Get Herald RSSThe economy is in a slump. Job opportunities are scarce. What's a Brown graduate to do? Start a sex Web site, of course.
Rufus Griscom '91 graduated into a floundering economy. He says many of his classmates were faced with the reality that their ambitions of landing a lucrative job would have to be sidelined, at least for the time being. Griscom, however, found the dismal financial forecast liberating.
"It was a great thing," he says. "It reduced the pressure to get a high-paying job."
After hopping from Washington to Little Rock, Ark., and then back north to New York City, Griscom, a concentrator in the now-extinct Literature and Society Program, found himself taking literature in a different direction. In 1997, with a staff of three, he started Nerve - a Web site devoted to sex.
At first glance, the site seems more like a blog than an erotica site, but Nerve is unabashedly sex-centric: "We think sex is beautiful and absurd, remarkably fun and reliably trauma-inducing," reads its mission statement.
But Griscom is keen to point out that the online magazine is not pornography. "My view of porn is that it's fine, but it's kind of like picking lampshades: It's not very interesting," he says.
And Nerve's founders are unafraid to flaunt their attitudes toward fornication - Griscom and co-founder Genevieve Field posed nearly nude for Newsweek as the site was starting up.
Griscom argues that popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Maxim try to hide behind the veneer of covering lifestyle issues while actually being about sex, but Nerve bares it all.
"It's a thoughtful magazine about sex and culture," Griscom says, adding that "Literate Smut" was the title of one of Nerve's anthologies.
Griscom recalls writing long and flattering letters to his favorite authors and photographers asking them to contribute to the magazine in its early days. The end product was a site that today hosts blogs, photos, videos and essays to facilitate an open, mature sexual environment.
"We were different because we took a lot of risks," says Jack Murnighan '90, former editor-in-chief of Nerve. He says that during the magazine's formative years, they were not afraid to publish "provocative and intellectually challenging" pieces.
So why a Web site about sex? "Sex is interesting because of so many taboos around it," Griscom says. "It's a very complicated and conflicted human experience." The Web site's mission statement, composed by Griscom and Field, echoes the sentiment: "We still have a smelly-fingered fascination with our shame and desire." The Web site says it seeks to uncover those cultural ironies that permeate the way we think about sex - from forbidden desires to sexual obsessions.
Read by nearly 1.2 million people a month, Nerve caters mostly to "overeducated people who have a liberal leaning who live in cities," Griscom says, people not unlike himself. There is a three-to-two demographic split between male and female readers, a statistic that makes Griscom proud. Though pornography is geared mainly to men, Griscom says Nerve was created specifically for men and women.
But one demographic was not so easily seduced. Griscom recalls that his parents, especially his father - Rufus Griscom Sr. '66 AM'69 P'91 P'92 P'96 - were less than thrilled.
A newer generation of parents, however, found a niche in Nerve Media. "If you follow instructions on Nerve, you may find yourself with children," Griscom acutely observes. And so, the spawn of Nerve caters to Nerve users with spawn. Babble, a Web site about parenting and culture, was the natural reflection of Griscom's life. He and wife Alisa Volkman - and many Nerve staffers and users - began having children, and thus Babble arose from the need for a forum to discuss the reality of parenthood.
And Babble, "the graduating class of Nerve," maintains its own edge. Eschewing traditional parenting magazine models of a sunshine filled, cookie-baking household, Griscom says, "Babble is about the reality of the parenting experience - and the reality is that it's hard, but that it's also very funny and joyful."
Since its launch in December 2006, Babble has grown into a forum for young parents in urban settings, drawing in nearly 1.5 million visits per month. Babble features discussion boards, personal blogs and articles that look at raising children from the perspective of a new generation that has been influenced by a scientific and technological revolution and is skeptical of parenting cliches, according to the site's mission statement. It also recently won the Silver Eddie Award for best consumer website presented by Folio Magazine, edging out Newsweek.com and finishing just below Time.com.
Griscom credits his classes in the Modern Culture and Media Department for helping to make his studies relevant in the outside world, especially as the Internet and online communications grew. He describes himself as "extremely privileged" to live the life he does, and would like to "write a beautiful novel" and immerse himself in creative work, photography and writing.
