The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- An Encyclopedia of Perversion -- (Chapter VIII, Part 3)

Though by no means immune to the crackpottery of his day, the truth is that Krafft-Ebing strove to understand sexual deviance in keeping with a motto recited to him by a masochist: 'to understand all is to cure all.'

His compassion helped persuade courts to take a more lenient approach toward many acts that aren't even classed as perversions anymore, let alone sex crimes.

In his mid-forties, the esteemed psychiatrist published a book that repulsed much of the medical establishment—and is still quite shocking now.

Psychopathia Sexualis was a bewildering compendium of case studies gleaned from Krafft-Ebing's own experience as well as medical texts, compiled in one easy-to-read encyclopedia of perversion.

The first edition, published in 1886, covered fifty-one case studies in just over 100 pages. By the time Krafft-Ebing died in 1902, the twelfth edition had swollen to more than 300 cases—a fraction of the 20,000 he'd accumulated.

Krafft-Ebing countered accusations of porn-mongering by arguing that his work would help doctors and lawyers assess sex crimes in court.

To prove it, he fig-leafed the dirty bits in Latin.

In contrast, the editor of my modern edition has not only helpfully translated the Latin into English, but also set them in boldface type, supposedly 'to illustrate Krafft-Ebing's editorial choices of what he found to be "particularly revolting".'

Not out of prurience, of course.

THE CASE OF Z

Case 81, profiling a Russian masochist called Z, gives an idea of the material:

'What oppressed him was the unnatural desire, recurring every four weeks, for mictio mulieris in os suum—' 

Or in my genital-warts-and-all version—'a woman to urinate in his mouth.'

'Puerum decem annos agens serva educatrix libidine mota ad corpus suum appressit et digitum ei in vaginam introduxit.' 

'When he was ten years old, his nurse, on a libidinous impulse, clutched him against her body and put his finger into her vagina.' 

'Quum postea fortuitu digito nasum tetigit, odore ejus valde delectatus fuit.' 

'When he happened to touch his nose with his finger later, the smell was intensely pleasurable to him.' 

'This immoral act developed into a lustful fantasy that made him believe he was lying bound inter femora mulieris cumbere—'

'—between a woman's thighs—'

'—coactus ut dormiat sub ejus podice et ut bibat ejus urinam.'

'—and forced to sleep under her buttocks and drink her urine.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Of Pinceurs and Zopfabschneiders -- (Chapter VIII, Part 2)

Before Freud began seducing the West, though, Europe produced a boom in sex research that belies the buttoned-up stereotypes of the nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution forced millions of people to migrate to the cities, freeing individuals to make like-minded acquaintances outside their families.

Rather than having to suffer as 'the only pervert in the village,' a person with unconventional kinks could find entire clandestine villages of 'perverts' in the big city.

And faced with this perceived increase in 'perversions'—and their attendant diseases—doctors endeavored to work out whether deviance was inborn or induced: was it breeding or city living that drove people crazy? 

Inevitably, these medicine men framed their diagnoses in the technological (and sexist) metaphors of their time.

In fact, like the old nature-versus-nurture argument, you can still hear people repeating them today.

Doctors concluded that the human body was a complex machine, and sex a uniquely powerful form of energy. To keep the machine from overheating or breaking down, regular releases of energy were necessary.

Conversely, if a body had too much sex—or the wrong sort (viz: masturbation)—the whole thing could blow.

And if that happened to enough people, well, civilization itself could bump and grind to a halt.

The most famous sex expert was a German-Austrian aristocrat who's barely remembered now.

If mentioned at all, Richard von Krafft-Ebing is often vilified as an obsessive cataloguer of 'perversions,' a doctor who created the sexual categories we still live with today.

At a time when the world seemed to be going sex-mad, it was a roly-poly Catholic with kind eyes who crafted the straitjackets.

To be sure, Krafft-Ebing and his fellow sexperts had a tendency to get carried away: besides inventing terms that we still use ('heterosexuality,' 'homosexuality,' 'exhibitionism' and 'pedophilia'), they came up with plenty more that we don't, such as pinceur (a perv who pinched women) and the presumably extinct Zopfabschneider (a perv who chopped off women's hairbuns).

With their Germanic knack for nomenclature, it's a wonder they never minted a term for 'Doctors Who Get Their Kicks Conducting Dodgy Sex Studies in the Name of Research,' such as the gynecologist in Berlin who beavered away, examining 1,000 women—it's hard work, but somebody's got…—to conclude what most of us would have guessed already: that a woman's hair color often matches her pubic follicles.

(The world's still awaiting a follow-up study on men).

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- And Venus Laughed: How Siggie & Co Got Us All Jiggy -- (Chap. VIII, Pt. 1)

Chapter Eight 

AND VENUS LAUGHED 

How Siggie & Co Got Us All Jiggy 

in Fin-de-Siècle Graz and Vienna 

'Things have become livelier. The sexual business attracts people who are all stunned and then go away won over after having exclaimed, "No one has ever asked me about that before!"'

--Sigmund Freud, in a letter to his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, 1893 

While the French elevated decadence to an art form, their Teutonic counterparts turned it into a science.

A German pioneer in 'sexology' championed the Marquis de Sade's work, and a certain Austrian shrink popularized the term 'sadism' and its pain-loving partner in 1890—naming 'masochism' after a fellow academic (much to his colleague's chagrin).

Even now, the West is struggling with the fallout from fin-de-siècle Austria and its role in inspiring not one but two 'Sexual Revolutions.'

Like Istanbul and Venice before it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a nexus of East and West, controlled by a sclerotic ruler and legions of bureaucrats.

Economically powerful but politically impotent, the moneyed classes focused on pleasuring themselves during the 'Gay Apocalypse,' an era combining Klimt's erotica and the timeless waltzes of Strauss, initially described as 'African and hot-blooded, crazy with life.'

And when the whirl of life ended, the elite insisted on leaving eine schöne Leich: a 'beautiful corpse.'

A modern take on the theme
by Martin Schmid

At the top of society, the young heir to the Empire killed himself and a mistress (conspiracy theorists maintained they were murdered), and the death of the Crown Prince—and the succession of a cripple to the German throne—seemed to prove that Western civilization was breeding itself into extinction.

Nietzsche had declared God dead, and in the midst of this nihilistic, eroticized milieu—where the demimonde was 'everywhere but unseen like the sewers'—a fame-seeking Viennese neurologist with a messiah complex began obsessing about the sex lives of children.