The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- From High Drama to Low Farce -- (Chapter VIII, Part 10)

Although the conventional view nowadays is that Krafft-Ebing ruined the writer's reputation, in truth, if anyone ruined Sacher-Masoch's career, it was the Chevalier himself.

Forever striving for high drama, his sexcapades usually collapsed into low farce.

While Wanda was still recovering from the birth of their third child, for instance, her husband excitedly showed her a personal ad from a Viennese newspaper:

'Handsome, rich, energetic young man would like to meet pretty, elegant young woman; admirer of the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch preferred.'

The writer himself quickly drafted a reply for his wife, enclosing a photo of Wanda.

The man returned the favor, including a picture of himself in Eastern garb.

'A Turk, Wanda!' Leopold exclaimed. 'Now at last we've got hold of someone who understands how to make love!'

Sacher-Masoch then hastily dispatched his ailing wife to a health spa to have sex with the stranger.

However, Wanda returned the very next afternoon, informing her far from gallant Chevalier that the 'Turk' was actually 'a very nice boy' from Vienna—real name: Nikolas Teitelbaum—whose mother was a friend of the family.

'We talked half the night, but nothing happened,' Wanda told him. 'I felt ill, anyhow.'

LUDWIG THE MAD

In another intrigue, a mystery correspondent tried to sound out whether The Love of Plato might reflect Sacher-Masoch's true tendencies.

Wanda quickly worked out that the fan was a man, not least because of his nom de plume: Anatol.

But Sacher-Masoch fantasized that he was a frustrated 'she-devil,' a manly woman who would beat him like an evil Queen Mother of Constantinople.

The famous author then embarked on a bizarre charade that at one point involved him sitting blindfolded alone in a hotel room at midnight (to meet a man he couldn't see) and at another him and his wife trying to arrange a ménage-a-trois, sitting in the dining room of a hotel in Graz so that Wanda could be seduced by Anatol.

When she was finally summoned upstairs, instead of the deep-voiced man Sacher-Masoch had met, she found a crippled pipsqueak with red hair.

After a tiresome cat-and-mouse game (even Sacher-Masoch got bored), the couple found out years later that they'd been outwitted by two royal friends: Holland's invalid Alexander of Orange and Bavaria's 'Mad' King Ludwig II, who wound up drowning himself and his doctor in a lake (Krafft-Ebing had warned his colleague to keep an eye on Ludwig).

Mad? Me?

The History of Sex: South of France -- How Notre Dame Got Its Name -- (Chap. III, Pt. 5)

By the eleventh century, though, the sexual indiscretions of the clergy and their sisters in Christ had become so flagrant that reformist popes tried to force priests to stop fornicating for once and for all: if necessary, with the aid of angry mobs.

The turning point occurred around 1075, when Pope Gregory VII made celibacy the rule for Western clergy (even though many of his successors were less than chaste).

Around the same time, the image of women in the West received a long-overdue makeover.

The Turks' conquest of the Holy Land triggered the Crusades, and many knights who made it back to Europe returned with a newfound admiration for the Virgin Mary.

(from Ominous Ellipses)

The Mother of God had long been venerated in the East, while the Western Church tended to portray her as merely the lowly female vessel for the male God's Immaculate Conception.

However, the newly imported cult of Our Lady helped put all of womankind on a pedestal—Paris even named its new cathedral after Notre Dame.

Whether a renewable virgin was the best role model for women is debatable, but at least it made a change from being judged guilty by association with Eve.

The Virgin's ascendancy also raised the profile of a less-than-virginal Mary, who may or may not have been a fallen woman but was definitely close to Christ.

According to Gallic legend, Mary Magdalene fled Jerusalem after Jesus' death and settled in the south of France (carrying the Holy Grail with her, if you believe the likes of The Da Vinci Code).

Centuries later, this sensual, fractious corner of Europe served as the crucible for the West's first modern love poetry—courtesy of the troubadours—and a sexual rebellion that spawned the Inquisition.

* * *

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- 'It's Not Like That in Gay Clubs' -- (Chap. II, Pt. 23)

'No, it's too expensive,' he explains. 'Here the average monthly wage is something like $325—actually, $275 with the devaluation. That's four hours of sex.'

But worth every penny, I'm sure.

Later, on the web, I learn that you can bargain the girls down to $50 for two hours or $100 for a whole night, according to this posting from a Turkish john on a sex forum:

Don't give 150-200 $ to bit*hes!
Do not spoil the morals of the wh*res and the market!
You may tip the owner of the tail, if you are really over-satisfied.
But please be thoughtful. Not every other soul has a wallet as thick as yourselves. 

And they say chivalry is dead.

Mehmet's practically gnawing his knuckles by now, so I decide to put him out of his misery.

Florentina is curling her finger toward me to come back, but we're ready to go. And she can't breach the invisible barrier to pursue me. I'm the man. I'm the boss.

Having approached her in the first place, though, I never counted on the flicker of despair in her face as she watches us leave.

Everybody faces rejection in life—God knows writers do—but it must be keenly humiliating to offer your body to a stranger and then be knocked back without knowing why.

Of course, it could be that I'm a sucker, and she's just sorry to see me go. She may be playing me right to the end. But I feel vaguely disgusted with myself for not having anticipated the consequences.

For his part, Mehmet's feeling full-blown relief. 'It's like coming out of a prison!!!' he gasps as we emerge onto the dead-end street.

The Mother Mosque is glowing in the distance, and the balmy air is laced with rotting rubbish, but Mehmet breathes it in gratefully.

'I was so nervous, my legs were shaking! It was depressing—the women just standing there for sale.' He shakes his head. 'It's not like that in gay clubs.'

Alas, maybe next time.

* * *

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Consorting With a Lady of the Night -- (Chap. II, Pt. 22)

'Are you going to ask the price so we can leave or what?' Mehmet asks.

He's chawed his way through the popcorn, the olives and the pickles—and he's starting on the mixed nuts. I think he's worried about his waistline.

As I leave the table, I'm absurdly self-conscious about approaching the prostitutes, not only because I look like a seedy sex tourist but because it's akin to standing up and declaring, 'I'm JR, and I have to pay women to sleep with me.'

Not like anybody in here would care, of course. I'd probably win a round of supportive, AA-style applause from my fellow losers.

The blonde is beckoning me to cross the threshold out of the darkness into the disco lights. For some reason, it reminds me of a vampire inviting a victim into its lair.

Turns out I'm not far wrong: 'Florentina' is Romanian.

'Hi, um, my friend likes you, but he's shy,' I say, thinking 'How lame is that?'

Aside from the fact that I've just made Mehmet heterosexual, it's like I'm back in school, only the message I'm supposedly relaying has a decidedly adult edge: My friend thinks you're, like, really cute, and, um, he wants to know if he can screw you for money. 

'One hour, $100. Two hours, $150,' she shouts over the din.

Grinning inanely to cover my embarrassment—I wasn't consorting with a lady of the night, I was simply asking her the time of day!—I report back to Mehmet. 

'No wonder they don't do any business,' he scoffs.

I take that to mean it's not enough to turn a profit. Call me a sucker, but 150 bucks doesn't seem much for letting a stranger ram his anatomy in you for two hours.

And that's without factoring in the risk of being locked in a room with a hardcore deviant or serial killer.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- A Cunning Stunt -- (Chap. II, Pt. 21)

If anyone here is more uncomfortable than me, though, it's my gay companion.

He's literally keeping his head down, sucking on his beer and snuffling through the cocktail snacks, clearly unimpressed by the crudest of hetero meat markets.

First, there's the music.

Whoever picked the soundtrack must be an arch ironist, mixing in tracks like "I'm Lookin' For a New Love" and "Somebody's Watchin' Me."

'Low-class music,' Mehmet mutters.

Then there's the men, a smattering of males sporting spectacles, bald heads, stooped shoulders, man boobs and body hair galore.

A couple of shy guys are shuffling on the dancefloor, pretending to enjoy the music while working up the courage to hit on the prostitutes.

One of them is pumping his fist like a one-handed drummer. I'm tempted to sidle up and ask what he'd charge for the night.

'EVERYTHING HERE IS ILLEGAL'

The girl I keep staring at is dancing up front, a blonde with crisp curls and a tight dress slashed across her thighs. She must be in her mid-twenties, with man-killing curves and breasts perfectly proportioned to her backside—even Mehmet reckons she's the sexiest.

She's been flirting at me all night—of course, we all probably think that—so I think of a cunning stunt.

'Do you think it would be possible for me to pay one of the girls, then take her up to a room and tell her I just want to talk?'

Mehmet stops nibbling long enough to keep me from getting killed.

'No. That might cause big problems. She might not like it and tell the management. And if they find out you want to write something about it, they wouldn't like it. Everything in here is illegal. Everything.'

But at the very least I should find out the going rate. Not being a veteran whoremonger, I'm surprisingly nervous about approaching the women.

The two guys on the dancefloor have overcome their shyness by snapping into haggling mode, bargaining for booty.

Maybe the girlie images on the wall work like the brothel in Pompeii—How much to truss you up like a plucked chicken?

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- The Hookers' Corral -- (Chap. II, Pt. 20)

For I'm bewitched by the spectacle onstage.

The disco square is a kind of hookers' corral, with the girls lining up on the sides to entice pay-for-play suitors.

At least two dozen women are on the dancefloor: blondes and brunettes, Asians and Caucasians, all tarted up in their sexiest clubgear, whether it's perms or ponytails, tube tops or bikini tops, miniskirts or maxiskirts, all with an eyecatching array of slits, straps, stripes and colors.

'Do the girls come to your table?'

'No, that's not the way it works here.'

If a man is interested, it's up to him to approach her; the hookers can't hassle the clientele. So even here, in a hotel de whore, the sexes are separated and the men very much in control.

THEY MAY NOT BE VIRGINS

Initially, this seems like a straight man's dream: a club where all the women want you, and if you want one (or more) of them, all you have to do is ask. No need to chat them up, buy them a drink, or pretend they're interesting. Just 'how much?' and you're in.

Or if you're not in the mood, you can just drink with your friends and ogle the girls for free.

Some are sexier than others, and some look downright bored, but most are smiling and making goo-goo eyes at you—yes, you!—blowing you kisses while grinding their hips and shaking their cleavage.

They may not be virgins, but they're a verisimilitude of paradise. It's like having your own harem.

And at first, I can't stop grinning—albeit nervously.

Soon enough, though, all the staring starts to get to me. The hookers have obviously clocked me as a foreigner (ka-ching!), so they gravitate over to my side of the floor, and having that many women pouting at you all at once is more than a little off-putting.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- The Me-So-Horny Hotel -- (Chap. II, Pt. 19)

Worryingly, the three-star 'Otel' where we're headed reminds me of the sort of dive I might have booked unsuspectingly due to price, location or last-minute availability.

I'd like to think I would've been put off by its website, with its cascading stars and rendition of 'New York, New York' by somebody's Uncle Iqbal on his portable organ.

However, the hotel's brochure looks decent enough. It even advertises itself as a venue for business conferences and wedding receptions. Okay, so the woman in the photo at reception doesn't look like she's got anything on under her fur coat.

But there's no mention in the literature of the metal detector on the front door—and there's certainly no indication of what happens in the 'American Bar' at night.

Mehmet and I pay the entrance fee (30 lira with a free drink), and we're escorted through the darkness to a table near the dancefloor.

Naturally, our chairs are black and the column next to us is mirrored, but the lights in the bar have an odd shape.

They're clam shells—the bulbs are pearls—and they're synchronized to flash red, green and blue, changing color with the lights on the dancefloor and the decorations on the wall: backlit images of naked women in me-so-horny poses—gloved, booted, bent over, spread-eagled and in one case even washed up on a beach.

Bizarrely, a couple of these adorn the ceiling—why up there?—but the one I'm staring at shows a glamour girl with her hands tied behind her back, a rope around her ankles and leather straps around her bare breasts.

And I suddenly imagine myself newly arrived in Istanbul, coming down here to breakfast the morning after a late flight, thinking, That would explain all the thumping next door last night.

And as these nudie images wink and blink around us in synch with the clamshell lights, illuminating the Turkish talisman on the far wall that protects against the evil eye, my mind free-associates to what I've read in Sexuality in Islam—'an unshaven vagina is readily compared with an evil eye'—and I can't help but wonder about the girls on the dancefloor.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Was the Father of Turks the Gay Son of a Prostitute? -- (Chap. II, Pt. 18)

'Are many imams gay?'

'It's not as common as gay priests. Imams have to marry and have children. If not, they set a bad example.'

Mehmet delivers all this with soft-spoken good grace. To use a crude term, he's straight-acting, and nothing in his appearance marks him out as being different from his countrymen. It's only when we move on to our final topic that he starts to dish the dirt.

So far, we've freely discussed sex, sodomy and honor killings in the open air at a public café, despite my misgivings.

THE BATTY BOYS OF DOLMABAHCE

But when he starts talking about the sex life of the Father of the Turks, Mehmet lowers his voice, as if the palm trees might have ears, and uses a codename: '"Osman" was the son of a prostitute.'

Now, most Kurds don't like Atatürk—he killed scores of them in forging the Republic—but to claim he's the son of a whore is, well, highly controversial.

It was Atatürk who defended the rump of the Ottoman Empire and saved the Turks from being well and truly buggered after World War One.

The Harem suite where he died in Dolmabahce Palace is a shrine, and you can be locked up for three years just for insulting his memory.

'But many of the sultans were sons of concubines,' I counter.

'Yes, but "Osman" did not have any royal blood. He was a commoner.'

Mehmet lowers his eyes and glances around furtively. '"Osman" was also homosexual. Many people say they made up the stories of him being a womanizer.'

But even I know 'Osman' was married. 'You mean he was bisexual?'

'No, he was only one way,' Mehmet whispers. 'He would make party all the time with boys in Dolmabahce.' 

Aside from the tempting alliteration of 'batty boys' and 'Dolmabahce,' I have to confess there's a mischievous appeal to the idea of the Father Turk being the gay son of a whore who chose to die in the pink-walled harem of a palace confected by the Frenchman who designed the Paris Opera.

And a private ability to swing both ways would go a long way toward explaining his uncanny knack for keeping the Soviets and Americans off his back, so to speak.

Then there was his advanced approach to women's liberation, which can't be entirely explained by economic motives: Turkey needed women to work, but there was nothing forcing him to give them the vote.

Throw in the dandified dress sense and matinee-idol poses, and well, I can see Mehmet's point.

For me, of course, it doesn't matter. But for many Turks, it would be reprehensible to paint their founding father as a political Liberace.

Out of respect for Turkishness, then, I suggest we move on.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- 'The Most Horrible Thing Happened in My Family' -- (Chap. II, Pt. 17)

Mehmet notes that most of the 'tradition killings' you read about in Turkey and the rest of Europe are by Kurds, but they're also common among Turks from the countryside.

'In traditional culture, women are the men's honor, and the men will even call them that in conversation.' Instead of calling a sibling 'my sister,' in other words, a man may refer to her as 'my honor.'

And then he tells me: 'The most horrible thing happened in my family.'

Mehmet was in Germany at the time, but he heard the details from his relatives later.

One of his female cousins was having an affair with another cousin who was also married. Both lovers were first cousins, though that wasn't the problem.

'YOU WOULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING'

The controversy started when the woman began threatening that if her lover didn't make good on his promise to divorce his spouse, she would set up home in his house and effectively force him to take her on as another wife. 'That would have been a big scandal. It would not have been seen as a respectable marriage.'

Likewise, divorce wasn't an honorable option. 'In the area where I was born, only three or four women have been divorced.'

So the adulterer did the 'honorable' thing: he killed her—apparently by strangling her with a wire.

Mehmet says the man's mother then helped him dispose of the corpse. 'They burned her body in an industrial furnace.'

The man was arrested and jailed for two days, but without a body as evidence, the authorities ruled that the woman had run off or disappeared.

Within Mehmet's extended family, though, the cousin's murder is an open secret. The killer's mother has even goaded the victim's parents, saying: 'If you were in my position, you would have done the same thing.'

Mehmet still sees the man at family functions. 'He's a killer, but he lives like a respectable man.'

Muzzammil Hassan, founder of Bridges TV, a US network aimed at portraying Muslims in a more positive light;
in 2009, he beheaded his wife in upstate New York after she filed for divorce

Conversely, Mehmet can't tell his family he's gay because 'it would be like being a murderer.' Many homosexuals have been victims of 'honor killings:' their families have them shot dead, usually by a younger brother because he'll get a lighter sentence.

Even so, it's not uncommon for married men to take advantage of sexual segregation to have gay affairs.

Mehmet says he had an older lover who tried to get him to marry his daughter, just so the two of them—father- and son-in-law—could be together.

As a camp comedian used to say, my flabber is gasted. That seems so wrong, I can't even think of the term for condemning it. It wouldn't be incest—maybe just plain old fraud?

My guide's merely bemused. 'And the strange thing was, he was a fundamentalist, a very religious man.'

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Islam's Model Child Bride -- (Chap. II, Pt. 16)

For traditionalists, the Prophet's marriage to a child bride also serves as a potent role model, Mehmet says.

'Many families give their daughters to older men when they're young. I've heard people say, "Aisha married when she was nine, so thirteen is fine for her."'

A 40-year-old groom poses next to his 11-year-old bride in Afghanistan
(photo by Stephanie Sinclair)

Even if the man is much older. 'When they come together on their wedding night, the girl is crying and shaking. For her, sex is a torture. It's kind of like rape.'

Traditionally, the newlyweds also have sex on a special piece of cloth to prove that her hymen is intact. 'If there's no blood, sometimes they send her back and say she is not a virgin.'

And thanks to mass migration from the countryside—encouraged by Muslim hardliners—this isn't just a rural problem.

Mehmet knows a family in Ankara, the capital, where the bride failed to bleed on her wedding night.

After their first night together, the groom wanted to send her back to her parents—a potentially lethal move.

However, the woman swore that she'd been a virgin, so both sides agreed to seek an expert opinion: 'Three people went to the doctor with her.'

A SMART MAN

The physician examined the bride and told her inlaws that she had a very deep hymen, which was why it hadn't broken.

'But if her hymen was that deep and blocked her vagina, how did she manage to become pregnant later?' Mehmet asks. 'I think the doctor was a smart man and lied to them.'

In doing so, he may very well have saved her from death—or a genelev.

As a father myself, I can't imagine murdering one of my daughters for sleeping with someone she shouldn't have. And purely from a selfish, propagation-of-the-species point of view, you'd think people would instinctively stop short of killing their offspring simply because it lessens the chances of their own genetic survival.

'Is virginity really all that important?' I ask.

Mehmet sighs patiently before explaining the paradox.

'Every man wants to have sex with a woman, but no man wants to marry a woman who isn't a virgin. It's very rare that a woman would have sex before marriage because if she's caught, that means her life is over. She can never marry.'

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- The Clue of the Upside-Down Shoe -- (Chap. II, Pt. 15)

Once they settle into established relationships, though, Turkish men have sex two or three times a week, he adds.

'And I know that from my own family. Because for Muslims, when a man takes a shower in the morning, it means he's had sex.'

Pity the poor wife who has to shag him beforehand.

And that's not the worst of it: 'Where I come from, the men take a bath in the main room of the house, and the women take a shower outside in the animal stalls—with the cows.'

Pass the soap!

That may explain why Turkish men don't get to have sex more often. If I not only had to convince a woman to sleep with me, but also persuade her to bathe in a barn afterwards, I'd probably still be a virgin.

In Turkey, though, sexual relations are very different—particularly outside the country's cosmopolitan anomalies. 'Women have sex when men want because men are the bosses in the house.'

Under Turkey's old penal code, one of the few reasons a woman could seek a divorce was if her husband demanded anal sex.

Sodomy is still very taboo, despite the fact that it's often a way for an unmarried girl to keep her virginity technically intact.

In court, though, to save the would-be divorcee's face (not to mention her backside), judges would allow her to signal the source of the marital rupture without actually verbalizing it.

'She would take her shoe off and put it upside down on the table.' Mehmet demonstrates for me.

Why upside down?

'Because this is the back.' He points to the sole of his upturned shoe. 'I have an aunt who divorced her husband this way. The man was gay.'

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Talking Dirty with 'Mohammed' -- (Chap. II, Pt. 14)

Mehmet reckons the best place to see Istanbul's underbelly is Aksaray, a grotty district popular with Russian, Eastern European and Iranian tourists.

Purchasable women are as plentiful as kebabs, but we shake off the touts to find a cafe terrace that shields us from the traffic. Overhead, above an expressway flyover, stands the dome of the Valide Camii—the Mother Sultan's Mosque—a monument marking the beginning of Women's Rule (and the decline of the Ottoman Empire).

With the mosque in the background, I settle down to talk dirty with 'Mohammed.'

As a gay Kurd, he's obviously a minority within a minority.

But as someone with experience of both men and women, Asians and Europeans, not to mention city and country life, he knows more than most about sex in Turkey.

For instance, he mentions that Turkish towns on the Georgian border saw divorce rates skyrocket after the fall of the USSR; local men were squandering all their money on Russian floozies.

Ukrainian women protesting in Turkish:
'Ukraine Isn't a Brothel'

'I think it's because Turkish girls don't open their legs,' he remarks.

'Eh?'

'For example, they don't do blow jobs. They think it's dirty. You see, in Eastern Turkey, even lip-kissing is very new. They think it's dirty to kiss someone's mouth. One woman in my mother's village, when she saw people kissing on TV, she'd say, "How disgusting! It's like kissing a dog!" But Russian girls, they do everything.'

Mehmet reckons the quick turnover at genelevs probably has to do with Turkish men's staying power. 'Men in Muslim countries tend to come very fast.'

I feel a fatwa coming on, but Mehmet quickly restores Muslim pride, assuring me that Turkish men have more repeating power than Westerners.

'With Western men, you usually have sex once, and then everyone sleeps—' —I stifle an urge to protest— 'But Middle Eastern men want to have sex several times in one night. Sex outside marriage is very difficult to find, and once they find it, they're going to have as much as they can!' He laughs.

'Also, in Western countries, you hear people say "I'm depressed" and things like that. But you never hear that in Turkey.'

'Why's that?'

'I think it's because 60% of people in Turkey have only a primary school education. So mentally, they're not very busy.'

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- How to 'Cure' a Homosexual (or Not) -- (Chap. II, Pt. 13)

Of course, if you're religious enough to care about purifying your penis, surely you shouldn't be sticking it in a prostitute in the first place.

By all accounts, there's a reason that prices start at around 30 lira, or just £10 ($15).

'To be honest, you're probably better off not going in the genelev,' he shrugs. 'You might never want to have sex again!'

Romanticizing the genelev

Unfortunately, his first time with a woman was in a genelev.

Mehmet knew from the age of eight that he was attracted to men, but as a young Kurd in tin-shack Anatolia—the Asian side of the country—he wasn't able to seek counseling until he was sixteen.

'The doctor was sick himself. He told me a lot of stupid things, like "stay out of the sun", "don't eat salty food" and "go have sex with a woman".'

After the first two failed, Mehmet tried a brothel, the only outlet for heterosexual singles in Islamic societies—apart from infidel divorcees at tourist resorts. 'The genelev definitely didn't help,' Mehmet recalls, shaking his head.

The prostitute took him to Room 41—he still remembers the number—and ordered him to undress.

'She laid down, closed her eyes and told me, "Do it." I told her, "Shouldn't you be moving or something?" But she just laid there. She didn't even open her eyes.'

'So that put you off women for good?'

'For sure!'

'THE ASS IS ALWAYS BIGGER'

Of course, you can't blame the women.

Forever stigmatized by society as registered prostitutes, many actually live on the same dead-end streets where they work; if they try to move out or quit the game, the local vice squad tracks them down.

So girls who enter the genelev as teenagers—with punters queuing out the door—may end up staying until they're in their sixties.

'The women stand in the windows in their bras and panties, like in Amsterdam, but you'd be amazed that anyone could ever have sex with them,' Mehmet says. 'Most of the women are very much used-looking and old and fat.'

Still, that doesn't put off Turkish men.

'People don't mind fat women here, especially in Kurdish culture. In Eastern Turkey, being fat is a big plus.'

A bit of heft implies wealth in a society where people aren't skinny by choice.

As Mehmet puts it: 'You know the English expression that "the grass is always greener"? Well, there's a Kurdish saying where I come from that "the neighbour lady's ass is always bigger."'

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Starbucks, Drag Queens, and Sex Ghettos -- (Chap. II, Pt. 12)

Whereas any commoner can blunder through the sultans' inner sanctum nowadays, for foreigners there's still an equivalent of the harem: Turkey's municipal brothels.

According to legend, it was here in old Constantinople that the selfsame Roman Emperor made the first (failed) attempt by a Christian ruler to regulate prostitution, sanctioning one brothel for the entire city.

Modern Turkish genelevs—literally, 'general' or 'public houses'—are the successors to that institution, quarantined into dead-end zones that are more like prostitute ghettos than red-light districts.

The genelevs are also strictly off-limits to foreigners.

'They think that Western men could have AIDS and sexual diseases,' says my guide, a man I'll call Mehmet—a Turkish form of 'Mohammed' and an homage to the sultan who conquered Constantinople.

'Mehmet' normally runs secretive gay sex tours, but he's agreed to modify his usual itinerary to show me the 'straight' side of Istanbul.

I can tell he's not really looking forward to it, though.

As we set off from Taksim Square in the heart of the city, he mentions that the statue of Atatürk is a popular cruising spot—an irony that will become apparent later.

Strolling down the broad thoroughfare of Independence Avenue, far from the carpet shops and landmarks of the Old Town, the terrace cafes are as cosmopolitan as anything in Paris, serving far more sophisticated coffees than those at Starbucks—though there's room for one of those too on 'Liberty Way.'

The boulevard's mosques blare calls to prayer, undercut by street vendors' calls to purchase, while the Catholic church down the way keeps its doors open in tactful silence. A man in a fez is twirling unmeltable marash ice cream in the air as his compatriots queue for soft-serve at McDonald's—both doing good business—and women in headscarves lumber past teens flaunting naked midriffs.

Men leer at the ladies while walking arm in arm—'That's very common here, even in my village,' Mehmet says—and there's even a couple of drag queens sashaying down the main drag in the sunshine. Which is not common where Mehmet comes from.

Passing the Dutch and Swedish consulates, we take a left into the 'hood of the Galatasaray football club, descending past music shops and the home of the Mehlevi Dervishes (whose founder was certainly no prude) into what was historically the foreign part of town.

Genelevs are not meant to be seen or heard from the outside, and the only vague indicator that you're near Turkey's largest sex ghetto is a hamam on the corner.

'Muslims believe that you have to take a bath after sex,' Mehmet explains.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- 'Disobedient Women Should be Punished' -- (Chap. II, Pt. 11)

Despite Turkey's paper protection of women's rights, so-called 'honor killings' still haunt the country—and Muslim communities throughout Europe.

A parliamentary investigation in 2006 documented 1,091 of these murders in Turkey over a five-year period, though the true number may be much higher, even after recent legal reforms to lengthen prison terms.

'Honor killings' are still legal in neighboring Iran:
women are buried, then stoned

'Now that the penal code has been changed, the families try to force the women to commit suicide instead,' says Canan Arin, a lawyer who opened Istanbul's first women's shelter back in 1995.

Speaking to me in her study on the European side of Istanbul, with books lining the shelves and jazz burbling in the background, she tells me that one of the main barriers to securing convictions for 'honor killings' is that many judges come from traditional backgrounds.

'Deep down, they think that disobedient women should be punished and the penalty should be death.'

DON'T CALL IT A CRUSADE

To overcome the honor problem, some reformers have tried to rename murders 'traditional killings.'

But Ms. Arin argues that this change is more for male politicos than female victims; the root problem is that women's honor is treated as a commodity. If a girl has sex outside marriage—even if she's raped—'her uncleanliness is a stain on the family honor:' 'Honor is represented by women, so politicians can't openly say they're against honor.'

Like many of her allies, however, she's reluctant to make a link between Islam and the oppression of women—after all, the reports that call her a 'crusader' for women's rights are just an awkward reminder that modern feminism is a Western import (like the Crusades, derived from the Latin for 'Cross').

Instead, Ms. Arin takes refuge in a relativistic stance. 'It is difficult for all patriarchal systems and patriarchal men to accept the need for women's rights. We are living in a man's world, and Turkish men are no different from that.'

'But isn't the problem that Western-style reforms inevitably increase secularization?' I ask.

'Turkey should increase secularization,' she counters adamantly, echoing the outspoken atheist I met at Topkapi Palace. 'We need more secularization, and religion should be entirely personal.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Islam and the Medieval Mindset -- (Chap. II, Pt. 10)

More generally—and controversially—it strikes me that Muslim women's prospects are limited simply because Islamic culture is locked in a medieval mindset, forever harking back to the good ol' days of Mohammed (while Christians were told to look forward to the return of Christ).

That may sound overly blunt, but hear me out: Christianity began as a high-concept religion that was more about spirituality than precise rules dictating what you ate or how you washed.

Jesus and his Jewish disciples broke with the legalism of their ancestors, whereas Islam actually revived many Semitic traditions, even going so far as to reinstitute circumcision (the early Christians also considered penis checks at the pearly gates, but Paul argued that faith was more important than foreskins—not for nothing did they make him a saint).

Turkish boy about to be circumcised
(photo by Dick Osseman)

Furthermore, Judaism and Christianity had the advantage of antiquity: they're so old, they effectively built the civilizations that practice them.

Islam, on the other hand, was late to the game and superimposed on ancient cultures that already had their own patriarchal traditions.

As a result, it tends to be even more male-oriented than Christianity or Judaism.

And as for holy role models, the asexual nature of Jesus allows both men and women to identify with him and become Christians—'little Christs'—whereas the most a Muslim woman can aspire to is being a godly sidekick: marrying or giving birth to a Chosen One who follows Mohammed.

Unfortunately, it's this sexism that may be Islamic culture's main contribution to sexuality in the West (apart from the enduring titillation of the harem, belly dancers and the likes of The Perfumed Garden).

For centuries, Northern Europeans attributed the jealousy of Mediterraneans to their Muslim heritage—the 'hotheaded Spaniard' couldn't help being jealous, they thought; he was half-Arab.

'THE HONOR-SHAME SYNDROME'

In recent decades, academics have begun to restyle these chauvinistic attitudes, dressing them up in more sophisticated terms.

According to the theory of 'the honor-shame syndrome,' for instance, a woman's honor is a material good with an actual value (her dowry) that also reflects on the honor of her family.

Academics argue that this phenomenon is particularly strong in those parts of Europe with an Islamic past—notably, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Sicily.

(For the record, I doubt that Islam was entirely to blame, though it probably did reinforce existing tendencies.)

The reason it's stigmatized as a 'syndrome'—rather than a quaint custom—is that if a woman's virtue is compromised, her male kinfolk feel compelled to defend their honor by either avenging her or killing her outright.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Could Turkey Lead the Way on Women's Rights? -- (Chap. II, Pt. 9)

But what I really came here to find out is this: could Atatürk's Republic serve as a role model for Muslims around the world in the way that the Ottoman Empire was the self-styled Caliphate of Islam?

Binding East and West, could the Republic's alchemy of Islam and secular democracy provide a magical solution to culture-clash issues such as women's rights in Muslim communities?

The religious and the secular in Istanbul

To spare you the suspense, the answer is 'no'—or at least, 'probably not'—and it's naïve of me to even ask.

Despite reformist attempts by moderate Muslims, Turkey has enough problems of its own without having to worry about setting an example for all of Islam.

What's more, Islamic tradition varies immensely from country to country, and plenty of Westernized Turks will tell you they're a breed apart from the 'dirty Arabs' of the Middle East.

Likewise, Saudi Arabia and Iran view Turkey as a bad influence—thanks to Atatürk, their womenfolk also started agitating for rights—so they've pumped millions into building mosques in the Republic to stir up fundamentalism.

FLOUTING THE LAW

That's partly why you see more veils and headscarves in Istanbul these days than you would have in 1926 and why the pro-Islamist government has repeatedly tried to reverse some of Turkey's most progressive laws.

During the recent redrafting of the constitution, for instance, a clause ensuring equality was ditched in favor of one characterizing women as vulnerable souls in need of special protection: a sacrilege to the secularism of Atatürk, but completely in keeping with Islamic tradition.

Despite the argument that Islam is feminist in theory, in practice it's hardly ever turned out that way.

In Sexuality in Islam, Abdelwahab Bouhdiba—a sociology professor at the University of Tunis and an advisor to the UN—notes that polygamy and concubinage inherently devalued wives, making it impossible for women to be treated as equals.

Meanwhile, Muslim families routinely flouted Islamic law by disinheriting their daughters or forcing them to marry cousins to keep their resources within the clan.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- Ataturk and the Keepers of the Harem -- (Chap. II, Pt. 8)

Eunuchs being in short supply these days—you just can't get the help—the current Keeper of the Harem is actually a woman.

Canan Cimilli works alongside two other women in an office where every expense has been spared: there's only one computer between the three of them.

Despite her imposing title, Canan speaks in a shy, girlish voice that's easily overruled by the trio's alpha female, a raucous, middle-aged mamacha who's probably never had an opinion she didn't like.

As Canan starts showing me photos of the many rooms in the Harem that are falling apart, her dark-haired elder pulls up a chair and hijacks the conversation, informing me that there are no restorers or curators in residence at Topkapi.

WOMEN IN CHARGE

'The Turkish Ministry for Culture not give money for Topkapi. The Turkish government keeps the reality secret.'

'What do you do as curator of the Harem?' I ask Canan.

The other woman flaps her hand dismissively. 'Curators of Turkish museum do everything: they guardsman, housewife, archeologist. Only women could work for such a small amount of money.'

'Why's that?'

Canan stops laughing long enough to reply. 'Because in Turkey the men have to make money for the family.' 

And before I know it, I'm immersed in a moanfest about the male domination of Topkapi and Turkey in general.

Topkapi's top managers are both men, it seems: one a secular academic, the other an imam who lives on site, along with the Prophet's relics.

'MACHIAVELLIEST'

As for Turkey's prime minister, well, my informer doesn't think much of Recep Erdogan, either.

'He's machiavelliest. You know what that means? He go to Europe and say one thing, then he comes home and does another. He's fundamentalist—he supports women wearing the headscarf.'

'You don't?'

'I'm atheist,' she volunteers proudly.

'But her mother was a Muslim!' Canan laughs.

'I hate religion. Do you know who is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk? Atatürk is big man in Turkey—he is very handsome. He has blue eyes—like you—and light hair. All the Turkish women love him.'

Ataturk (with remarkably blue eyes)

Not least because Turkey's autocratic founder made sure the new Republic implemented female-friendly reforms that were not only revolutionary for the Mideast but advanced by Western standards: first he banned polygamy and the veil and then, in 1934, he granted Turkish women the right to vote and run for election—a full decade before French women had the same privilege.

Canan's colleague bustles over to her desk to retrieve a small, black-and-white portrait of Atatürk at his matinee-idol best.

It's a billfold-sized photo, the kind that a woman might keep in her pocketbook to remind her of a lover, only here it's propped up on a lone gilded shelf above the telephone (in addition to the standard, government-issue portrait of Atatürk in uniform, naturally).

THE PROPHET FOR ATHEISTS?

And I can't help but wonder if Atatürk is to Turkish atheists what Mohammed is to their Muslim sisters.

'In my life, my husband is first man'—the woman taps her wedding band. 'My father is second man'—she touches her heart. 'And Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is the third man.' She beams and shows me the photo again. 'I love him.'

'She's got three men in her life!' Canan cracks.

Funnily enough, the Father of Modern Turkey died in the Ottomans' Imperial Harem (no, not from that; he had cirrhosis).

One of the last sultans, the grandson of a French Queen Mother, had decided that he needed new digs to replace Topkapi, so he splashed out on a great big, frilly confection of stone in High French Style.

When the Dolmabahce Palace was finished, he transferred his Harem there in 1853.

Decades later, Atatürk used Dolmabahce's defunct Harem—complete with its pastel-pink hall—as his base in Istanbul.

By the time he died there in 1938, some eighteen women had been elected to Turkey's parliament.

* * *

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- The Emasculation of the Ottomans -- (Chap.II, Pt.7)

The Head Eunuch was a kind of Pimp-Master General in charge of spying on the girls for the sultan and scouting for new talent.

As the third most important official in the empire—after the Grand Vizier and the leader of the Ottoman Muslims—the Head Eunuch could talk to the sultan whenever he wanted.

The theory was that eunuchs were more trustworthy because their dynastic ambitions had literally been nipped in the bud.

Unfortunately, this argument failed to take into account the bitterness of men who'd been mutilated at the behest of a regime they were meant to serve.

EMASCULATED SULTANS

As with the Queen Mothers, who were packed off to the Palace of Tears when their sultan sons died, the selfish incentive for eunuchs was obvious: to grab as much as they could for as long as they could; let Allah take care of the greater good.

And as the sultans spent more time in the Harem, leaving their concubine mothers and corrupt eunuchs to govern, ironically it was the Ottomans themselves who wound up being emasculated.

A particularly nasty Queen Mother was Kösem, a Greek slave girl who effectively ruled the empire for much of the seventeenth century after having engineered the first regicide in Ottoman history (among countless crimes).

Kösem conspired to have her teenaged stepson, Osman II, murdered in jail by a combination of strangulation and 'compression of the testicles.'

Osman II -- executed at 17
after having his testicles 'compressed'

It was her husband who built Istanbul's famous Blue Mosque and temporarily stopped the tradition of murdering one's brothers upon assuming the throne.

Instead, he had his brother confined to a wing of the Harem known as the Cage—referred to delicately as the Twin Pavilions on the tour—keeping him doped up on alcohol and opium with a dozen concubines for company.

The 'Golden Cage'

When one of Kösem's sons emerged from the Cage to become sultan, he was so deranged he became known as 'Ibrahim the Mad.'

Besides regularly hosting one-man orgies around the pool—the one you see while visiting the Favorite Concubines' Courtyard—Ibrahim once had 280 of his odalisques tied up in bags and drowned in the Bosphorus.

One of the few to survive his jealousy was his beloved 'Sugar Cube'—an Armenian who weighed over 300 pounds—but his mother later had her throttled over dinner.

The Queen Mother finally got her comeuppance in her early sixties, when she tried to murder yet another young sultan.

The boy's mother found out about the plot and had the eunuchs hunt Kösem down, dragging her out of the Harem, stripping her naked, and strangling her outside at the Gate of the Aviary.

And that's where this tour ends.

The History of Sex: Istanbul -- How to Make a Eunuch -- (Chap. II, Pt. 6)

Obviously, part of the problem is that the seraglio has seen better centuries.

A labyrinth of more than four hundred rooms, less than a tenth of the chambers have been restored and opened to the public.

And as undeniably beautiful as they are, even these are faded and often shabby, with a musty smell that makes you wonder if the Harem was actually seedy rather than sexy.

To be fair, no one knows exactly what it was like to live behind the closed doors of the Harem: by definition, the word means 'private' or 'forbidden.'

However, key events are known—you're just not going to find out about them on the tour.

THE DEMISE OF SELIM THE SOT

For example, although the sultan's bath is impressive, it would be even more interesting to hear about Selim II (aka 'The Sot'), who died after slipping while chasing girls around his hamam.

Like virtually all the Ottoman rulers, Selim was the son of a concubine himself.

His mother was a redheaded Slav who'd out-schemed the competition to convince Suleiman the Magnificent—the longest-ruling sultan—to break with tradition and marry her around 1520, at the peak of Ottoman power.

Roxelana clawed her way up from being a common concubine

Up until then, the Ottomans had considered the sultan to be so exalted that no woman was worthy of being his wife.

However, Hürrem—known in the West as Roxelana—established the so-called 'Reign of Women' with its powerbase here in the Harem of the newly completed Topkapi Palace.

Her power grab also marked the slow beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire.

Now, if you're a man, you may be thinking: typical—put a woman in charge, and all hell breaks loose.

But that wouldn't be fair: plenty of other factors brought down the sultans. As a hothouse of lust, greed, murder and corruption, though, the Harem was the empire's epicenter of dysfunction.

Consider who ran the place: castrated slaves who came in two colors—black and white—and three mutilated varieties. As nouveau-riche nomads, the Ottomans had picked up a lot of bad habits from the Christian Byzantines, including a fondness for eunuchs, who were outsourced from a Coptic monastery in Egypt.

MOLTEN CHEESE

For full-frontal castration, a slave boy would be bound to a chair, his penis and testicles tied with a cord and then razored off.

The wound was subsequently cauterized with a hot iron, boiling oil or melted wax (The Arabian Nights also mentions molten cheese), and the castrator would stick a nail in the boy's urethra to make sure it didn't get clogged up.

In some cases, the boys were buried standing up in sand and deprived of water until they stopped bleeding.

Not surprisingly, only a third survived this ordeal, and most of them suffered from incontinence for the rest of their lives: inside their fine robes, Ottoman eunuchs carried silver quills that served as catheters.

Wotchyou lookin' at?
The Guard of the Harem by Jean-Leon Gerome