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Anka Radakovich
By Maggie SerotaPhoto By Malia James
Thanks to Sex and the City and the good people at HBO, the popular imagination is ingrained with the image of a sex columnist as an overly manicured woman with a surplus of leisure time and an impossibly huge apartment in an Upper East Side brownstone who occasionally finds the time between endless brunches with other overly manicured women to write a blurb comparing emotionally unavailable men to Prada slides.
“That image of a sex columnist isn’t even real,” comments Anka Radakovich, who served as Details magazine’s resident erotic authority for nine years. “I was down there in the trenches: going to nudist colonies, S&M dungeons, and swingers clubs full of guys who looked like Bill Gates.” Through her signature candid, first-person accounts, which were compiled in her first book, The Wild Girls Club, Anka carved out the script of a witty, independent female who is both vocal and unapologetic about her sexuality as well as her intelligence. Of course, when you’re up to your nipples in sexual research, it doesn’t hurt to have a rapier wit, the smoldering looks of a film noir actress, and a tendency to create vaginal euphemisms out of Peanuts cartoon characters (think beagle).
Although Anka’s tenure as a columnist for Details came to an end, she faithfully continues her “field research,” writing for British GQ and working on her third book, which also doubles as her first novel and her first attempt at capturing a solidly female audience after earning a strong gay male following during the Details years. Not to neglect her ragingly hetero male admirers, Anka is also working on a screenplay—which, fittingly enough, is a raunchy sex comedy in the tradition of Animal House. “There will be plenty of dick jokes and plenty of boner jokes,” she promises rather matterof- factly.
While Anka is lauded for her candor in carnal matters, she’s also the first to lament the impact it sometimes has on her personal life. “When you’re a female and you write about sex, people automatically assume that you’re a slut, but if you’re a man and you write about sex, that’s perfectly okay.” When it comes to dating and sex, she has one staunch rule: no sex on the first date. “I’ll have sex on the second date, but three quarters of the men I go out with never make it to the second date. I’m picky.
“Sometimes I just tell guys I’m a writer and reveal that I write about sex later, otherwise they tend to assume that I’m some kind of ‘sexpert’ and really good in bed,” Anka explains before pausing to add, “Which I am—not to brag or anything.”