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Nerve is two! In Internet years — roughly equivalent to dog years — we're practically a teenager. And just days after breaking in our new offices with a befittingly debauched celebration, I sit, surrounded by boxes, attempting to take inventory of the ways Nerve has changed. We're bigger, that's a start: a staff of fifteen, including editors, designers, programmers, an office manager and Louis, the money guy, now make up the staff. There are so many people milling around — freelancers, messengers shouting into staticy walkie-talkies, photographers with their portfolios pressed to their chests, phone installation people, the occasional reporter, the food delivery guy looking for whomever ordered the eggplant parmesan, venture capitalists who immediately loosen their ties upon entering, fresh-faced interviewees — it's hard to believe we were in diapers just fourteen dog years ago . . .
I believe it was on the subway, after several hours of drinking, that Rufus first mustered the courage to ask me to help him create a magazine about sex for both genders. I immediately said yes, then we went to his place and got busy (no, not with the business plan!). The next morning I woke up, swallowed three aspirin, and thought, This is a great idea — but it's sex, and it's going to complicate my life. What would people think when I announced I was quitting my nice job in book publishing to devote my career to "smut"?
What would people think? Yes, it actually mattered to me, and that, ultimately, is why I had to go ahead and do this thing. I was twenty-seven — old enough to be over that good girl schtick (and it was a schtick). Besides, sex had been complicating my life for years — why not make a job of it? So I did. We did. We were a couple. We had sex. We had a sex magazine. The press couldn't get enough of us, until they got too much of us. After a year or so of "Striking a Nerve" and "Having Some Nerve," of sitting in each other's laps, eating grapes for the camera, and making the same crack about how the magazine didn't leave us time to actually have sex, we began to notice that nobody gave a damn about us anymore. And to our happy disbelief, even when our once-public romance ended, they still didn't give a damn.
The story, at last, was about the project. They wanted to know what we thought about censorship and Monica Lewinsky's sexual power and the evolution of porn and the significance of Viagra and the future of sex on the web and evolutionary theory and monogamy and the clitoral orgasm and the pratfalls of do-me feminism and how kids were supposed to grow up with realistic expectations in this plastic, plastic, plastic world.
We'd done something right.
Who cares if my answers to those questions are no more expert than the next person's? (I never claimed to be a sexpert, just an editor.) And who cares if a lot of this stuff still makes me blush? What matters the most right now, as we light our second candle, is that Nerve is bigger than a color story about a bright-eyed Manhattan couple. It's got people asking questions, relating, reading and rethinking. It's what I wanted all along. Goodbye puberty.
