THEY'VE GOT SOME NERVE

By Joel Stein

Genevieve Field and her boyfriend Rufus Griscom have created the perfect scenario for a breakup: they walked away from their day jobs, set up an office in their tiny New York City apartment, created an online sex magazine and contributed lots of incredibly personal stories. I give them six months max.

But for now, Field, 27, and Griscom, 29, are clicking. Attractive, bespectacled and living in a bookshelf-clogged apartment that looks very much like grad-school housing, they've become the cyber Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw. Since they launched their online magazine, Nerve, on June 26 (the very day the Supreme Court knocked down the Communications Decency Act), they've got great reviews, a book deal with Broadway Books and about 10,000 visitors a day.

What's the attraction? Nerve www.nervemag.com is the only intellectual publication that trades in smutty stories and pictures of naked women--one of whom is lapping water from a bowl. There's sleaze aplenty on the Internet, of course--but how often is it accompanied by contributions about sex from literary luminaries like Norman Mailer, John Hawkes and Rick Moody? That combination gets attention (though you can't underestimate that bowl-lapping thing).

Griscom and Field, former co-workers at a small publishing house, were able to attract such writers--from Joycelyn Elders on masturbation to William T. Vollmann on venereal disease--simply by writing them mash letters and offering to pay them $1 a word--not bad for the magazine world and extraordinary for the Web. "I spend the majority of every day thinking about how best to communicate with writers," says Field. "And that's what did it." The letters work. Moody (The Ice Storm, Purple America), who doesn't use the Web and can't imagine anyone reading onscreen, got half a dozen of the letters. "They kept sending me letters saying, 'I love your work. I love your work.' And I kept saying, 'I don't have any time. I have nothing to say about this.'" Eventually he relented. "I'm against online publications in principle, but just found Genevieve's energy appealing," he says. Likewise, Griscom was able to persuade a professor of his from Brown, Hawkes, 72 (The Blood Oranges, An Irish Eye), to contribute. "As soon as he made clear that they were writing seriously about sex, I thought it seemed extraordinarily necessary," he says, "though I confess that I didn't know what online meant."

Sallie Tisdale (Talk Dirty to Me), who also doesn't read on the Web, pitched in. "I write for Nerve because there is not a hip, general-interest sex magazine around." One submission, excerpts from Catherine Texier's Breakup, was scooped up after being rejected by the New Yorker, possibly because of its sexual content.

Armed with $150,000 in seed money from a venture capitalist, Field and Griscom have lured big-time photographers like Andres Serrano, whose photos will appear next month, as well as the Web's Cool Site of the Year designer Joey Cavella, who has created one of the slickest-looking spots on the Net. Field and Griscom are starting to see some of the money trickle back in ads. Nerve doesn't accept ads for porn sites and 900 numbers, which is where the real Web money is at, but a dozen legit companies have signed on. Field and Griscom believe the big money is still in print--like the sister magazine they hope to publish and the "best of Nerve" book coming out next year. (In fact, they put an apartment broker's number in their phone's memory--so they could call as soon as the book deal went through. "The old bed-to-desk commute will probably go from 10 to 30 feet," Griscom crows.)

Because the stories are both smarter and tamer than the stuff meant for one-handed typists, the site has been able to attract a 25% female readership. "A woman feels more comfortable looking at this stuff than going to a newsstand where a man is going to give her a sneer," says Field. "Which is how I feel about porn." Actually, Nerve isn't really close to porn. The Webzine's sexual high jinks are more a ploy to get surfers to stop and read. Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist who writes an online sex-discussion column for Microsoft's One Click Away, remains unaroused. "There are pictures of, like, naked accountants," she complains. "It was strangely unerotic. Willing as I was to get aroused, it wasn't even close."

Field and Griscom are looking forward to moving into a bigger place, hiring an assistant and eventually selling their venture for major bucks. But for now they seem content to make their work part of their all-too-happy, too-enmeshed, 24-hour-a-day, two-year relationship. Dressed as if they're just out of bed at 5 p.m., drinking apple cider and listening to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, they look more like cooing honeymooners than the pornographers of the future. Still, signs of a breakup are imminent. "We no longer have time to have sex," Field complains, "because we're always working."