"Allison Maddox holds six inches of shiny, slick sex in the palm of her hand. She sighs gently and gazes lovingly at what she's been fondling for the past few minutes: the sleek silver cell phone she carries everywhere.

'To me, this is a sexual object,' she says. But then, almost everything can be a sexual object, according to the 33-year-old co-founder of the proposed New York Museum of Sex: 'Sex is not just the old in-and-out. It's the way you fetishize something, the way you're attracted to an idea or an object or music or a space.'

A tall, slender Gillian Anderson look-alike, Maddex is perched on a stool at the White Dog Cafe, her favorite local hangout, expounding, as she has her entire adult life, on sex in the everyday world. As an artist in the 1980s and '90s, Maddex created multimedia exhibits at Brazilian galleries about food, sex and fertility; as a curator, she's known for a 1995 series at New York's The Kitchen and other spots exploring the cultural significance of Barbie. And for the past seven years, she's been romantically involved with Camille Paglia, the renowned sexual/social critic at University of the Arts, who is 20 years her senior.

Now Maddex, who holds an MFA from Penn, is the creative force behind the country's only Museum of Sex- MoSex - scheduled to open in three years. 'We want it to be the Smithsonian of sex,' she declares. Her business partner in MoSex is Dan Gluck, a former software entrepreneur whom she met when they were grad students at Penn in the late '80s - dating the same woman.

With the museum still years away, MoSex plans to launch an on-line magazine this month: ThePosition.com, a cross between Maxim and Salon.com (for which Paglia writes a monthly column). Edited by Jack Heidenry-a former Penthouse Forum and Maxim editor-the 'zine will feature columns by porn star-turned-director Candida Royalle and Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, a Harvard gay rights advocate. It will also include a soft-core 'peephole,' a city-by-city calendar of sex-related events and, eventually, a sexhealth information center complete with graphic depictions of, for example, how to insert a diaphragm.

Maddex is also preparing for the museum's first show - a multidisciplinary history of sex, surveying everything from film to fine arts to academic studies - to debut in temporary digs in New York this year. There will be artifacts, like the 1920s vibrator once used to calm hysterical women that Maddex bought on eBay. 'It's huge and plugs into the wall,' she says, laughing. 'It looks like it could short out at any second.'

Maddex calls the 53-year-old Paglia MoSex's 'chief cheerleader,' and her name is on a star-studded list of so-called museum 'advisers' and 'friends' that includes comedian Sandra Bernhard, Politically Incorrect's Bill Maher and designer Todd Oldham. If nothing else, the Mist has brought needed attention to MoSex, a for-profit corporation currently undergoing a second round of venture financing. Unlike most museums, MoSex will operate without government funds, to avoid the kinds of public-money disputes-like last year's brouhaha at the Brooklyn Museum of Art-that tend to dog controversial art. To date, Maddex and Gluck have raised $1.3 million, enough to buy two five-story buildings at 5th Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan and to design a new structure, a translucent seven-story shell curved like a row of nude bodies.

MoSex is bringing renewed attention to the personal life of Maddex and Paglia. Their paths first crossed in 1993; Maddex, then operating a small art gallery in Washington, D.C., sent Paglia a fan letter after meeting her at the University of the Arts. A few days later, they rendezvoused at a Baltimore restaurant. They've been together ever since, and share a house in Swarthmore. Once the museum opens, Maddex says, they might have a baby. CamillePaglia.mom? Now, that would be interesting" (Roxanne Patel, Philadelphia Magazine, May 2000).