http://www.nerve.com) is chock full of twisted tales of procreation, artsy pictures of naked people and analytical essays on strange sexual topics.

In addition, the Erotic Excerpts section reviews sexually oriented movies and films and hosts some daily features like the Photo, Quote and [Sexual] Position of the Day (past examples: the Alpine Downhill and the Fire Hydrant) to fill out the site's content. Keep an eye out for Moby Dick's timeless whale-penis passage excerpt.

Nerve's timely launch on the June 1997 day that the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act earned it a considerable amount of press coverage, as its buzzword-description of "literate smut" was transmitted to adolescents everywhere through articles in Time, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal. Maintained and edited by a young (unmarried) couple, the magazine premiers works by some semi-famous as well as not-famous-at-all authors, aiming to make readers think deeply about sex.

But really, there's little that's truly smutty about Nerve, except maybe the plethora of darkened "provocative" crotch shots. All of the writing tends toward the literate side, but it's boring. The personal revelations are clinically detached and dull ("I walked around naked...I had sex in a car..." and so on, making you expect "I had sex in an outhouse...when I was 12 I masturbated with a stapler" and so forth), and the other intellectual material is less than insightful. The most interesting article on the site at present: Dmitri Nabokov's essay on copyright laws and his father's Lolita.

Nerve asks the Harvard student: Is the scorn of roommates and friends worth the intellectual stimulation gained through thoughtful consideration over the course of a 2,200-word article about the psychological impact of pubic hair removal? Decide for yourself and log on to Nerve, but proceed with caution.