Have yourself a horny little Christmas

The Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender and Reproduction spent years collecting photographs that document the sexual practices of ordinary people. "Peek: Photographs From the Kinsey Institute" displays amateur snapshots and professional images dating from the 1880s to the 1990s. Some of the lusty porn shots that dominate the Rotenberg Collection can be found here, but the real pleasure is in the comical and exhibitionistic sensuality of ordinary people. A couple shoots arrows on a snow-covered hill, naked except for heavy black boots. A dominatrix in a black mask and lace-up thigh-high boots whips a small toy dog into obedience. A bespectacled woman turns hamburgers on a barbecue in the nude. This is the erotica of everyday life, arousing and odd.

The photographs in "Nude Sculpture: 5,000 Years" are discreetly erotic. The book is simultaneously a homage to the beauty of the human body and a testimony to the nearly miraculous ability of sculptors to render softness out of stone. It's a collaboration between photographer David Finn and artists like Rodin, Bernini, Canova, Dupré and Michelangelo, and the pleasure is in the curves of the highly muscled male bodies and the smoothly arching female ones. Christ hangs on the cross, and there are closeups of several penises -- those of Hercules, Perseus, Bacchus, Adam and someone who raped the Sabine women. The genitalia of myth, history and legend, suitable for your grandma's coffee table.

"Emerging Bodies: Nudes From the Polaroid Collections" will excite the art lovers and amateur photographers on your list, though it's not much of a turn-on. Pictures made on instant film by artists like Gabriele Basilico, Chuck Close and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as a number of lesser-known photographers, prove genuinely thought-provoking and very often lovely.

Michael Spano's black-and-whites of women whose bodies are patterned with light and Basilico's pictures of naked bottoms scored by marks from chair seats explore the relationship of the body to its environment. And of course, Polaroid film is ideal for anyone inclined to snap his own dirty pictures. Rather than face prying clerks at the local 24-hour photo stop, the Polaroid photographer gets instant results and complete privacy. Consider "Emerging Bodies" as inspiration for a little homemade erotica.

On the other hand, Petter Hegre's "My Wife" is a valentine. Over the past few years, he took innumerable snapshots of his petite, blond (and always fully shaved) wife, Svanborg. She is vivacious and silly, not always beautiful, perpetually erotic. In the kitchen, she struggles into a lycra bodysuit. On the porch, she sunbathes nude next to a kiddie pool. Sometimes she sleeps with other women, sometimes with a man who appears to be Hegre himself.

The pictures are scarily intimate: Svanborg is photographed with a tampon string hanging between her legs, sitting on the toilet while doubled over with stomach cramps, stretched across the bed with a vibrator. "My Wife" feels like a genuine document of a hot-blooded romance in which the woman is neither idealized nor degraded: she simply is.

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