EXPLORATIONS: Journeys to the Erogenous Frontier

Details magazine's sex columnist, Radakovich (The Wild Girls Club, 1994) has spent too long in the trenches of sex journalism, as evidenced by this utterly unerotic book. Her idea was to travel the country in search of the randiest among us, visiting such lubricious sites as swingers' bars, nudist colonies, and polygamist clubs. But with nothing much to say about any of the behavior she sees, she resorts to poking fun at the paunchier swingers, offering endless jokes about ""packages"" that only a 12-year-old could enjoy, bragging about the men who try to pick her up, or, in a neat contradiction, griping about the men who stare at her. Radakovich (or ""Mistress Anka,"" as she refers to herself) generally hates every place she goes, and if she's not having fun, neither is the reader. She eventually heads to Las Vegas, where she and her girlfriends repeatedly flash their breasts in a feeble attempt at being wild. It's a sad picture of women of a certain age feigning the insouciance of youth, and the reader longs for someone like the much more droll Candace Bushnell to add a little zest and wit to the situation. The only essay that works is the conclusion to the ""win-a-date-with-Anka"" story, when Radakovich eases her relentlessly too-tough stance and admits that her feelings are hurt when the date on whom she has developed a huge crash manipulates and rejects her. A look at America's favorite pastime by a reporter who's lost her edge.