"When I put my Sex book out, my mistake was that I naively thought that everybody liked the same things I liked, and had the same sense of humor I had, and was turned on by the same things, and I was really creating in a vacuum. I was pushing the envelope with "Justify My Love," but when I put out Sex, that's when the big steel doors came down on my head. It's like, you can push the envelope, but you can't open the envelope.
There are the people that liked the book and didn't like it just on a taste level, or whatever. And then there are people who just were horrified by it and didn't even bother to look at it or read it. I divide my career from before and after the Sex book. Up until then, I really was just being a creative person working and doing things that inspired me and I thought would inspire other people. After that, I suddenly had a whole different point of view about life in general. Ever since that book, I think there are the people that look at me and go, "Oh man, she just went off the deep end, she went too far. I can't deal with her, she disgusts me." And then I think there are other people who go, even if they didn't like the Sex book, "Oh well, she survived that and she goes on and she continues to do what she wants to do," in spite of the fact that the press beat the shit out of me. Very few people came to my rescue. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience.
You can't be a pop star and have an opinion. Some unknown entity can put out a magazine with erotic photographs, but a famous person young girls identify with can't do that and make money off of it. I think men can deal with those fantasies when a man is in control of them and in charge, like your father and his magazine. It's a man's point of view, it's a man's fantasy. Sex was my fantasy, and I made money off of it. That is a no-no.
Then there was just a lot of imagery that grossed people out in the book. A lot of people were really disgusted with the men that were together with men. They were fine, you know, with my naked ass all over the place."