The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Founder of the First Sexual Revolution -- (Chapter VIII, Part 35)

With his electrified shock of hair, hiss fairy stronk accent and screwball hypotheses, Wilhelm Reich (like Freud) would be laughable if so many people still didn't take him seriously.

In fact, one reason I've come to Vienna is to see the Jewish Museum's temporary exhibit in honor of the archetypal mad scientist.

Whereas Freud was a Victorian at heart, arguing that the libido had to be controlled to preserve society, his Galician disciple was a child of the sexed-up fin de siècle—'Willy' had started having sex with one of his family's maids when he was eleven, and both his parents had killed themselves over his mother's affair with one of his teachers.

Unlike his mentor in Vienna, Reich echoed Rousseau's view that humans were fundamentally good; it was society's hang-ups that were bad.

If people's libidos could be let off the leash, Reich argued, the world would be revolutionized: in fact, he coined the term 'Sexual Revolution' way back in 1930.

A couple of years later, the young psychoanalyst committed an unpardonable sin in Freud's eyes.

While the father of psychoanalysis had been exploring masochism with his daughter, he had also developed a new pet theory: the so-called 'death instinct,' the counterpart to the libido that drove humans to destruction.

Sacrilegiously, though, Reich had the audacity to debunk Freud's latest universal discovery, linking it to just one of many particular character traits.

Freud responded with the standard punishment for anyone who wouldn't kowtow to his godlike self-image: he had him excommunicated from the psychoanalytic church, using his masochistic daughter as his enforcer.

When Reich published his article on 'The Masochistic Character' in 1932, Freud tried to claim that he had written it 'in the service' of the Communist Party.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pop Psychopathy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 5)

With dirt-dishing like that, 'Sexual Psychopathy' soon became a medical bestseller, despite many opinionmakers frowning on its populist appeal.

Here was a top psychiatrist and society doctor, a stout, patrician Catholic in the staid university town of Graz (aka Pension-opolis)—a devoted husband and father of three—who had made it his life's work to catalogue perversity in 'the minutest and the most nauseous detail.'

As The British Medical Journal remarked: 'Better if it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.'

Like Aretino's Positions, The Kama Sutra, and the rediscovered erotica of Pompeii, Krafft-Ebing's work introduced more than a few readers to practices they'd never thought of before: ironically, his Psychopathia Sexualis popularized some of the 'psychopathic' behavior it sought to cure.

At the same time, though, the book provided solace to sexual outsiders.

'By publishing his patients' letters and autobiographies, Krafft-Ebing enabled voices to be heard that were usually silenced,' writes his Dutch biographer, who recently uncovered the doctor's archive in Graz.

Professor Harry Oosterhuis cites a lesbian novel from Austria in 1901, in which one of the lovers yearns to tell a couple of male scoffers that 'We also belong to these "Krafft-Ebing people"! I think that they would have fainted!'

ENTER THE MASOCHISTS

Krafft-Ebing was intrigued by one group of 'perverts' in particular: men who yearned to be whipped and humiliated by women.

Rousseau had written about the joys of a good flogging in his Confessions, and many old codgers knew the trick as a way to get blood flowing to their todgers.

But the fantasies of Krafft-Ebing's correspondents represented something different: the flip side of sadism.

A thirty-five-year-old recounted how he'd always been excited by the idea of slavery: as a teenager, he'd had erections while reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (not the effect Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind).

A German count confessed to paying prostitutes to kick him and make him lick their feet.

And another correspondent traced the worship of imperious women back to the troubadours.

What these gluttons for punishment had in common, though, was their praise for the pervy oeuvre of a contemporary novelist who happened to live in the same Austrian city as Krafft-Ebing.

In fact, his dad was the police chief of Graz.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Sadism: The Most 'Natural' Way to Live -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 10)

When the parents of four of the girls claimed that their children had been abducted, the Marquis' wife spirited them away to hide the signs of her husband's abuse.

One of the girls chose to continue serving the Sades, but three others were packed off to convents (the Marquis' wife told the nuns not to believe their confessions), and the most traumatized teenager was sent to be guarded by the Marquis' uncle.

Seeing that he was a priest, the raving girl tried to confide in him; little did she know that the Abbé de Sade—an expert on the troubadours—was almost as bad as his nephew: rumor had it he'd also recently kidnapped a girl from her parents.

But the cover-up didn't end there.

AN ABUSIVE FAMILY TREE?

In the spring of 1775, Sade's chambermaid, Nanon, had a child and claimed he was the father (which may very well have been a lie).

Just in case, to prevent her from joining forces with the parents of the abused girls, the Marquis' wife framed her for stealing some silver and succeeded in getting her locked up.

Nanon didn't find out until months later that her newborn had died while she was in prison.

Which makes me wonder: just as the Marquis' descendants are still kicking around—his great-great grandson lives in the Loire Valley—it's feasible that the victims of his victims might have survived down the ages, forming a kind of abusive family tree.

If it's true that many pedophiles have been victims themselves, and some of Sade's victims went on to abuse more than one child each, and their victims did the same, then even allowing for war, disease and margin of error, it's possible that someone somewhere is being abused now because of what took place in Lacoste less than eight generations ago.

Maybe that's why Sade gets so little publicity here.

Not surprisingly, Finn doesn't like to talk much about his hero's sex crimes, preferring to paint him as an important figure in the history of thought.

And to a certain extent, he's got a point.

For example, Sade mocked Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers for idealizing Nature.

Decades before Darwin, the Marquis preached that Nature was cruel, not kind; in his brutally reductive view, the most 'natural' way to live was to revel in Nature's cruelty.

A sculpture on the grounds of the Marquis de Sade's castle,
part of Pierre Cardin's Festival de Lacoste
(with a not-so-ghostly specter in the foreground)

The History of Sex: Seville -- Rape as a Weapon -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 10)

That claim that would have appalled the late 'Generalissimo of Spain' and self-styled 'Leader of the Last Crusade and of the Hispanic World.'

Not that he was a big fan of Don Juans.

Francisco Franco's father had been a womanizing military man who was often away from home (has anybody seen my daddy?), leaving the future Fascist to cling to his devout, bourgeois Catholic mother.

Like most dictators, Franco wound up running his beloved Motherland into the ground. But it wasn't meant to turn out that way.

In launching his coup against Spain's anti-Catholic government in 1936, Franco's goal had been to restore España to its glory days as a global power, adopting the 'Catholic Monarchs' who founded the Inquisition as his role models.

The Last Crusade: Fascist propaganda from the Civil War
Franco vowed to make Spain the 'Spiritual Guide of the World'

The Fascists aimed to bring about not just a political and economic revolution, but also a moral one, rejecting liberalism—particularly the relativism of Rousseau—and restoring the Church to the center of Spanish life.

Decadent Italy and the Vatican might be the Pope's home, but Franco's Spain aimed to implement the purest form of Catholicism on the planet.

And right from the beginning, sex was a weapon.

Seville was one of the first cities to fall to Franco's coupmongers, and the officer who conquered it bragged about the rapes committed by his troops.

For men who viewed women as either virgins or whores, of course, violating a godless Communist wasn't really rape at all: she was already a whore.

After the war, these false ideals became the focus of the Fascist regime.

'In the Spain of National-Catholicism, the accent on immorality fell almost exclusively on sexual sin, so much so that the multiple forms of theft and corruption were forgotten,' according to a fascinating history of Sexual Repression in Franco's Spain, which argues that 'the autarchy's sexual repression also had its Torquemada:' the Minister of Information and Tourism, a 'super-Catholic' who supposedly kept fiscal accounts of how many souls the Fascist regime saved each year.

Spanish Civil War poster:
'Avoid venereal diseases: They're as dangerous as enemy bullets'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Why Car Nerds Aren't Cool -- (Chap. V, Pt. 15)

So in the same spirit as Chris the West-Country Mechanic, if not exactly Jean & Jean-Jacques, I feel compelled to make a confession of my own: I don't 'get' cars.

At least not in the way most men do.

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate a well-designed car as much as a well-designed egg beater, but I'd never lust after one, let alone be tempted to stick my bits in it.

Not exactly an egg-beater: a handle-powered vibrator from Germany
(from the Prague Sex Machines Museum)

To me, an excessive love of things that go vroom is symptomatic of the same quasi-autistic streak that drives other men to spend their free time logging the comings and goings of choo-choo trains.

And whereas it's commonly accepted that trainspotters are to be pelted with stones and driven from their homes with burning torches, I've never understood how a 'motorhead' who can bore the chrome off a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz is celebrated as 'a man's man'—muy macho.

If anything, it seems to me that train anoraks are more endearing than car nerds because

a) they're self-aware enough to realize they're crazy and even a bit sad; and
b) there are fewer of them so there's less threat of them breeding. 

Indeed, what's frightening about the Geneva Motor Show is just how many car-nerds there are—the official tally this year is 730,736 (minus one) over ten days!

I'm clearly missing a kink in my chromosomes.

Which is why Lena the Latin South African is here.

With her curls and curves, she's got enough kinks for both of us.

For starters, she lets me in on the secret psychology of auto-nerds: 'It's not what you know about your car; it's what you know other people know about your car.'

Frankly, I wouldn't know.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- The Man Who Has Sex With Cars -- (Chap. V, Pt. 14)

Nowhere is modern Geneva's mix of luxury and lust, of mammon and mammaries, more apparent than its annual Motor Show, another unlikely byproduct of Calvin's internationalism—and a development that no doubt would have horrified Rousseau, whose last book was Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

For the best part of a century, Switzerland has provided neutral turf for rival automakers from around the world to seduce the public with their latest models, usually posing in front of a new car.

To tempt you into attending, the Motor Show's official website has a photo gallery entitled 'Atmosphere:' snapshots of young things come-hithering while the suits around them stand a-dithering.

If the businessmen were actually sitting in the cars, it could be a convention for working girls and the suits who use them.

'HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A CAR'

Of course, ever since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, you can bet that one of Henry Ford's newly empowered workers was plotting how and with whom to exploit the semi-privacy of its upholstered backseat.

But it's taken our era, empowered by the invention of the World Wide Web, to create entire global communities devoted to actual auto-erotica like 'dogging' or the logical culmination of the much-vaunted 'love affair with the auto:' people who have sex with their cars.

In what seems like April Fool's come early, Britain's Sun tabloid has alerted the world to the case of thirty-eight-year-old Chris Donald, a mechanic from England's West Country who boasts that he's had sex with more than thirty different (car) models, as well as two motorboats and a jetski.

Of the BMW 520i V6 he says gallantly: 'It wasn't all sex. She was a great drive, too.'

Chris has his very own website, including a manual on 'How to Make Love to a Car or Other Vehicle.'

Tip No. 3: 'Leather interiors on luxury vehicles work rather well for humping. I've seen vanilla folks enjoy this as an alternative to lady palm and her five fingers. Cleans easy, too!' 

Shudder.

As with so many of the world's ills, Chris reckons his fetish is David-Hasselhoff-related; apparently, he spent too much time watching the Hoff's talking car in Knight Rider.

Sure enough, The Sun has a photo of the corpulent mechanic with his kit off, 'humper to bumper' with a recent conquest.

'Some men prefer boobs and bums, but I prefer curvy bodywork.'
Chris the West Country Mechanic putting the moves on his latest conquest
(The Sun)

Chris claims he's in a long-term relationship with a girlfriend (see 'lady palm' above) and says he knows more than 500 like-minded souls.

Most of them masturbate while they video Chris 'exhausting himself.'

'Some even like to taste mechanical fluids, but that's going too far,' he clarifies.

Likewise, he cautions against inserting one's privates in an exhaust pipe while the engine is running: 'Never fuck a car hot!'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Weeding Out the Weirdos -- (Chap. V, Pt. 13)

As for Rousseau, his love-hate relationship with his hometown is reciprocated to this day.

A little island in the middle of the Rhone is named after him, but the even tinier Espace Rousseau museum is chronically underfunded, consisting of just two small rooms.

And as scientists increasingly question whether we have souls ('Is the Genome the Secular Equivalent of the Soul?,' asks a boffin at the University of Geneva), the notion of the soulmate still haunts the popular psyche like a ghost in the machine, summoned up in countless personal ads—even if some modern lonely hearts, like this twenty-nine-year-old in Geneva, come across as anti-soulmates: 

'Just a man searching for attachments-free good sex. Why? Well, i don't believe in love anymore, so i am looking to enjoy life until the end, and that's all.' 

Notably, this guy's online photo, obviously snapped in an internet dive, reveals him to be bug-eyed, eggheaded and bushy-browed.

Online, though, he's 'OrigPussyLicker:' aka 'Don Juan de Marco.'

'More like Don Juan de Weirdo,' Lena observes.

To help weed out the weirdos, a Dutchwoman in Geneva has launched an upscale dating agency that marries atavistic Calvinism with modern materialism.

Trea Tijmens is a former corporate headhunter who charges 4,000 francs—around £2,000 (upwards of $4,000)—to introduce professionals to potential merger candidates, or 'life partners,' as she tells me in a local café: 'I think everyone hopes that their life partner will be their soulmate.'

The full-service SuccessMatch membership fee lasts for eighteen months, with each arranged date costing a further 250 francs.

It includes professional headshots, an in-depth interview and a Myers-Briggs personality test, with clients signing a contract and non-disclosure agreement swearing that they've told the truth.

'THE ONLY THING I DON'T TALK ABOUT'

So having NDAed them and Myers-Briggsed them, I ask, 'What about sex? Do you ask them what they're looking for in a relationship?'

Trea starts to laugh nervously, as if I've mentioned something unmentionable.

'Sex?'

Well, yeah, I shrug. I'm shocked that she's so shocked. She's even blushing.

'You're Dutch for God's sake!' I tease her.

'That's the only thing I don't talk about. We speak about money. We speak about religion. We speak about past relationships. We speak about their whole childhood—what type of family they had and where they grew up. I know them better than their own friends and relatives. The only thing I don't speak about is'— She can't even bring herself to say the word again.

'Why is that?'

'Well, probably because I wouldn't be comfortable speaking about it. Because I'm very Calvinist. That's how I was raised. Very prudish. So I probably wouldn't be comfortable speaking about that.'

A cultural Calvinist to the core, Trea also urges her clientele to be pragmatic about love.

'Some clients have this idea that once they meet the right person, they'll sweep them off their feet and live happily ever after,' she laughs. 'I don't want to scare them off, but it isn't easy to make a relationship work. It's a lot of hard work.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and 'The Woman With Beautiful Breasts' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 12)

The latest attempt to breathe life into the Old Reformer is the $3.4 million International Museum of the Reformation that opened in 2005 in a neoclassical mansion right next to the cathedral.

Built on the spot where Geneva's leaders officially adopted Protestantism, the maison itself actually dates from the city's age of decadence—in fact, the merchant who built it was accused of flouting laws against extravagance.

Even more gallingly for Calvinists, the museum's first director is a Lutheran, though she's also the moderator of Geneva's Company of Pastors, the first woman in the post since Calvin himself created it nearly five centuries ago.

As if the 21st-century mandate of making history 'fun' weren't daunting enough, the Reformation Museum also has to overcome the modern ignorance of religion.

A PROTESTANT JUKEBOX

What's more, the early Protestants weren't big on the visual arts; their focus was always on the Word.

So the museum has done its best to make religious history comprehensible to the TV-minded: Calvin and Luther pop up in mirrors as talking heads, an imaginary dinner party ropes in the competing opinions of Jean and Jean-Jacques, and a jukebox cranks out Protestant hymns.

In trying to make Calvin's brand of Protestantism palatable, though, they've watered it down so that he comes across as being mainly about respect for the individual, a fundamental love of democracy and other smiley-faced concepts.

The museum shop peddles Calvin's grave image on everything from busts to umbrellas.

They even sell Calvin-branded beer, Reformation ashtrays and bonbons stamped with the ascetic's face, which is akin to putting Gandhi's mug on shotgun shells.

As of this writing, there are no Calvinator sex toys on sale, but I wouldn't rule it out.

The new musee won the Council of Europe's Museum Prize in 2007, causing some embarrassment: the statuette is an abstract by Miro with a terribly specific title: La femme aux beaux seins, or The Woman with Beautiful Breasts.

While drinking a Calvinus with a museum board-member and an official Friend of Calvin, I mention that their founder condoned death for adultery.

They look bewildered.

'I don't think they killed people who committed adultery,' the museum official blusters. 'Witches were burned, but that was everywhere at the time.'

So even modern Calvinists are a bit sketchy on Calvinism.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- A Decadent Playground -- (Chap. V, Pt. 10)

Strolling through Geneva today, you'd need the eyes of a Protestant sin-spotter to glimpse its puritanical past—or its Rousseau connection, for that matter.

Every December, the city celebrates the defeat of a Vatican-backed attack on its walls in 1602, but the Pope eventually had the last laugh as the city continued to welcome refugees and immigrants.

By 1863, Geneva was majority Catholic.

That year, one of the city's Protestant elite founded the International Committee of the Red Cross, inspiring the first Geneva Convention on the tercentenary of Calvin's death—and the formation of its Muslim counterpart, the Red Crescent, some sixty years later.

Geneva is now home to the largest United Nations' office outside New York, the World Council of Churches, the headquarters of more than fifty multinationals and countless NGOs, as well as CERN—the research center where the World Wide Web was invented and physicists have conducted experiments in search of the 'God particle.'

These are all the legacies of Calvinism, even if the tourist bumf is reluctant to link them to the dour, foreign God-botherer who believed in self-sacrifice, torture and the eternal hereafter.

SIN CITY?

And as hard as it is to make Geneva sound sexy, that doesn't mean the city's boring.

On the contrary, my advice is: Don't go there at all! Save your eternal soul!

For Geneva's stately grey architecture and restrained elegance hide all the makings of a decadent playground, depending on your bank account and sense of self-control.

Every creature comfort can be catered to, with countless vices to stave off boredom.

Modern Geneva really is a 'Petit Paris,' without the poor to nag your conscience.

In fact, if it weren't for the atavistic Calvinism, Geneva would probably be Sin City.

Prostitution and gambling have been legal for years, and strip bars and casinos brazenly advertise on billboards and bus stops, including posters for a joint called Moulin Rouge showing a woman's naked legs and backside, accentuated with red stilettos and a bloom clutched somewhere that doesn't naturally smell of roses.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Rousseau and the Soulmate -- (Chap. V, Pt. 9)

Two centuries later, all these conflicting elements crystallized into one contradictory philosopher, a proud 'Citizen of Geneva' who applied Calvin's doctrines about fate and destiny to sex and romance and also invented the celebrity kiss-and-tell.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau didn't actually coin the term 'soulmate'—Plato famously claimed that Zeus had bisected humans so that we would spend our lives searching for our 'other half'—but he did give it legs.

Born in 1712 to a Genevese watchmaker, Rousseau claimed his parents had such 'a natural sympathy of soul' that they were destined for one another.

In his bestseller, Julie, or The New Heloise, Rousseau updated a true story of castrated love from the age of the troubadours to tell of two lovers on Lake Geneva who are kept apart by civilization's conventions.

In modern talk-show parlance, It's like, society's hang-ups mean they can't be true to themselves, y'know? 

Tragically, Rousseau had more than a few hang-ups of his own.

Rousseau, aged about 54

Toward the end of his life, he bared his soul in an autobiography far more introspective than the saucy anecdotes recorded by contemporaries like Casanova.

In his Confessions, Rousseau admitted to indulging in masturbation, exhibitionism, masochism and homosexuality, as well as borderline incest with his surrogate maman.

He also forced his lover to abandon all five of their children to an orphanage.

Nevertheless, he still found time to tell his beloved Genevans where they were going wrong, preaching against the corrosive effects of vice and luxury.

When Geneva banned his writings on religion, Rousseau mocked the city's pastors for having gone soft: 'One knows not what they believe, nor what they do not believe, not even what they pretend to believe.'

James Boswell, who met Rousseau during his Grand Tour, had a similar reaction when he visited Geneva in 1764 and saw men playing cards on a Sunday—with a minister among them:

'O, Calvin,' he wrote, 'where art thou now?'