The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The Girls Love What They Do' -- (Chapter X, Part 25)

Tramping off to another club, I ask him why Czech women get into prostitution.

'Lazy!' he snorts. 'Most of them are just plain lazy. A job in marketing pays about US-five an hour. So most of them would rather sleep 'til noon and go to a place where they can smoke and drink on the job. They're agnostic, so they don't have any guilt to hold them back—well, they have social guilt, but they make sure their families never find out. But the girls love what they do. I've never known one of them to leave the work permanently. You could offer them a job in an office paying just as much or even better, but they'd still want to work in the clubs.'

Lazy?
A prostitute touts for trade on a Czech highway
(photo by Heather Faulkner)

Being Irish-American, John's an atavistic Catholic, born into a religion but unable to remember what he's lost.

That said, he's a demon on divorce rates, telling me apropos of nothing that 60% of marriages in the Czech Republic end in divorce: twice as many as in Slovakia and three times the number in predominantly Catholic Poland—'and the archbishop in Poland recently said, "We're failing!"' he laughs.

If hell froze over, John says he'd probably settle down with a nice Polish girl.

'I would never marry a Czech: they drink and they're agnostic, so they're liable to get high and cheat on you—and probably forget about it.'

I remember the Russian biznesman in Venice making a similar remark.

'Do you really think the main difference between Czechs and Poles is religion?'

'It's the only difference I can see. After all, the two countries are right next door to each other and have similar cultures.'

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 Most Atheistic Country in Europe' -- (Chapter X, Part 18)

An even bigger mystery is why so many ex-comrades resorted to the world's oldest profession after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The easiest explanation seems to be that prostitution (and human trafficking) have always thrived in Central Europe—an early Czech feminist opened a local branch of the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women immediately after World War One.

It could be that the reopening of the borders after 1989 simply gave women and the men who prey on them more opportunity to ply their trades.

But there's more to it than mere logistics.

As with Spain's cultural revolution during the 'Me Decade,' the former satellites of the USSR had the misfortune of playing catch-up at a time when the 'Greed is Good' ethos was all the rage in Western society.

Both Britain and America had produced more than a few 'robber barons' in their time, but even the Carnegies and Rockefellers felt compelled to throw some money at philanthropy, if only as a hedge on hellfire and damnation.

Fast forward a century later, and rather than capitalism with a human face, the former Soviet bloc has gotten capitalism without a conscience.

According to czech-bride.com,
'The Heart of European Union countries is truly Czech Republic.'

Communist rule degraded sex into a tonic for boredom, an impotent protest against the system, and even a currency in its own right, while simultaneously dispensing with religion.

Traditionally, Czech national identity had revolved around religious figures like St. Wenceslaus and Jan Hus, yet the Czech Republic now vies with other former Soviet satellites as the least religious country in Europe.

As many as three out of four Czechs are agnostics or atheists—a statistic that horrifies US missionaries who've parachuted in to 'save' the country (much like Western feminists).

'The Czechs say they're the most atheistic country in Europe, and they say it with some pride,' an emissary for the Catholic Church told a US newspaper.

'This is how Western civilization may look in fifty years.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Premature Perestroika -- (Chapter X, Part 15)

And most of the government's reforms were very moderate indeed.

As a teenager, Jan Kaplan took advantage of the new freedom to travel to visit London.

He describes the Prague Spring as typically Czech, comparing it with the attempts by national hero Jan Hus to gradually change the Catholic Church from within a century before the Reformation—a statue of the martyred reformer is one of Prague's landmarks.

Student Jan Palach committed suicide by self-immolation in Wenceslaus Square
to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring.
This still is from Burning Bush, a Czech miniseries set in the era. 

'You can't live in central Europe and be landlocked and hope to change things except from within,' Kaplan says.

'The Czechs were developed, and the Russians were peasants, with an almost feudal form of control in the way that they implemented Socialism. The Czechs could have done it far more elegantly,' he adds wistfully.

That may be, but the Russians realized that their template for undermining democracy now threatened to break up the Communist bloc.

In August 1968, the Soviets decided to crush the 'premature perestroika,' and the Red Army that had once liberated Prague returned to shackle it.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Back to the Party -- (Chapter IX, Part 24)

Which all sounds eminently reasonable.

When I see him later that night, though, I begin to wonder if there isn't something to the 'self-loathing' tag that he resents so much.

Armed with the gay guide that Gad had a hand in, Lena and I have hit the gay clubs, including a joint with a tranny DJ and pictures of the German pope holding the host over the bar.

Around three a.m., we meet up with Gad at Rose's Bar, a smoky nook that's like walking into the belly of a debauched Muppet.

The walls and ceiling are coated with hot-pink, shag-pile carpeting that's so thick, the cilia-like hairs actually billow from the fan overhead.

The usual mock-religious bric-a-brac is scattered throughout the club, including a big painting of the Virgin Mary on the supply-room door and a portrait of Jesus surrounded by swirly lights.

Maybe it's the spiritual imagery—or a far stronger substance—but Gad has a confession of his own to make.

'I once had sex with a dog,' he announces to Lena.

She laughs.

'It was an Irish setter that belonged to a friend. I woke up and it was licking me. I was so drunk at first I pushed it away. But then I thought, this feels rather nice.'

Gad gabbles on like this until Lena and I take our leave to head to another club.

While we wait for a cab, he points to four small brass plaques capping the cobblestones in front of the bar.

They're Stolpersteine—'stumbling blocks'—and they're memorials to victims of the Holocaust.

In this case, the plaques are reminders that a family of four lived here until they were deported in 1943.

'Because the Nazis sent them to AUSCHWITZ!!!' Gad cackles, kicking at the blocks.

And then he turns and goes back to the party.

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Only With Added Nipples -- (Chapter VIII, Part 20)

'Shhhho… what are you two into?' he slobbers at Lena.

She fends him off effortlessly. 'Um, each other?'

Once all the bluehairs have gone, the backroom turns into an impromptu slideshow starring Grazy and some other regulars at the annual drag-queen extravaganzas in Graz and Vienna.

These 'Tuntenballs'—or 'fag bashes'—are the successors to the exclusive parties hosted by homosexuals in Germany and Austria back in Krafft-Ebing's day.

The official photos feature gorgeous costumes and outrageous peacockery.

Unfortunately, the pics in this slideshow are more like vacation snaps, with dodgy drag queens surrounded by hot girls trying to outglam them by flaunting the only physical advantages they have: some are actually naked.

A more typical sequence, though, shows a woman and a tranny groping a topless woman's boobs, then the topless gal groping the woman back, and finally the topless woman cupping the drag queen's falsies.

It's like having to sit through your parents' holiday slideshow, only with added nipples.

Note to self: when your sex life is the most interesting thing about you, it's time to get a life. 

Just as my eyelids are crusting shut, Grazy's girlfriend shouts at him and storms out, leaving him to totter after her and providing me with the break I need.

Outside, Grazy tells Lena and me they're headed to a joint called No Limits.

But I've already reached mine, and Lena's been gagging to go ever since she got here.

'God, that was dull!' she groans as we walk away. 'I've had more fun at lunch with a nun—at least she was laughing and telling dirty jokes!'

* * *

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

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

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

'All that is about hypocrisy.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 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: Paris and Provence -- A Poor Little Aristocrat -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 7)

However, Finn's relativism echoes that of Sade's defenders.

His most acclaimed biographer, Francine du Plessix Gray, spends the first sixty pages of At Home with the Marquis de Sade creating a sympathetic portrait of her subject: a poor little aristocrat with a rich pedigree (one ancestor was Petrarch's muse)… neglected by his frigid mother and bisexual father (they didn't even attend his baptism)… fobbed off on his uncle, a womanizing priest in Provence (who loved the troubadours)… spoiled rotten by his relatives… a brave but laddish officer… and finally married off to a plain wife for money... comme ci, comme ça—pretty much the routine for an eighteenth-century aristo.

Next thing you know, though, little Donatien-Alphonse-Francoise de Sade is tormenting a pregnant prostitute in a rented house outside Paris, boasting about cramming communion wafers up a woman's holiest of holies and wanking into a chalice while blaspheming the Virgin as a 'bugger,' God the Father as a 'motherfucker' and shouting 'If thou art God, avenge thyself!'

That bit of funmaking earned Sade three weeks in the clink in 1763.

Five years later, after much infidelity interspersed with marital bliss (including a few children), Sade was back in Paris, this time picking up a part-timer and taking her to a little house where he proceeded to masturbate while flogging her with a bundle of cane and a cat-o-nine tails; if she refused, he told her, he'd kill her and bury her in the garden.

During a break, the prostitute tied the bedsheets together and escaped out the window to report him to the police.

Glamorized misogyny:
sexing up Sade's crimes

The crime scandalized the nation, not least because he'd done all this on Easter Sunday, seemingly mocking the flagellation of Christ.

Without any aristocratic friends to protect him, Sade's whipping of the prostitute turned him into a whipping boy for the bourgeoisie.

Even so, he spent only seven months in jail.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'The Last Slave of the Marquis de Sade' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 6)

Like most of its neighbors in this fractious territory, Lacoste is built on a hill for self-defense and hewn from a tawny stone that glows in the sunshine, its dwellings protected from the elements by tile roofs and timber shutters.

Mysteriously, though, it's escaped the gentrification that's transformed its immediate rivals.

Whereas Bonnieux and Menerbes boast upmarket shops and restaurants, barely 200 souls live in Lacoste—nearly half of them outsiders—and its few streets are little more than petrified pathways winding down the hillside.

Even with the festival under way, Lacoste seems all but deserted.

As for Sadeian touches, there is a gay restaurant called 'Loofoc,' but that refers to a 'seal' rather than cottaging, and the inevitable Café de Sade is just a drab café-cum-newsagents.

'Am I missing something?' I ask Finn.

He assures me there are no secret S&M rings in the village; they don't even get many BDSM pilgrims here. 'Sade's not marketed at all.'

As a pacifist vegetarian and recovering alcoholic, he's probably the least likely defender of sadism you could find.

However, just as Sade's wife stuck by him for years, aiding and abetting him, you can't help but wonder if the Marquis appeals to his admirers' inner masochist.

The local schoolteacher who first started restoring the chateau—his widow passed it on to Cardin—used to claim he was 'the last slave of the Marquis de Sade.'

Now that dubious honor seems to have been passed to an Irish gardener whose scraggly cap of black curls makes him look like a friendly labradoodle.

Or maybe I've got Finn all wrong.

'A few of the things that brought Sade down was that he went into a church and took a Eucharist and a chalice,' he explains nonchalantly.

'And he put the Eucharist in a woman's vagina and had sex with her and challenged God. He also masturbated into the chalice. But so what? Big deal. Nowadays, people are going into churches all over the world and stealing stuff and breaking them.'

Somehow that doesn't seem like the same thing at all.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- So Who's This Jesus Geezer? -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 4)

Facetiousness aside, the fact that a former prima ballerina of the Paris Opera Ballet can mount a choreographed bondage-fest out in the sticks—with the blessing of a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts—shows just how far BDSM culture has penetrated the mainstream.

The perversions of yore have become commonplace: for all I know, half the provincials in this Provençal audience are wearing nipple rings.

Artistically, though, there's nothing exciting about Sade, the dance version.

At one point, a witless murder inspires the inmates to hang the long-haired deceased a la Crucifixion (minus the traditional loincloth)—a scene that would be a lot more shocking if Europe weren't a couple of generations away from schoolchildren asking in art history: 'So who's this Jesus geezer, then?'

It's all a bit passé.

Like most modern takes on Sade the Legend, though, the ballet doesn't reflect the deeply repugnant reality that was Sade the Man.

Standing only five-foot-two, the real-life aristo was pint-sized even by the vertically challenged standards of his day.

And although handsome in his youth, by the time he turned to porn in his late forties he was so fat from guzzling wine and sweets in jail that he could hardly dress himself, let alone walk.

Though no portraits of the Marquis survive from his porn years,
Man Ray was probably right in imagining him like this...

...rather than this (a portrait of Sade in his twenties,
before he turned to writing porn)

Still, that didn't stop him from trying to keep up appearances.

Having already impoverished his wife, he continued to demand silk hair ribbons, face powder by the pound and custom-made dildos so he could sodomize himself—as well as plenty of ointment to soothe his hemorrhoids.

No wonder the legendary Marquis actually had to pay most of the people he ever slept with.

Somehow, though, the cynical, one-handed musings of this gluttonous powder puff not only presaged modern views on sexuality but also shaped them, reinforcing France as the ne plus ultra of all things sexy.

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Why Men Are Don Juans -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 16)

Wright ended his night with the 'white slave trader' in the bar where I'm sitting now:

'And in each place, he signed up girls to work in the whorehouses of North Africa.'

Now, as with the Inquisition, it's not common knowledge that Seville was a hub of sex trafficking under Franco, with white católicas willingly venturing to Africa to sleep with dark-skinned Muslims.

How many family homes in Seville must have been bought with the proceeds of prostitution? Granny, where were you in the Fifties?

It's not a particularly polite question to ask a proud sevillano.

And anyway, I'm here to find out about Don Juan.

DON JUAN IN THE FLESH

Alfonso Sanchez played the legendary womanizer in a local theatre production that combined three incarnations of the Don on one stage: Molina's hellbound original, the wise-cracking atheist envisaged by Moliere and the most popular version, Jose Zorrilla's religious romantic, a man who's redeemed by the love of a good (Catholic) woman.

In casting the main character, the director told me that her Don Juans had to look like they'd give a girl 'the best sex in the world.'

I'm not the best judge, but Alfonso is dark and bearded, and what he lacks in height he makes up with poise, carrying himself with actorly self regard.

What's more, Alfonso's an actor with a brain.

Alfonso and a musician
outside the historic Bar Citroen

'I had a bit of a phobia about playing Don Juan, because in my life, it's always been present,' he admits. 'My father is a total Don Juan. So I've lived it. And it has its light and dark sides. I was also a little afraid of confronting my own ghosts.'

While we're exorcizing our demons, I suppose I should confess that there was a time when I was called a Don Juan, though it never seemed much of a compliment, mainly because it sounds synonymous with 'male slut.'

After centuries of cogitation about what makes a man a mujeriego—mother issues, arrested development, being an incurable romantic, etcetera—the best reason I've been able to come up with is far more prosaic: Don Juans cheat because they can.

If men weren't indulged as rogues, victims or sex addicts, if they were stigmatized in the same way that—oh, I don't know—'bad' women have been repudiated for ages—well, I reckon the fanciful Don Juan 'gene' would quickly die out.

'THE GREAT TRAGEDY'

Alfonso doesn't disagree with this view, though he reckons there's a strong cultural element to being a Denomination-of-Origin Don.

'In the culture of the south, the myth of Don Juan is ever-present, especially in relationships with women. It turns into a relationship of conquest. Everything is conquest. You go to have a coffee, and you arrive at a moment of conquest. It's as if it makes you more manly—in theory. But it's self-destructive.'

He shakes his head when I mention guides like The Game and its Spanish imitator.

'That's fascinating,' he says. 'It's the opposite of the process I've gone through.'

Instead, he recommends a cure for Don Juanism: playing the Don onstage.

'It forces you to be conscious of your own limitations. Because the things you do without thinking about them, out of a tradition that obliges you to be a Don Juan, or a need for conquest, you realize that isn't the essence of who you are: you're searching for something else.'

'The great tragedy of Don Juan is that he's constantly searching for God—or rather, pure love. And he doesn't find it—until he meets the love of his life.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Flamenco and White Slavery -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 15)

Having set the standards for the rest of the world during the Inquisition and launched a mission to save Catholicism under Franco, it seems ironic that Spain should now be so desperate to ape the mores of traditionally Protestant (if largely secular) countries.

Meanwhile, alarmists talk of Muslim immigrants—and Spanish converts—establishing a 'New Al-Andalus' in Spain: the historic stronghold of Granada opened its first mosque since the Reconquest in 2003.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a Spanish novelist wrote a mock political manifesto outlining how to make Spain 'the most dynamic and innovative service society in the new, global trans-national order:' 

'Spaniards! Those young people who sow their barely adolescent bodies on the curves of our highways every weekend. They're not a problem; they're a solution… Let's not go back to wasting the gold of America… Let's illuminate the world once more with a new Golden Age… Now is the time to convert ourselves into a BROTHEL OF THE DEAD.' 

'I YOU GO AFRICA'

That notion is only slightly more offensive than the real reason I've chosen the Bar Citroën to meet a modern Don Juan.

The bar sits on the corner between Seville's Moorish-style Plaza de España and the family park that hides the spot where the Inquisition used to cremate people alive.

Like the Plaza, the Citroën dates from the Spanish-American Expo of 1929: the small, circular building was actually the carmakers' showroom.

Now a pitstop for tourists and pedestrians, the Citroën was more of a nightspot when Richard Wright came here over half a century ago.

A shady compatriot had offered to show him 'enough flamenco to last you a lifetime' but ended up taking him on a club crawl.

As a black American, the author was surprised to find sevillanas throwing themselves at him, saying: 'I you go Africa.'

Laughing, his guide explained the joke: 'I'm organizing these girls to take them to Africa next week. They think that you are the boss. You see, you are dark. They think you own the cathouses in Casablanca.'

'You mean they want to work in the whorehouses in Africa?'

'They are dying to go. I got the pick of thousands. I can't sleep for the women in Seville begging me to take them to Africa. Two years' work over there and a girl can buy a house in Seville.'

Don't twist my arm:
Contrary to pulp fiction,
Richard Wright found that many sevillanas went willingly

The History of Sex: Seville -- Land of the Necrophiliac Whorehouse -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 13)

Meanwhile, women were either 'good' or 'bad,' according to a couple of twentysomethings who guided Wright around Barcelona:

'Since they could not have the "good" ones, they frequented the "bad" ones. And since going to bed with either a "good" or a "bad" woman was a sin, it was necessary to be forgiven. Both boys went to confession regularly.'

Eventually, he met one of their girlfriends.

'What does your fiancée do?' I asked him.
Dumbfounded, he stared at me.
'She's a virgin,' he repeated.
Being a virgin, evidently, was a kind of profession in itself.

The Catholic hierarchy estimated that Madrid had a hundred thousand prostitutes, while Wright found that 'Barcelona and Seville literally crawl with hungry women willing to grant access to their bodies for bread or its equivalent.'

Professional virgins?
A Spanish magazine from the Franco era

In Seville, he stayed in a pensión run by an ultra-Catholic landlady, realizing belatedly that it doubled as a 'house of assignation:'

'Spain seemed one vast brothel.'

A decade or so later, a whoremongers' guide to Europe quibbled with that description, claiming instead that 'sexually, Spain is a working hypocrisy.'

Respectable prostitutes would hang a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin over their beds, refusing to use contraceptives: they were 'immoral.'

'Because the prostitute accepts her role in life, she has few complexes or guilt feelings. Her religion does not interfere, for it has told her to accept things as they are.'

In Barcelona, the writer described an establishment that seemed emblematic of the intensely Spanish obsessions with sex and death.

In the 'necrophiliac whorehouse,' a girl would lie in a coffin and play dead. If she moved while the punter played with her, he got his money back.

Not for nothing is the Spanish word for 'kinky'—morbo—akin to 'morbid.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- How America 'Gave' Spain a Middle Class -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 12)

However, vowing to fight them on the beaches was like trying to hold back the tide.

The US had done a Cold War deal with the devil in 1953, supporting Franco as a bulwark against Communism and effectively giving its blessing to Viva España sunseekers who then did their bit to prop up the Fascist regime.

The Spanish government didn't like their foreign immorality, but it needed their cash.

When the girls at a school for foreigners in Santander demanded to be able to swim without being fined, the authorities marked off a special section of a nearby beach where they could frolic in their navel-revealing, two-piece, Satanic Bikinis.

SEX- (AND DEATH-) OBSESSED

Naturally, all this mortification of the flesh had the opposite effect, creating a people who were positively—even morbidly—sex-obsessed.

The American novelist Richard Wright opted for a road trip through Spain in 1954, and his little-known travelogue, Pagan Spain, is intriguing mainly because of its time-capsule details and the people he encountered, such as the veteran Spanish journalist who told him 'the real and simple truth' about the civil war:

'We butchered one another and we loved it. The Spanish never had a better time of it in their modern history than they had in that war.'

Or the New Yorker designing the new air bases under the Franco pact:

'What these people need is a middle class. We're going to give them one. These people cannot resist the new stuff that we are bringing in. They try to, but they can't.'

Sexually, though, Spain was still a world apart.

A professional woman who had lived everywhere from Berlin to Buenos Aires said she was shocked by the Spanish obsession with sex.

'When I first came here, I thought that the Spanish had just discovered sex. A Spanish child of six could tell a man of twenty-one in New York things that he does not know.'

Even so, an 'intellectual Spaniard' told Wright that he and his fiancée spoke French in small towns to avoid being fined if he touched her arm in the street:

'Go in the spring and summer into Andalusia and look into the open fields and you'll see the Spaniards fornicating like animals—and the Church has made it like that'.

The History of Sex: Seville -- Beware Satanic Fashions! -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 11)

So it was that students in seminaries and religious colleges were told to beware the 'diabolical serpent' of the penis and the 'Satan's den' of the vagina.

As in medieval times, books on morality divided the female body into three zones: the 'honest' or 'decent' parts (the hands, feet, face and arms up to the elbow); the 'less decent' bits (such as the upper arms); and the downright 'indecent' bits.

The Archbishop of Toledo issued a dress code declaring that 'it's against modesty not to wear stockings,' while posters warning against the evils of MODERN DANCES showed a besuited young man waltzing unknowingly with a horned and winged devil, as a woman in a dress does likewise.

('YOUNG PERSON… AMUSE YOURSELF ANOTHER WAY' it commanded, though it must have been a toss-up between close dancing and masturbation.)

All the media were censored, and most magazines and newspapers hired touch-up experts to doctor photos.

Rita Hayworth above, Ava Gardner below:
both before and after the censors

Gone With the Wind wasn't shown until 1950—eleven years after its debut—and even Biblical fare like Samson and Delilah had to be made decent for los españoles (the temptress' midriff was covered up in posters).

However, just as Goya had dodged the old Inquisition by painting a double portrait of La Maja (one nude, the other clothed), Spanish filmmakers found a way around Franco's censorship: shooting two versions of the same scene.

In The Return of Clint the Stranger, one of many spaghetti Westerns shot in Spain, the international version included a scene with a blonde lying on a bed, exposing everything from her breasts to the top of her pubic triangle.

In the Spanish edition, a sheet covers her up to her armpits.

What with modern Spain's fame for 'Ibiza Uncovered'-style debauchery, it's hard to fathom that one of the main battlefronts in the war on sin was the country's beaches.

Up until at least the Fifties, many swimming areas were divided between the sexes: boys would have to bathe separately with their fathers, and girls with their mothers.

In Las Palmas, the bishop ordered his priests to deny absolution to anyone who insisted on playing on la playa in mixed company.

As late as 1976—a year after Franco's death—a religious magazine in Valencia denounced 'Satanic Fashions:'

Bikinis and tight trousers
Mothers sin by buying them for their daughters.
The girls sin by using them.
Men sin by looking at them.

A modern condemnation of 'infernal fashion':
Woman: 'Hey! Why are you cutting my dress?'
Demon: 'It's to make you more attractive...
but especially to send men to hell!'

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: Seville -- Was the Original Don Juan Gay? -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 9)

Other men like Moliere and Mozart quickly turned the Latin lover into a universal archetype, but there were specific reasons why Don Juan premiered in Inquisition Spain, where sex was literally a matter of life and death.

As in the rest of Europe, the ancient Roman rules about shame and honor had never really died out; if anything, they'd probably been crystallized by eight centuries of Islamic rule, particularly in the Moorish south.

'There is in Seville a class of useless, idle people usually known as men about town,' wrote the novelist Cervantes, a man who'd done time in the city's jail himself before giving the world that other product of Inquisition Spain, Don Quixote.

One of these gadabout sevillanos was just a toddler when Tirso de Molina's play made its debut in Madrid, but he grew up to embody the stereotypical Don Juan.

Fortunately, Miguel de Mañara's life had a happy ending.

Staggering home through the Old Town one night, he bumped into a funeral procession.

De Mañara snuck a peek at the corpse—and saw his own dead face staring back at him (other versions claim his wife's death straightened him out).

De Mañara forsook his sinful ways, gave his riches to the poor and genuinely became a force for good. 

However, the more likely real-life inspiration for Don Juan met a sticky end.

THE 'REAL' DON JUAN?

The Count of Villamediana—Don Juan de Tassis y Peralta—was murdered in Madrid in 1622, having offended so many people with his satirical poems that his killer was never caught.

One theory is that Villamediana had peeved the king by consorting with the queen.

But a far more intriguing theory maintains that the 'real Don Juan' wasn't a ladies' man at all.

Now, as with the rumors about 'Osman' in Istanbul, the homosexualization of historical figures is practically a cottaging industry in its own right. In modern life, you're no one until you've been outed in death.

Still, the 'Gay Don Juan' story is a good 'un: according to this conspiracy theory, Villamediana was killed while riding in his coach with a teenager who was also a relative of the king's right-hand man.

What's more, shortly after Villamediana's demise, the Inquisition seems to have found evidence linking the count's household to a ring of homosexuals: two of his servants were burnt as sodomites, alongside a duke's page, a black slave… and a 'pet dwarf.'

Not this dwarf: a court buffoon from around 1626

Unfortunately, this account is based on research dug up by a Spanish historian over three centuries later, in 1928.

When a British successor, Robert Stradling, tried to find the same source material in the archives in 1986, he discovered that 'the papers had vanished:'

'The evidence had been removed, evidently by an authority… concerned to preserve intact the myth of Don Juan. A gay Don Juan evidently threatened the integrity of every Spanish male, even the identity of Spain itself. It had to remain a state secret. I had encountered a case of cultural cover-up.'

Or an administrative cock-up.

But Stradling is convinced—in italics—that if the 1928 account was accurate, 'no doubt can exist that the accepted prototype of Don Juan, most potent of all myths of heterosexual male seduction, was a promiscuous homosexual.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Tricksters and Conquistadors -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 8)

Though prone to corruption, a devil's advocate could argue that the Inquisition served as a check on decadence during Spain's 'Golden Century.'

Even after England thrashed the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain ranked as a global superpower, with vast territories encompassing Latin America, the Caribbean, Florida, California and the southwestern US (without forgetting the Philippines).

The Spanish Inquisition also influenced fashion throughout Europe, though Continentals eventually ditched the rich-but-dour look for more revealing styles (even as the Spanish bizarrely took to binding their daughters' chests with lead plates to make their breasts 'as flat as a sheet of paper,' according to a French contemporary).

At the same time, Spain popularized the Cult of the Virgin, forcing women back up on an even higher pedestal.

Seville still prides itself on being MUY MARIANA: VERY MARIAN.

At least two centuries before the Vatican made it official, the home of Don Juan touted Mary's Immaculate Conception, a doctrine that took the concept of female purity to the extreme: not only had the Mother of God been an eternal virgin, she'd also been conceived sans original sin.

NONCONFORMISTS VS. CONQUISTADORS

Crucially, the riches that made this age 'Golden' for Spain weren't so much earned as stolen, with the conquistadors taking far more from the New World than they put in.

Consider the settlers of New England versus New Spain.

The former were Calvinist nonconformists who risked their lives for an ideal: to be able to practice their beliefs free from religious persecution.

In contrast, the semi-literate brutes who conquered 'New Spain' (like the English fortune-seekers who settled the American South) risked their lives solely to get rich or die trying.

The mountains of gold and silver they shipped back via Seville fostered generations of aristos with no real purpose but to waste their fortunes and amuse themselves by exploiting others.

It's this decadence that produced the character of Don Juan.

Miguel de Manara, often cited as the 'real' Don Juan

The original Trickster of Seville was a straight, wages-of-sin cautionary tale, penned around 1630 by Tirso de Molina, a monk turned playwright.

Don Juan Tenorio is a rich young blade who gets his kicks tricking women into bed.

Catholic to the core, he seduces and double-crosses his way from Naples to Seville, cynically boasting that he'll seek God's forgiveness with his last breath.

The supernatural twist is that the ghost of a man he's murdered—the father of a dishonored woman—kills Don Juan and drags him off to hell before he can repent.