The History of Sex: Prague -- The Breaking Point -- (Chapter X, Part 10)

For straight targets, the most sinister honeytraps involved being framed for rape and threatened with life in a Soviet jail.

After Verkhonoye, Vera's first assignment was to seduce an American businessman in Moscow.

She was given a job as a chambermaid at the man's hotel and 'accidentally' walked in on him while he was showering.

He offered to show her a good time in bed, and as soon as he'd finished, two KGB men posing as hotel security broke through the door.

Vera started to scream that the man had raped her.

While the goons pummeled him, the man begged her to tell the truth, but she swore she'd been attacked.

Behold, the nipple transmitter!
In Sexpionage, David Lewis writes: 'If a female undercover agent wears fake nipples fitted with radio equipment, even the most intimate body search won't reveal that she's wired for sound. Powered by body heat, the nipple's chip transmitter with microphone is said to have a range of several hundred feet.'

'Then, suddenly, they all began to laugh,' Vera said.

'The American got up and pulled on his clothes, saying to me in Russian that I was very good in bed. It was a final examination, and I passed successfully. Even while I believed that the man was an innocent victim, his whole life threatened with ruin, I felt nothing for him… A man was merely a target, to be rapidly assessed and then dealt with.'

Then she added a quote that's almost too good to be true.

'By the time our training was completed, we were hard, cynical, sophisticated young women capable of bedding any heterosexual man and providing him with the time of his life.'

And here's a close-up.
On his website from his days as a photojournalist,
Lewis shows how to make a nipple transmitter 

In time, however, Vera's pillow talk with Westerners made her doubt her indoctrination.

In 1963, she was ordered to bed a French student who was due to marry an aristocratic girl back home.

The boy was very much in love with his fiancée and initially resisted Vera.

However, she eventually seduced him.

The KGB showed him the photos and threatened to derail his marriage unless his father, a major figure in mining, handed them commercial intelligence.

'The boy said he needed time to think it over,' Vera said. 'The same afternoon he walked in front of a car near Red Square and was killed. Perhaps it was an accident. But it was the breaking point for me.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- No Famine of Phalluses -- (Chapter IX, Part 25)

In truth, that image summed up my initial impressions of Berlin's gay scene.

Given Germany's pioneering role in the gay rights movement and the sacrifices made by its homosexuals over the decades, it seemed overwhelmingly tragic that modern Berlin should be just another gay party capital renowned for shopping and shagging.

But then I went to see Karl-Heinz Steinle, the curator of the world's first Schwules Museum: the only 'Gay Museum' in the global village.

One of the museum's exhibits

'I would say that Berlin is actually more balanced than other cities,' he explains. 'Berlin has these dark-sex-triple-gangbang-fuck-rooms—'

—a word I would love to see written in German— 

'—with all the drugs and stuff. And it has, let's say, new ideas, experimental gender-crisscrossed rooms and programs and quite a few historical groups.'

The Schwules Museum began in a flat before the fall of the Wall and now occupies an old industrial workshop; its neighbours are a gay café and a shop called 'Faster, Pussycat!'

'There is one part of gays' thinking that isn't so interested in history, but there is another part which is enormously interested to be able to say "I'm not the first one,"' Karl-Heinz says.

'The museum's development from a little special interest group to the institution that we are now also establishes gay history as a scientific study. It's not done by gays who want to say, "I will collect 2,000 photographs of cocks."'

That said, there's no famine of phalluses in the museum's exhibit on two centuries of gay history.

Inevitably, as with Freud's house in Vienna, Berlin's Gay Museum takes the we-are-the-champions approach to history.

But amid the usual namechecks—nods to the Greeks and Romans, plus Dietrich, Wilde, Auden and Isherwood—it also displays plenty of curiosities: an anal diagram from a French medical text in 1878 showing 'Desordres que produit la pederastie' (it ain't pretty)… Gestapo photos of known homosexuals, taken in three poses (including with and without hats)… and kitsch Seventies copies of him: das magazine mit dem mann featuring weedy sex symbols with bush cuts and sideburns before the American gym-bunny aesthetic conquered the world.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Sometimes Wake Up Howling' -- (Chapter IX, Part 16)

In the camps, gay men were usually forced to wear pink triangles, making them targets for their fellow prisoners, as well as the guards and SS doctors, who injected gay men with hormones to try to 'cure' homosexuality.

Pierre Seel was a gay teenager in a French border town when the Nazis overran his country.

Although his boyfriend, 'Jo,' seemed to have escaped, Seel was arrested in 1941 and tortured along with other known homosexuals.

'Outraged by our resistance, the SS began pulling out the fingernails of some prisoners. In their fury, they broke the rulers we were kneeling on and used them to rape us. Our bowels were punctured. Blood spurted everywhere. My ears still ring with the shrieks of our pain.'

Worse came in the camp.

'One day the loudspeakers ordered us to report immediately to the roll-call. Two SS men brought a young man to the center of our square. Horrified, I recognized Jo, who was only 18. I hadn't previously spotted him…'

'The loudspeakers broadcast some noisy classical music while the SS stripped him naked and shoved a tin pail over his head. Next they set their ferocious German shepherds on him: the guard dogs first bit into his groin and thighs, then devoured him right in front of us.'

'His shrieks of pain were distorted and amplified by the pail in which his head was trapped. My rigid body reeled, my eyes gaped at so much horror, tears poured down my cheeks. I fervently prayed that he would black out quickly. Since then I sometimes wake up howling in the middle of the night.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- The Problem With Being 'Born That Way' -- (Chapter IX, Part 7)

Whereas buggery had been legal in France since the Enlightenment, gay sex was still very much against the law in Germany.

An effeminate lawyer from Hannover was possibly the first man to 'come out' in the modern sense of the term.

In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published The Riddle of Male-Male Love, expounding his theory that homosexuals belonged to a congenitally different 'third sex' that deserved the same rights as the other two.

Ulrichs argued that the male homosexual had the disposition of a woman in a man's body—a precursor of the modern 'gay gene' theory, in the sense that he believed sexual 'inverts' didn't choose to be 'perverts;' they were born that way.

But it's not that simple...

In retrospect, the major problem with the third-sex argument was that it was based on false assumptions.

At the time, even the most forward-thinking scientists believed that men were naturally promiscuous and women passive; that was the only way to hold civilization together.

'If a woman is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small,' Krafft-Ebing wrote. 'If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel, and marriage and a family impossible.'

Hmm…

Confronted with the Rigid-v.-Frigid division, you can see why many men (and women) must have felt like misfits, simply because they didn't conform to either stereotype.

With his third-sex theory, Ulrichs tried to win the public over by contending that homosexuality was entirely natural.

Unfortunately, after Darwin, the claim that homosexuals were biologically distinct could also be used to justify their extermination.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'The German Vice' -- (Chapter IX, Part 6)

Like history, for instance.

Sooner or later, while slogging through your umpteenth tome on the erotic past, you realize that practically all modern sex histories share one unquestionable underlying assumption: namely, that Sex Is a Very Good Thing Indeed.

Tossing off any pretences of objectivity, even the driest academic works tend to portray 'sexual progress' as being synonymous with 'more sex,' while the only 'good' kind of sexual control is birth control.

As an outsider, it's probably no coincidence that I first noticed this bias while trawling through the literature on homosexuality: I think the book that finally clinched it for me was a university hardback entitled Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600.

By one Helmut Puff.

It was then that I realized: if history is written by the victors, you can practically hear Freddie Mercury caterwauling 'We Are the Champions' when you open your average 'queer studies' text. 

Oddly, though, the genre often overlooks one believe-it-or-not fact: contrary to what I would have guessed, the gay-rights movement didn't begin in New York or London—or even Paris or Amsterdam—but in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century.

As a matter of fact, it was a German émigré (Henry Gerber) who later founded America's first gay organization, naming the Society for Human Rights after the groups he'd been involved with in Berlin.

Some also credit Germany's gay-rights movement with pioneering the term 'activist'—amid a slew of other world firsts.

And not for nothing.

If spanking was le vice anglais, the French called homosexuality le vice allemand.

Homophobia and chauvinism aside, there were many reasons why the Continent's Germanic core became the home of gay emancipation in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps most importantly, Germany's activists had something concrete to kick against.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Hysteria Mysteria -- (Chapter VIII, Part 23)

Having struck out with drugs, Sigmund then tried to make it big with sex (as rock and roll had yet to be invented).

Freud went to study in Paris with a famous neurologist who was now well into his quack years.

Jean-Martin Charcot specialized in a very voguish malady that eventually served as the ersatz foundation of Freud's entire career.

'Hysteria' was a catch-all affliction attributed to women (and a few men) who suffered from complaints ranging from anything as minor as a nervous cough to convulsions, partial paralysis, wild gesticulations known as 'clownism,' and, in female patients, the sensation of being suffocated by their wombs rising into their throats.

One of Charcot's 'hysterical' women

In fact, the definition was so broad that a skeptical American dubbed it 'mysteria.'

Charcot, in contrast, touted hysteria as 'the great neurosis' and argued that its main cause was emotional rather than physical trauma, claiming, in effect, that symptoms like paralysis were all in the mind.

So if a barrowboy was run over and subsequently suffered seizures and nosebleeds, Charcot would attribute his afflictions to the emotional impact of the accident rather than the obvious fact that the poor 'hysteric' probably had brain damage from being knocked stone cold by a carriage.

In fairness, neurologists at the time didn't have the technology to detect minor cerebral lesions.

But the truth is that hysteria was all but impossible to treat because it probably never existed in the first place—certainly not on the scale that Freud and his 'great teacher' diagnosed it.

In all likelihood, most of the unfortunate souls branded as 'hysterics' by Charcot and Freud were actually physically—rather than psychologically—ill.

Indeed, years later, Freud blamed a fourteen-year-old girl's 'noisy manifestations of hysteria' for causing him to overlook her genuine complaint: abdominal pains.

Having been 'cured' by Freud of hysteria, the girl later died of what had really been ailing her: stomach cancer.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Austria's Awfully Boring Masochists -- (Chapter VIII, Part 16)

Prior to coming here, I struck up an email correspondence with a transvestite who used to run Graz's (now defunct) club devoted to S&M—or simply 'SM,' in German.

He/she then forwarded my email address to an online forum, and since then, I've received helpful tips about Graz's miniscule SM scene.

In fact, the aficionados have decided to hold one of their special meetings, a Stammtisch, at a local restaurant in honor of my arrival.

So it would be rude not to go, right?

Weirdly, the setting for the BDSM do is a traditional wood-beamed Austrian restaurant, the kind of place that sticks antique farm implements on the walls for decoration and makes its waitresses dress up like wenches for ambience.

The arrival of 'Grazy' and his girlfriend—both in high heels and black fetishwear—elicits a few bemused chuckles from the pensioners dining nearby, but there's no real shock or disgust.

After all, today's bluehairs are yesterday's longhairs: these sexagenarians came of age in the Sixties.

And whether they're able to accept it or not (forever young!), most of Grazy's entourage isn't much younger.

Having met the Terribly Nice Sadists of France, I feel bad being mean to Austria's Awfully Boring Masochists; then again, they probably prefer it that way.

THE USUAL SEXBAIT

The twenty or so people who show up are typical of the regulars you see on swingers' sites: mainly well-preserved women who serve as sexbait for their balding partners, plus a couple of young guys tagging along in the off-chance an orgy breaks out.

At the top of the long wooden table sits Grazy, all dolled up in a bobbed wig, a black corset and a miniskirt with matching choker and armband.

Judging from his button nose and neatly symmetrical features, he's probably as cute as a guy as he is as a girl—and boy does he know it.

His poor girlfriend, on the other hand, has a face that's curdled round her nose. She's probably a big softie deep down, but her default expression is defensive: she doesn't so much stare daggers at you as an entire fortress, complete with vats of boiling oil.

You have to feel sorry for her: it's bad enough having a better-looking partner, but having a boyfriend who's hotter than you dressed as a woman would drive any girl crazy.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- How Masochism Got Its Name -- (Chapter VIII, Part 9)

In reality, the end of Sacher-Masoch's affair with Fanny was far less melodramatic: 'Gregor' and his Mistress simply split up when their six-month contract expired, apparently because they got bored.

After a couple more flings—one of which produced a daughter—Sacher-Masoch returned to Graz.

Then one day a letter landed on his desk signed 'Wanda von Dunajew.'

Ever a sucker for female fans, Sacher-Masoch took the bait: not only did he sign an S&M contract with this real-life 'Wanda,' he also proposed to her.

THOROUGHLY WHIPPED

After their marriage, she confessed to him that she wasn't actually a lady at all: her real name was Aurora Rümelin, the daughter of a deadbeat train-stationmaster and a woman who ran a tobacco shop.

What's more, Aurora hadn't even written the letters she'd sent to Sacher-Masoch; they'd been penned by a Jewish friend who knew he liked fan mail.

By then, though, Sacher-Masoch was so thoroughly whipped he didn't care.

He and his wife settled down in a millhouse outside Graz, where she gave birth to a second son (the first had died shortly after birth) and he focused on writing—while demanding that 'Wanda' whip and cuckold him.

Despite these extracurricular passions, Sacher-Masoch somehow found the time to churn out more than eighty books during his career, including a novella called The Love of Plato featuring homosexuality.

His works were translated throughout Europe, and in 1883, the French celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as a writer by inducting him into the Legion of Honor, with salutations from Zola, Dumas, Ibsen and Hugo.

By the time Krafft-Ebing coined 'masochism,' though, Sacher-Masoch's best years were behind him.

In naming the kink after a contemporary, Krafft-Ebing argued that even straight sex involved a degree of sadomasochism, with men inflicting pain on the women they deflowered.

What seemed to be new about Sacher-Masoch and his followers was that they reversed the 'natural' sex roles.

Krafft-Ebing rejected a rival term, algolagnia—or a love of pain—because his correspondents told him they didn't necessarily want to be hurt (or have sex, for that matter); they relished the feeling of being dominated and humiliated, usually with heavy lashings of fantasy and role-playing.

Sacher-Masoch complained that the psychiatrist had tarnished his mother's good name.

However, calling the kink 'Sacherism' might have hurt Austria's already delicate imperial pride: another family called Sacher ran the landmark Hotel Sacher in Vienna, home of the famous Sacher Torte.

'Precious' the Neanderthal and Caveman Nookie

From the archive: 2010

It's been a big year for Neanderthals, with the latest revelations being that they had 'Popeye-like arms.'

What struck me, though, is the equally cartoonish image of a Neanderthal striking a sensitive pose, reminiscent of Rodin's Thinker.

Discovery

That's not science; that's make-believe. I think they should call him 'Precious.' 

NEANDERTHAL NOOKIE

Earlier in year, a study argued that there's a little Neanderthal in most of us.

Scientists claim to have found traces of Neanderthal genes in modern DNA after studying nearly 2,000 people from around the world.

That can mean only one thing: homo sapiens had sex with their supposed evolutionary inferiors. ‘This is not what we expected to find,' says Jeffrey Long, a genetic anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study.

Maybe not, but I get extremely skeptical when scientists start talking about the prehistoric past.

One thing I've learned in writing The History of Sex is just how little we know about the past 3,000 years of ‘known' history, let alone the past 300,000 of prehistory.

And all joking aside, research like this inevitably causes people to question whether some groups might be more ‘Neanderthal' than others.

Sure enough, here's the first message on the comment boards:

‘I have always wondered if Basques, which are known to have striking differences in the frequency of blood groups and the form of the skull from the rest of the European population could not be such a population,' writes one Jacques Lerin. ‘I do not mean to be offensive in anyway...'

Offensive? Surely not.

Now if we could just prove that Neanderthals knew how to make bombs...

***

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Sadeian Dream Made Reality -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 31)

Grinning, Milukman shifts the small desk where the tax inspector has been doing her dirty work to open a cabinet and show me les fucking machines, including 'Le Pump'—an oxygen mask that clamps onto a woman's privates—and the electric bread knife that's been converted into a double-headed dildo.

He also produces the black headdress that the women wear, and agrees to let me photograph him in it—if he can get it on, that is.

'I don't know how to do this,' he says, fumbling with the strings.

After camping it up on the futon where the beurettes take their pleasure, he takes a seat at his laptop next to a poster of Scarface to show me the one Internet flick he's actually proud of.

'It was very funny to do.'

The sadistic premise of No Fixed Address centers on a not overly attractive woman who arrives in a business suit saying she's willing to do anything to work in porn. 

'Anything?' the director asks off camera.

'Anything.'

So the filmmakers decide to test her by luring a homeless man off the streets—the skinheaded actor from Beurettes Rebelles in a dodgy wig and makeup—and hauling him into the studio, where the woman is waiting blindfolded.

'She can't see!' Milukman chuckles.

The filmmakers remove the blindfold, and the woman's so disgusted, she starts to walk out, but the men talk her into having sex with the tramp.

She kneels in front of him only to find that his penis has gunk on it.

'We put cheese on his dick to make it look dirty!' Milukman laughs.

Cut to the homeless man hurriedly washing his penis in the sink.

'Reality,' the director turns to me to make a Very Important Point, 'That's something the Internet can provide: reality.'

In reality, I don't know what he's talking about.

The clip progresses from oral sex to fisting and screwing, climaxing with a 'facial,' to use the trade term.

And throughout all this, the porn impresario is laughing and cackling: if you couldn't see the screen, you'd think he was watching Chaplin's Little Tramp being hit with a cream pie rather than a tramp coming on a woman's face.

Maybe that's the Sadeian dream made reality. In the new age of porn, people don't know when they're being sadistic; cruelty just comes naturally.

* * *

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Muslim Porn: Behind the Scenes -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 30)

Likewise, I don't want to sound libelous, but it would be a scandal—and more than a little ironic—if the secretive entrepreneur behind Beurettes Rebelles were actually a racist enriching himself by exploiting French-Arab women.

And the more time I spend with him, I get the impression that Milukman doesn't hold France's North African population in the highest esteem: maybe it's because he's a Parisian from the upper crust or because his father had to flee Algeria in 1962 and remake his life after the revolution—Milukman still calls De Gaulle a 'traitor' for surrendering Algeria to the Algerians.

None of that makes him inherently racist, of course; in certain circles, it would just prove he's a good Frenchman.

But imagine the outrage if Milukman turned out to be a good Frenchman whose work just happened to rot the minds and reproductive relationships of immigrants to keep both them and their numbers down.

As Milukman says, though, he doesn't see it that way; it's a 'social service.'

Le Drilldo: one of Milukman's tools

'So are you planning to work in porn for the rest of your career?'

'No, no.' He shakes his head vigorously. 'If I want to have children, and they knew I was working in porn, that would be impossible for me. Maybe it's my Italian roots, but when I'm older, I can't look back at my life and say I did sex and porn.'

With that, Milukman offers to show me his studio nearby.

Instead of a professional film set—or even a photographer's studio—the woodbeamed atelier looks like a student's bedsit or, more romantically, an artist's garret, with a small skylight, a futon and a disheveled mattress, as well as DVDs of The Saint and The Da Vinci Code scattered around the TV and stereo.

The walls are decorated with postcards of tasteful nudes—there's nary a nipple in sight—in contrast to the hardcore scenes that are filmed right here.

On one of the Beurettes Rebelles DVDs you can glimpse the postcard nudes in the background—as a veiled woman with a C-section scar sodomizes herself with a massive black dildo.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'I Don't Want to Sound Racist, But...' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 29)

I'd rather not.

With all that and more under his belt, it's not surprising that Milukman views classic erotica like Emmanuelle as risibly tame.

'I'm from the new generation of producers. There's a gap between Emmanuelle and what I do,' he tells me, by which I think he means that old-school filmmakers tried to hide behind a fig leaf of artistic pretension, whereas his naked ambition is all about money shots.

But that's not what he's getting at.

'People of the old school did it because they loved it,' he explains.

'They were perverts—cochons—pigs. The new generation does it only because it's business. When we get together at meetings, we talk about links and partnerships, not about fucking.'

'You see webmasters who look like choirboys. There are a lot of men like me who didn't think they would work in sex, but sex came to them via the Internet.'

One glorious day I turned on the computer, and lo and behold, sex had come to me via the Internet! 

Likewise, Milukman rejects any notion that he enjoys degrading women, much less that he's a sadist.

'My job is as a businessman. This is just a business opportunity.'

'So if you could make the same money selling potatoes—'

'—then we would do that!' he smiles triumphantly. 'I want to show that you can do porn on the Internet without being a pervert.'

Which sounds perversely puritanical.

And while your mind's reeling from that, I should point out that I have no idea whether the makers of Emmanuelle were cochons.

When I mention another elder veteran of the French hardcore scene, though, Milukman is scathing: 'He's obscene, a pervert. His life is porn. My life is not porn.'

And like a canny drug dealer—or a carb-conscious purveyor of spuds, for that matter—Milukman doesn't partake of his own product.

'I never watch my own movies on the Internet. Except for one. It was very funny to do—I'll show it to you later.'

'What about the beurettes? Do you ever sleep with them?'

'Never.' He rears back. 'When I meet one of the girls, I don't even kiss her. I shake her hand. When you're on set, you're in a business mindset. Also, I have a fiancée.'

'Does she know what you do?'

'Yes.' He grimaces. 'She doesn't like it, but she accepts it. When we're with friends and family, I'm not allowed to say what I do.'

'Also, she knows that I'm not attracted to that kind of woman. I don't want to sound racist, but when you've already fucked that kind of girl, you realize that things will always be complicated with them and their families, and they're hard to put up with.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Muslim Porn: 'A Social Service'? -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 28)

And just as Sade disowned most of his work and was ostracized by polite society, Milukman says he's been shunned by some old schoolmates because of his career in porn.

'Do you ever worry about the impact it has on society?'

'We often give the excuse'—I think he means 'justification'—'that we give pleasure to people,' he says, before echoing the ancient sex-as-safety-valve point of view.

'It's better to have boys jacking off in front of a computer than to have them raping girls in a gang-bang in a banlieue. It's a public interest thing.'

He laughs, but he's serious. 'It's true. I really believe that.'

'What about the women? Don't you think it's degrading to them?'

'Yes, it's degrading, but the girls who do it have a choice to do it. This sort of thing has to exist,' he adds. 'It's like prostitution. It's a social service.'

A true public service:
A poster in the Paris Metro for Ni Putes Ni Soumises
(Neither Whores Nor Submissives):
a French feminist movement that fights violence against women
in the banlieues and ghettos where many of France's Muslims live 

Again, he's smiling—but he's not joking.

The closest he comes to showing regret is when he mentions a girl who suddenly asked him to remove all her films from the Internet.

'A lot of Arabian girls say "I want to keep my face hidden. Because if my brother or father sees me, I'm dead." And it's true—they would be dead.'

Unfortunately for the girl in question, her boyfriend was a subscriber to the site.

'And he recognized her body, even though her face was hidden.' Milukman rolls his eyes.

'Is she okay?'

'I don't know,' he laughs. 'I can't really call her to find out.'

'How do you feel about that?'

'I removed the movies. It was her choice.'

'And?'

He finally musters up some token remorse. 'I feel bad because the girl needed the money, and for me, it wasn't so bad because it was just a funny film.' He shrugs. 'She did something very hard—that may be why her boyfriend didn't like it.'

May be.

'Hard' involves household appliances fitted with sex toys: 'fucking machines' with names like 'Le Drilldo' and 'Le Breadbang.'

'We put two dildos on an electric thing you use to cut bread—'

'You mean an electric knife?'

'Yeah. Bzzzzhh!' he's laughing now. 'And she took it in the pussy and the ass at the same time. Can you imagine?'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Muslim Porn and Darwinian Capitalism -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 27)

Apart from my word to the wise, though, Milukman says his tip-offs have come from Arabic subscribers—not outsiders.

'But surely if you care about Allah and the Dome of the Rock, you're not going to be surfing Muslim porn in the first place?' I suggest.

'All that is about hypocrisy.'

As for himself, Milukman's mother is from Naples and his father French; 'Milukman' is a meaningless nickname, and his heritage has made him a fully indifferent Catholic.

'In my mind, I'm Italian; in my way of being, I'm French,' he says. 'I'm a Christian, but that is not a problem.' 

If anything, like so many people I've met on my journey, Milukman comes across as a Darwinian capitalist, a man whose belief system consists of one brutally simple credo: 'survival of the richest,' with little if any concern for what was once quaintly called the common good.

Superficially, he's as charming as you'd expect a Franco-Italian to be and far more handsome than the stereotypical Nethead.

Fundamentally, though, he must be a pretty nasty piece of work.

Milukman made his first fortune by starting a vengeance website back in 1998, claiming that it was one of the few Internet concepts to originate in Europe and be copied in the US rather than the other way round.

On the site, jilted lovers get their own back by posting compromising photos of their exes, alongside explanations of why they want revenge.

'For me, it was a very funny idea,' he recalls. 'I never believed it would be as successful as it was.'

Now in his mid-thirties, Milukman says he's made enough money from porn to never have to work again.

I have no way of verifying this, but when he mentions that an ongoing tax inspection may cost him €150,000, he doesn't look worried at all.

'My father had a big business,' he says, adding that he didn't know anything about France's slums until he started Beurettes Rebelles.

His dad wanted him to join the family business, but Milukman rebelled. That's how he got into porn.

'It's the best business to make money in,' he shrugs.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Dome of the Rock, Muslim Porn, and Mohammed's Child Bride -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 26)

I ask him about a Web report I've seen that claims one of his sites featured a 'photo of an Arab woman fingering her anus in front of the Dome of the Rock.'

He sighs.

'Yes, it was a mistake.'

That montage was mounted on a US version of the site by his designer, who wanted to use images that were evocative of the Middle East.

So apparently a woman diddling her rectum next to Islam's holiest of holies sprang to mind.

'And immediately people emailed me to tell me it was dangerous.'

The Dome of the Rock was quickly excised, but the beurette and her butthole are still there (or at least they were when I spoke with him), alongside a couple of veiled but otherwise topless women, some palm trees and… a scattering of decorative oil derricks.

Mistake or not, Muslim fundamentalists have harassed and killed people for less.

As we speak, rioters in the banlieues are fighting the police.

And not so long ago, protesters around the world were demanding death for a Danish cartoonist.

Not surprisingly, Milukman is keen to distance himself from those examples.

'I never speak about Allah, and I never speak about Mohammed,' he says. 

Well, except for that one time.

'My designer once put some Arabic writing on the body of a nude girl, and immediately people emailed us that some of the writing contained the name of Allah. It was an honest mistake.' He shrugs. 'How were we to know?'

Possibly by doing some basic research in the first place.

But one of the most surprising aspects about Milukman's potentially life-or-death pastime is just how little he (and his designer) know about Islamic culture.

At one point, I ask him if Aïcha, the half-Moroccan billed as a 'superb brunette' on his site, deliberately based her porn name on the Prophet's beloved child bride.

He looks genuinely shocked—and not a little worried. 

'Aisha was the name of Mohammed's wife?'

I nod.

'There are lots of Aishas in the banlieues,' he mumbles pensively. 'Maybe we'll have to change that on the site.'

Salman Rushdie was ayatollahed for less.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Provoking Muslims -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 25)

Now, I'm no expert on Islamic headgear, but this seems disingenuous at best, not least because the veil on Milukman's site isn't of the colorful, bellydancing variety but a somber black headdress that covers a woman's hair with a cap and most of her face with a long rectangular piece of cloth, leaving only her eyes exposed.

It looks to me like a close cousin of the hijab known as a niqab.

And given that France is the only major Western country where girls are banned from wearing headscarves in school, wrapping naked Muslim girls in black veils for porn shoots seems deliberately provocative, not least because their usual partner is a young white Frenchman with a shaved head.

Milukman gives me a cagey grin. 'It's not a religion-provoking site—officially.'

Nevertheless, for photos, he insists on hiding behind a veil of his own: sunglasses and a handkerchief.

He hit on the idea of using the veil as the unique selling point for a website in 2003.

'I wanted to do something that had never been done—and something to shock,' he says, emphasizing the last word by fisting the air.

I ask if 9/11 and the Iraq War had anything to do with it.

'I can't officially say Beurettes Rebelles had something to do with terrorism or politics.'

He uses his hands to show the divide between his website and those issues.

'But for me, it is a provocation,' he admits. 'In order to keep the site running, though, I have to say it's about Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights.'

The disclaimer on Milukman's site
(courtesy of Google's auto-translator)

Remarkably, Milukman claims he's never had any death threats.

'I've never received even one hate mail,' he says, dead-eyed and earnest. 'I think Arabian people are clever enough to understand the difference between my site and religion.'

In fact, he estimates that 80% of his subscribers are Muslims.

'Chiefly Arabian boys from the banlieues. In France, it's sexual misery for these men. The only way for them to see girls is the Internet, and it's not that expensive for them to pay one to two euros to see a full sex scene online.'

So long as it doesn't offend their religious sensitivities, naturally.

And Milukman—a self-styled 'Web subversive'—has had some close scrapes...

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Milukman and Muslim Porn -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 24)

In analyzing the adventures of the 'new Tintin,' an arch-conservative journalist (and Flemish separatist) noted that the case was the latest in a series of sleaze scandals.

'Morality has gone berserk all over Europe, but nowhere to the same degree as in Belgium,' he claimed. 'If Europe ever "belgianizes", i.e. becomes a state without a real nation, it will end up as the same moral cesspit that Belgium is today.'

As entertaining as Belgium-bashing may be, I'm sure there are plenty of Belguel types in other countries: I've even arranged a rendezvous with one in Paris.

ENTER MILUKMAN

'I think that Belguel guy was mad,' my contact says, though many people would say he's not so sane himself. 

The mystery man across from me is known to hordes of adoring wankers only as 'Milukman,' the founder of websites specializing in what some Westerners refer to as 'Muslim porn'—a deeply offensive term in its own right, especially when pornographers make puns on the word 'submissive' in the S&M sense and the literal meaning of Muslim as 'one who submits.'

Milukman's flagship site is Beurettes Rebelles, a beurette being any French-speaking girl of Arabic or North African extraction, particularly if she hails from one of the immigrant sink estates, or banlieues, on the outskirts of Paris.

For around €350 (less than $500), Milukman's French-Arab 'rebels' willingly subject themselves to varying degrees of humiliation: some masturbate in close-up—with or without the aid of 'fucking machines'—while others limit themselves to oral and anal sex (saving their vaginas for their loved ones), and a hardcore group of wannabe porn stars put their every orifice at the director's disposal.

But all the 'rebel beurettes' have one thing in common: they start off wearing nothing but their birthday suits… and a black veil.

'The veil is my brand—it's my marketing,' Milukman explains.

However, it's not a hijab, he adds.

Although it may look like sacrilege, Beurettes Rebelles features a disclaimer declaring that its inspiration is the (misogynistic) classic, A Thousand and One Nights, in which a courtesan tells a king a cliffhanger each night to avoid execution in the morning:

'Thus no religious character should be attributed to these veils,' the site states.

In fact, Milukman claims the beurettes' black headdress came from a costume store.

'It's a veil like Scheherazade wore.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The 'New Tintin' Unmasked -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 23)

While scrupulously blotting out his own belle gueule, he made no attempt to hide the women's faces, leaving them easily identifiable in his before-and-after photos.

This became a temporarily diverting topic for his fellow 'mongers' online, men with nicknames like Spurter, MeatMan and XXL whose idea of an ethical debate usually consisted of whether or not to tip for oral sex without a condom.

'He gets my vote for poster of the year!' gushed one, though another warned: 'These girls are Muslims. They live in a Muslim country. You are exposing them to grave danger.'

When the forum moderator suggested covering up the women's eyes, some members countered that there was no need: their faces were already covered in semen.

THE TRAGIC OUTCOME

Belguel's images soon began making the rounds in the local souks, and in 2005, the fiancé of one of the women recognized his betrothed on a black-market CD.

Despite the obvious question of why he was watching porn in the first place, the Moroccan did the me-so-macho thing and beat up the woman, an otherwise respectable schoolteacher.

Rejected by her family and friends, the woman tried to report Belguel to the police; tragically, she was arrested instead: in Morocco, it's a crime to pose for explicit photos.

The disgraced teacher was fined and sentenced to a year in jail, while the police tracked down the other women on the CD.

At last count, thirteen had been sent to prison (two reportedly tried to kill themselves) and several others had disappeared: presumed suicides or the victims of 'honor' killings.

It turns out that the true criminal in the case had been caught with porn pictures and questioned by the Moroccan authorities the previous year.

'The police kept me in for eighteen hours, but they released me because Morocco has good relations with Belgium, where I am a well-known person,' Belguel crowed later.

With the cooperation of the Belgian police, though, he was eventually unmasked as not just a run-of-the-mill perv but a baby-faced member of the country's media elite: Philippe Servaty, the chief economics correspondent of Le Soir, Brussels' most influential newspaper.

Although he apparently hadn't committed any crime under Belgian law, Servaty was forced to resign: not for abusing the women… but for making 'racist' remarks about them.

He's since gone into hiding with a bounty on his head.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Islam and the Pretty-Faced Sadist -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 22)

With their emphasis on 'safe words' and sex 'play,' most self-styled sadists today are anemic imitations of the real Marquis.

Like their namesake, genuine sadists probably wind up in prison—though more than a few walk freely among us.

In the maiden years of the new millennium, a modern Sade began posting Internet photos of his holidays to Morocco humiliating Muslim women.

Styling himself 'Belguel'—which sounds like 'pretty face'—the Francophone sex tourist boasted that he hadn't even had to pay the women for their services.

The girls he picked up on the streets of Agadir willingly submitted to being sodomized (and worse) because they believed he would whisk them to Europe.

'These sluts are so naïve. If you promise to marry them and take them with you to Brussels they do whatever you ask,' he wrote, alongside a photo of one of the eighty or so women he'd conned into posing for him.

Many of his unwitting victims were single (though some were married) and most were plain.

'NO BETTER DRUG'

In a typical sequence, one of Belguel's prettier victims, a dark-skinned woman with a sweet face, smiles shyly for the camera in a stonewashed jacket and denim skirt.

Before you know it, she's bent over a sofa with her skirt hitched up and her knickers around her knees, spreading her backside.

And that's just the beginning.

In the next photo, she's kneeling naked with a bondage gag in her mouth and her hands tied behind her back.

Belguel has wrapped a rope around her neck, chest and groin and clamped nipple clips on her breasts.

He stands over her, gripping the tail of the rope like a dog lead, having removed his trousers and underpants. He then proceeds to urinate in the bound woman's face (having placed a metal pot in her lap to protect the furnishings).

In another shot, she's wearing a hijab and silk gown, leaving only her face exposed while she kneels and the white man masturbates to completion in her eyes.

In the original series,
the face of Belguel's victim is clearly visible
(I've edited this photo)

'Look at this girl, her face is covered with two liquids. She didn't like it very much, but she said she was open to learning anything new from the West,' jeered the anonymous correspondent.

In an entry reminiscent of Sade and his era's fascination with nuns, Belguel bragged: 'There is no better drug than to ejaculate on the veiled face of a woman.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Bee Gees and the Terribly Nice Sadists -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 21)

I should point out that all this is taking place to a surreal, disco-riffic soundtrack of ABBA, Barry White and the Bee Gees.

Next door, a greyheaded man has lashed his partner to the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew.

She's pantyless and facing the wall, the taut skin on her face contrasting suspiciously with the flaccidity of her backside—if only they did Botox for buttocks.

As the old boy flails her with twirls and whirlybirds and other tricks of the whip, she gasps 'Oui! Oui!' and even 'Encore! Encore!' while the 'Walrus of Love' croons 'Let the Music Play.'

One voyeur starts grooving in unison—before stopping self-consciously.

Steve and Fanny have disappeared from the bar, and I wander upstairs to see if they're still here.

I turn the corner to have a look in the bedroom and—whoa!—see more of Sex Action Man than I ever wanted.

Steve is naked, kneeling with his butt to the doorway, while Fanny whips him between the legs… and gazes over his shoulder at me.

I shrink away.

TOO MUCH HEAVEN?

By now, the air in the club is the usual Metro stew of alcohol, sweat, smoke and garlic, plus a queasy soupcon of bodily secretions.

Over in the ob-gyn clinic, the bulbous woman with the trussed tits—she of the hot-waxed nipples—is lying on the examination table, her feet in the stirrups.

'Le Marquis Noir' guides a rotund blonde into the room and positions her between the patient's legs.

She begins administering cunnilingus, while the black woman's fat, ponytailed boyfriend kisses and fondles her and the usual crowd gathers round.

One of them starts humming along with the lush melody winding its way up the stairs.

(To answer that timeless question posed by the Bee Gees, I'm guessing the lickee's love is about six inches deep.)

Out in the hall, I've been cornered by a little guy with porthole glasses and a tubby sidekick wearing a toupee that wouldn't fool a blind man.

The elderly fellow in specs pauses to put on a tight leather glove, as if preparing for a rectal probe.

'What's that for?' I ask.

He blinks at me obviously and nods toward the blonde. 'For ze lay-dee.'

Ohhhhh.

Back in his shiny fetishwear, Sex Action Man materializes out of the funk, ready and more than willing to assist in Operation Ecstasy.

Steve's standing behind the kneeling woman with his arms at the ready, and at some mysterious signal—maybe it's a nod from the Marquis, maybe it's the beginning of 'Too Much Heaven (Nobody Gets Too Much Love Anymore)'—Steve sticks his fingers up the latex expanse of the fat woman's skirt.

She doesn't balk—then again, her tongue's otherwise engaged—so he enlists another guy to lift up her skirt with a plastic snap! and Steve's hand disappears up her bottom.

Despite the black woman's moans of ecstasy, after many minutes of lap licking, it becomes clear she can't muster up a crowd-pleasing climax.

Her boyfriend asks the blonde to stop.

'I'm doing my best,' she protests.

'Thank you, but I think she's had enough.'

And with that, the Terribly Nice Sadists disperse.

* * *