The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The Czechs Still Haven't Mastered Capitalism' -- (Chapter X, Part 20)

Having thrived during the free-market boom of democracy, the Czech sex industry is now experiencing the cut-throat side of capitalism: a market crash.

'I've never seen such a fast implosion,' says an American who ought to know: not only is he a veteran of the Great Dotcom Crash of 2001, he now makes his living guiding foreigners around Prague's brothels.

'I have my graduate degree in economics,' he assures me.

Lena and I have come to Prague just a few days before St. Stephen's Day on the 26th of December.

And while many sex clubs blame the lack of trade on the season, my guide says the slump is worse than that.

'It's a classic supply-demand imbalance.'

Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen...

While women in other Eastern European capitals offer sex tourists ever-cheaper bangs for their bucks, he reckons Czech prostitutes are in danger of pricing themselves out of the market.

'For two to three hundred euros an hour, you could just as well stay at home in London, couldn't you? But some of the Czechs still haven't mastered capitalism. They think if they lower their prices, people will think there's something wrong with the goods.'

He makes this observation while hustling across Wenceslaus Square, muttering 'Nyet, nyet' to the rival touts on the street trying to lure us into their clubs. ('Nyet works better because the Czechs are still scared of the Russians.')

Up at the top of the grand, rectangular promenade stands the horsebound statue of the Czechs' patron saint, an impotent sentinel that's witnessed the Nazi occupation, the Soviet invasion and the Velvet Revolution.

Vaclav (aka Wenceslas), meet Vaclav 
(Matej Divizna, The Telegraph)

Nowadays, when good King Wenceslaus looks out—on the Feast of Stephen or any other day—he sees a neon parade of clothing chains, restaurants and cafes.

And if you follow the saint's gaze far enough, down past the strip club marked GATE TO HELL, you can see what he's focusing on: a voluptuous, illuminated dollar sign revolving outside a casino.

The History of Sex: Prague -- The Soviet 'House of Love' -- (Chapter X, Part 6)

The most remarkable aspect of Sexpionage was Lewis' interviews with reputed alumni of the KGB's top 'sex school'—or the 'Verkhonoye House of Love.'

Having passed their preliminary training at the Marx-Engels School outside Gorky, potential sex spies were transferred to a special training center at the Lenin Technical High School at Verkhonoye*, a godforsaken spot near the Autonomous Tatar Soviet Republic.

Between lessons on politics, economics and how to kill people—the usual spy stuff—the recruits were told their mission and forced to lose their inhibitions.

This titillating article...

A defector in London named Sasha Demidov recalled that 'ravens' were ordered to start having sex with each other—even though homosexuality was officially illegal:

'If they were invited to an orgy in the West, they had to be able to participate with both sexes. If they thought a Western male could be blackmailed after having an affair with them, they had to be able to overcome any repugnance and sleep with him. At all stages it is emphasized that any task which is for the good of the Soviet Union must be undertaken.'

SWALLOWS AND RAVENS

The same ethos applied to the opposite sex.

With the aid of a former West German spook, Lewis managed to track down one of the few swallows who flew the nest and lived to tell the tale.

'Vera' seduced a KGB colonel to travel in East Germany and then escape West.

At the time Lewis met her, she was in her mid-thirties and living in Tunisia with her husband and two young girls.

Still fearing a KGB hit, she chose to meet Lewis in a small café in the walled brothel district of Sousse.

As she lit a cigarette—just like in the movies—the former sex spy recounted how the fifteen women and five men in her group were transported to Verkhonoye, split into groups, and systematically degraded into accepting their Party-designated fate.

After a pep talk from a female instructor promising them a life of luxury (countered by a uniformed man telling them their true motivation should be love of the Party), they were gradually made aware of what their country expected in return.

...is from this 'men's magazine'
from April 1965

----------
* Note for potential researchers/documentary makers: Lewis--and other sources likely based on his book--consistently spell the location as Verkhonoye; unfortunately, a Google search for that name doesn't yield any hits, though that could be for any number of reasons. 

According to Lewis' book, Verkhonoye itself was located 'about 100 miles from Kazan near the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Republic.' Kazan is actually the capital of modern Tatarstan, so I take that to mean that Verkhonoye itself was just outside the Tatar Republic.

The closest fit I can find on Google Maps is Verkhniye Tatyshly--though there are a lot of other potential candidates (like Verkhnyaya Salda).

The Lenin Technical High School, or 'Verkhonoye House of Love,' was reportedly part of a complex covering seven square miles, 'approached by a long, narrow road which runs through bleak countryside.' So for anyone on the ground, it shouldn't be hard to miss.  

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 -- The Prophet of the Second Sexual Revolution? -- (Chapter VIII, Part 37)

In keeping with the demented sci-fi theme, the modern videos on display promoting 'orgone therapy' are cheesily reminiscent of Scientology promos, minus the celebs.

Unlike L. Ron Hubbard, though, the Austrian never lived to see the triumph of his new reich.

As an ex-Commie flogging sex boxes to American gullibles during the Red Scare of the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before Reich attracted the Feds.

In a disturbing parallel to the Nazis' book burnings, the US government ordered all his writings about 'orgone therapy' to be incinerated.

Prosecuted as a fraud and sentenced to two years in jail, Reich died in captivity in 1957, turning him into a martyr of sorts for later free spirits.

In its cover story announcing 'The Second Sexual Revolution' in 1964, Time magazine conceded reluctantly that 'Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box.'

And since then, the West's libido has been unleashed to roam the world—and come back and pee on Freud's very own doorstep.

Just down the street from his former home in Vienna is a high-brow erotica shop with a painting of an eighteenth-century woman crouched on a bed, her naked hindquarters quivering in the air.

With a winged penis as its symbol, the store takes its name from de Sade: Die Philosophie im Boudoir. 

Though its counterpart in London boasts more relics, the Freud Museum in Vienna is obviously hallowed ground, for it's here that psychoanalysis was born—his most famous patients passed through these portals—and it's here that the prophet of a new age was persecuted by the heathens of his own land and forced to flee (Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.)

'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime, because they allowed him to take everything with him,' says the museum's director, Inge Scholz-Strasser, noting that after Freud left, his home became a 'Jew-collecting apartment:' a temporary residence for poor Jews who were dispatched to concentration camps.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Here's Where It Really Gets Messy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 34)

As a diagnosed masochist (and elementary schoolteacher), then, Anna Freud preached that kids could be taught to control their irrational impulses and conform to society—a notion that sounds far more benevolent than it really was.

In keeping with her father's methods, Anna secretly tested her theories on the children of her lifelong female companion, the heiress Dorothy Burlingham, daughter of artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Sigmund called her kids 'naughty American children.'

Anna and Sigmund managed to escape the Nazis, 
thanks to the strings pulled by his foreign disciples:
'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime,' the director of Vienna's Freud museum told me.
'They allowed him to take everything with him.' 

Obsessed that the boy was homosexual and therefore in her view abnormal, Anna subjected him and his sister to live-in analysis throughout their childhoods.

At first, her methods seemed to work: the children turned into apparently model citizens who married and had children of their own.

Sure enough, the son didn't become gay—but he did end up drinking himself to death.

His sister committed suicide in the same house in north London where Sigmund had 'died in freedom' and Anna had subjected her to experiments (ironically, the house is now a shrine to Freudianism: the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens).

And they're still at it:
The Anna Freud Centre in London

As for Anna herself, her dad's dodgy analysis left her with a father complex so severe she ended up dying a 'vestal' virgin guarding his legacy, huddling in his overcoat as an old, childless spinster on Hampstead Heath.

By that time, unfortunately, Anna's theories had been foisted on a generation of schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic.

The tragicomic implication of all this is that when the inevitable backlash came, the rebels of the Sixties wound up kicking against the wrong targets.

Behind the scenes, Freud and his disciples were as much (if not more) to blame for creating the consumerism and conformity of the 1950s as the usual scapegoats: namely, religion, bigotry and the nuclear family.

What's more, when a generation of disillusioned rebels tried to break with the past and create a new future, they looked to another misguided follower of Freud as their savior.

* * *

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Fanny, Sex Action Man, and a Taste of the Marquis de Sade -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 18)

Noting my discomfort, Oda introduces me to a regular from London who lives in Paris.

He's clad in a shiny shirt-and-trousers ensemble made of black plastic-leather.

Blonde and square-jawed, Sex Action Man has a habit of cocking his arms on his hips.

'Hi, I'm Steve,' he says.

Of course it is.

'And this is Fanny.' A French dominatrix with wispy hair, stained teeth and leathery skin.

I tell them I'm writing a book, and Fanny mentions that she was invited to the award ceremony last night for the Prix Sade, a literary prize founded in 2001.

Apparently a gay snuff novel from America won (I'm so proud).

Fanny makes it clear that she and Steve are merely acquaintances; he has a live-in girlfriend.

'But she's not really into this,' he adds vaguely.

After some more perfectly pleasant small talk—they're terribly nice, these sadists—I excuse myself to have a look round.

SPANKING AND SUCKING

The cubbyholes next to the bar have a torture-lite theme, with a leather sex swing and assorted shackles, handcuffs and pulley contraptions, as well as a dildo-equipped chair and a Cross of St. Andrew.

Upstairs, the mood moves from the inspirational (a room with an old-fashioned writing desk and quilled pen) to the clinical (a tiled 'doctor's surgery' featuring an examination bed with gynecological stirrups) and even the ham-handedly comical (a toilet with penis-shaped taps) before reverting to ye-olde dungeon theme in the main room.

A couple of middle-aged blondes are taking it in turns to be spanked and tied to stocks hanging from the ceiling, and in the corner, a topless black woman with ropes around her breasts—a kind of bondage support bra—is mashing mammaries with a white kinkster while her fat, ponytailed boyfriend drips candle wax on their saucer-sized nipples.

Both women are loudly sucking in air, licking their lips and flicking their tongues to let it be known to all and sundry that the hot wax is exquisitely painful.

To me, it just looks painful. 

But I soon spot the real attraction: a little curtained-off bedroom in the corner—the black hole of male lust that keeps the regulars coming back for more.

A couple of men are perving in the doorway, drinks in hand, transfixed by the grimly sexual scene inside.

Not knowing what to expect—though the spanking and sucking noises should be a clue—I take another swig of my drink and peer into the darkness.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Cochons, Defloration-Mania, and the City of Light -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 15)

Ironically, despite the current bondage boom, S&M clubs are virtually nonexistent in the land of the Marquis.

So I've decided to go to Paris in search of a latter-day Sade—or at least a real, live, squealing cochon (slang for 'pervert').

The City of Light sealed its illicit reputation in the century after the Marquis' death, when pornography became mass market and consumerism fueled the notion that both people and goods could be disposable.

The English had popularized the term 'shopping' during the Marquis' lifetime, while 'defloration-mania'—the sale of virgins—became the rage on both sides of the Channel.

In 1855, a French playwright came up with a new term for the decadent 'half world' that thrived beyond the bounds of prudish 'respectable' society.

Fast-forward to the present, though, and le demimonde could easily describe tout le monde.

In keeping with stereotypes, sex and swinging clubs are as common as poodle muck in Paris, but surprisingly there's only one venue devoted to BDSM.

Cris et Chuchotements—'Cries and Whispers'—is tucked away where the red-light spillover from the Pigalle meets the chi-chi respectability of the seventeenth arrondissement.

Don't believe the hype:
They wish they were this sexy

In fact, the S&M site sits right behind the local town hall and just down the street from a police station and an elementary school.

The kids' laughter is echoing down the street as I approach the dungeonesque door, marked with a flickering candle encased in a glass. It seems fitting that the nearest Metro stop is Rome.

Inside, the entrance is predictably dark, contrasting with the flash of white flesh that greets me.

A chubby blonde is peeling off the last of her street clothes to squeeze into something a little less comfortable, and from what I've seen (without wanting to), I reckon she's at that age just before the physical slide turns into an avalanche.

The guy who takes my coat, on the other hand, is a buff gym bunny who I've been assured is a serious S&M player, despite the friendly lettering on his T-shirt—Philippe—and his codename—Le Marquis Noir—which probably sounds more menacing if you twirl a fake moustache and pronounce it with a villainous stage cackle:

The Marquis Nwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Fetish With a Capital F -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 10)

Max and Maria's relationship started romantically enough, though, with the two opposites meeting via modem way back in 1996.

'By email,' she gushes. 'Not chat; email—one email a day. Without picture! Just words. And after seventeen days, he took a plane from Milan to Palermo to see me.'

'And some months after we met, we decided to go to London's Rubber Ball,' Max adds, as if a fetish fest were the most natural destination in the world for one's true love.

But Max and Maria talk about fetish with a capital F, recalling their introduction to binding and gagging with reverence—and a winning innocence.

Predictably, Max was the first to voice an interest in Fetish, though Maria soon followed.

'I love clothes in general—but I love fetish clothes. Very, very much,' she waggles her eyebrows.

THE POWER OF FETISH

Max had been emailing some aficionados in the UK—for an erotic novel—and they invited him and his new lady-friend to find out about Fetish in the flesh.

'And we said, Oh!'

'Oh, my God!' Maria adds in mock horror.

'We didn't know anything, and we were—'

'—afraid. We thought, they'll eat us!' Maria laughs so hard she snorts.

'But we decided we have to go,' Max adds, his eyes turning dreamy. 'And it was—it was such a beautiful experience. We discovered a world of—'

'Kind persons.'

'Yes.'

'Correct persons.'

Eh? At a bash devoted to bondage and sadomasochism?

You'd expect a fetish fiesta to be called a lot of things—sexy, scandalous or just plain hot—but Max and Maria paint it as nothing less than a life-changing experience.

In fact, listening to them describe the transformative power of Fetish, you wonder what they see in it that you don't. So I ask Max why he thought it was beautiful.

'It changed our lives because inside, you may have a lot of fantasies, but you're afraid of these things, and you think you are sick. You think you are the only one in the world to think of these things,' he explains.

'When you see 3,000 people, all with joy—'

'—respect—'

'—with respect, with a lot of creativity, with fantasy, you are astonished. You say, there is something nice—there is beauty—in all of this. The people are beautiful inside before the outside.'

The History of Sex: London -- 'The Woman of the Millennium' -- (Intro, Pt. 2)

Of course, it was no surprise to learn that, like most good things (ahem), the Masturbate-a-thon came from my homeland, America, though I doubt that's what Churchill had in mind when he christened our countries' 'special relationship.'

What astounded me was the Wank-a-thon's financial link with that grand-dame of family planning, Marie Stopes International, a New World-Old World match made in heaven—or hell, depending on your grasp of history.

The English poet Larkin famously joked that sex began in 1963, and invariably each generation thinks it invented sex.

When it comes to wanking, though, the first self-styled 'citizen of the world,' Diogenes the Cynic, went around Athens masturbating way back in the fourth century before Christ—without any pretensions about 'coming for a good cause.'

And as a gauge of our collective ignorance about sex, it's hard to beat Marie Stopes' reputation as a noble pioneer of birth control, a crusader for erotic freedom and Empowered Womyn who stuck it to the Man—especially the Church!

THE 'WOMAN OF THE MILLENNIUM'

Back in 1999, readers of the Guardian inexplicably voted her the 'Woman of the Millennium.'

Not Elizabeth I, that old 'Virgin Queen,' or Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, or even Margaret Sanger, the Yank who coined 'birth control' and beat Stopes to opening the first such clinic in New York.

No, otherwise educated readers hailed Stopes, the British underdog, as 'the great liberator' who 'freed women from the drudgery of unwanted pregnancies.'

'No other woman has done so much towards freeing women from their purely biological role,' gushed one correspondent.

Never mind that Stopes—like Sanger—had some rather controversial views about reproduction; specifically, that it should be limited to married couples who were healthy, intelligent and attractive (in Stopes' utopia, 'half-castes' and other undesirables would be sterilized—she disinherited her only son for the 'eugenic crime' of marrying a woman who wore glasses).

Though now portrayed as a patron saint of women's rights, Stopes was rabidly against abortion, as well as contraceptives for singletons.

'BREEDING RUBBISH'

An avowed Darwinist, she criticized residual 'Christian impulses of saving and safeguarding the weak' and ranted that postwar society was 'breeding rubbish:' 'The British race has tended for too long to foster the inferior stocks.'

Lacking the power to issue 'inviolable edicts'—not unlike Hitler's—Stopes opted to campaign for birth control as a means of ensuring that her beloved 'British race' produced strong offspring for the Empire.

Who says eugenics is unfashionable?
The Royal Mail's Marie Stopes stamp,
unveiled in 2008

But what seemed most surprising to me, in light of Marie Stopes International happily reaping the proceeds from a US-inspired Masturbate-a-thon, is that Stopes herself condemned masturbation as 'self abuse' (and she wasn't keen on Americans, either).

And now, with birth rates in Western Europe in terminal decline, Ma Stopes would have been horrified to find that the organization bearing her name was encouraging the Great British Public to have orgasms in vain. 

That's why a Marie Stopes Masturbate-a-thon struck me as so outrageous: not because of moral issues, but because it seemed to reflect our boundless ignorance of sex history—the not-inconsequential question of where we come from.

With the amount of info available to us in the twenty-first century, how is it possible that we—that I—know so little about the roots of Western attitudes toward sex?

Thinking ourselves wise, how have we become such fools? Without getting all ontological about it, how on earth did we get here?

So I set off to find the 'truth'—or the closest thing to it—about our sexual past.

* * *

The History of Sex: London -- In the Beginning... -- (Intro, Pt. 1)

'ARE YOU COMING?'

'On Saturday 5th August we will be making history…' the ads proclaim. Could it be a cure for cancer? A new energy source to save the planet? Or maybe another campaign to fight poverty?

After all, this is Great Britain, the land that's given the world everything from parliamentary democracy to penicillin, football, railroads, jet engines, the English language, TV and the framework for the World Wide Web.

When it comes to making history, the British have made more than most.

On this historic occasion, though, the organizers have pitched their ambitions somewhat lower than those of their illustrious ancestors: at groin-level, to be exact.

The his-and-hers posters show two shots of anonymous crotches: a man and a woman wearing Union Jack underwear… and sticking their hands down their pants for Europe's maiden 'Masturbate-a-thon.'

SAY WHUH?

I first heard about the event from Lena the Latin South African, who phoned me while commuting to work. 'JR, have you heard about the Masturbate-a-thon tomorrow?'

'The whuh?'

'A Wank-a-thon! I've just read about it, and I thought of you.'

Ignoring the slur by association, I couldn't fathom the concept of marathon masturbation, let alone the fact that Lena was getting such a kick out of repeating the term in public on a busy train in London.

The Asian guy across from her couldn't believe it, either.

An office type in thick glasses, he started fingering his freesheet like crazy to find out more. Eventually, Lena leaned over and showed him the bottom of page 12.

So the Anglo-Indian man read it, shook his head and said to the Latin South African:

'It's not Britain anymore, is it?'

©J.R. Daeschner

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