Thu Oct 3, 9:39 PM ET

By ERIN McCLAM, Associated Press Writer

The director of the newest museum in this culture-packed city is surveying the prizes of his permanent collection — leather straps, condom boxes, video porn playing on large screens.

He stops and points at a 1940s Wonder Woman comic book cover. `Just look at her,` Daniel Gluck says. `The cinched waist, the high heels, the rope. ... She`s always tying people up.`

Wonder Woman is among the tamer attractions at the Museum of Sex, which opens this weekend in Manhattan and aims to catalog American sexuality, from 19th-century brothels to turn-of-the-millennium sex parties.

In a city that has affectionately shortened the names of its culture hubs — MoMA, the Met — the new museum has already been dubbed MoSex. And it has stirred opposition from those who say it is merely a celebration of smut.

The state rejected an early attempt by Gluck to create a tax-sheltered foundation to support the museum.

And William Donohue, head of the 350,000-member Catholic League, attacked the museum weeks before its opening, suggesting it should include a death chamber to mark the `wretched diseases` caused by promiscuity.

`They can talk all they want about the scholarly veneer on this,` said Louis Giovino, a Catholic League spokesman. `So it`s historical. That makes it quaint? It`s porn.`

To museum officials, though, the collection tells a fascinating story of evolving sexual subcultures and their unending war with each generation`s vice patrols. They contend the museum is a venture of history, even art.

Patrons, who must be 18, can walk through a sexual timeline of sorts covering nearly 200 years.

There is a touch-screen guide to the sex parlors that sprouted downtown in the early 1800s. Eugen Sandow, a musclebound curiosity of the 1890s who charged women money to feel his biceps, flexes on a black-and-white video.

In the 20th-century galleries, pornography