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: Prague -- Sex and Communism -- (Chapter X, Part 12)

By the Sixties, though, all that had changed.

The Czechs were both physically and psychologically closer to the West than the Soviets, with easier access to new ideas.

Whereas those born before the Communist coup tended to be true believers, the younger generation knew that Socialist rhetoric rarely matched social reality.

'I don't remember anyone having any qualms about hopping into bed with one another,' says Jan Kaplan, a Czech émigré.

'Part of the allure of collective farms and summer projects was that they were fuckfests: "To hell with bourgeois ideas of chastity; let's have a lot of sex!" How did you get young people to build factories for free? Because at the end of the day, they got to fuck themselves silly.'

Jan Kaplan was also a consultant for
Prague's Museum of Communism

Not surprisingly, then, Prague flourished as a center of sexpionage during the Cold War.

Che Guevara partied there with Fidel Castro's brother while trying to broker an arms deal for Cuba.

According to their official minder, both the Czechs and the Russians viewed Che as 'an anarchist,' while Raul Castro—now the president of Cuba—'was no laggard in debauchery:' 'Every night I went with him to some nightclub, where we would stay drinking and dancing with the hostesses until the small hours. I would also procure blonde girls for him to sleep with—he was obsessed with blondes.'

Che Guevara's lived in Prague for a few months in 1966
before setting off on his ill-fated trip to Bolivia
(Source: Czech news site)

To find out more about the heyday of sexpionage, I've decided to try and track down one of the last veterans of the era.

Like many top Czech spies, Ladislav Bittman defected to the West after Soviet troops crushed the 'Prague Spring' of 1968, a doomed attempt to reform the Communist bloc from within.

In The Deception Game, written shortly afterwards, the former deputy chief of 'Department D,' describes how he helped pioneer the field of disinformation.

'For a long time I was a disciplined Communist intelligence officer, speaking the same language and thinking along the same ideological lines as my fellow officers, praying with them to the same god named Lenin, admiring the majestic panoramas of the Charles Bridge and Prague's Hradcany Castle from the headquarters of the Czechoslovak intelligence service.'

The spies' HQ was actually a former monastery kept intact by the Communists because of its artistic value.

'As a result, Party and official meetings took place in the monastery's chapel, where portraits of melancholy saints looked down from the walls.'

The former spooks' HQ
(the dark facade beneath the dome)

The History of Sex: Prague -- How to Train a Sex Spy -- (Chapter X, Part 7)

The training started with a series of sex films more explicit than anything Vera had ever seen.

Still a virgin at eighteen, she had been raised by an aunt who was very religious.

In subsequent sessions, the girls were ordered to strip for each other and watch a couple have sex in front of them, while an instructor in a white coat narrated their technique.

Then the girls had to undress for a trio of male instructors who ended up fondling them.

'On the sixth day the men began to abuse us and comment on our bodies. During the first week I often cried myself to sleep out of shame. But slowly it didn't seem embarrassing any longer.'

Katya, the KGB head in the TV series, Archer

Around the eighth day, a group of officer cadets were bussed in and each girl was given a partner for the evening.

In a bugged cocktail bar on the site, the boys were instructed to play the part of nervous foreigners, while the girls deployed their training to seduce them.

In reality, most of the soldiers were actually chomping at the bit—visiting the sex school was a special reward for them.

Vera described her target as 'an animal.'

'There was no romance for me that evening. He tore off my brassiere and began to massage my breasts very hard… It was to this stranger that I lost my virginity.'

The next morning, the girls were ushered into the theatre for more sex films—only to find out that their performances had been secretly filmed.

One girl whose target had failed to have an erection was criticized so harshly she became hysterical.

The trainee swallows then had at least three more bouts of sex with strangers: once to get them used to the hidden cameras (one girl was so self-conscious her bedmate beat her for 'acting like a robot'); then to teach them how to seduce fumbling virgins (actually teenage boys); and finally the ultimate test—conjuring a performance from a jaded sexagenarian.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Hammer-and-Sickling Out a Solution -- (Chapter X, Part 2)

In theory—particularly the Marxist-Leninist variety—it was never meant to turn out that way.

In trying to build their secular paradise on earth, the founding fathers of Communism were downright puritanical.

Marx, for instance, seems to have been too busy fathering children and a misbegotten economic theory to dabble in infidelity.

Likewise, his money man, Engels, contended that 'marriage founded on sexual love is of its nature monogamous,' arguing that more men would be faithful if women were truly equal.

Decades later, Lenin also supported women's liberation, mainly because he needed all the lumpenproles he could get to prop up his revolution-wrecked economy.

Even so, when it came to the ancient problem of sex, the first Communists had some trouble hammer-and-sickling out a solution.

Sex in the USSR:
a fascinating book from the 1970s
by Dr. Mikhail Stern

Traditional Russian society had been religiously patriarchal, so one of Lenin's first acts—barely a month after the Revolution—was to outlaw church marriage and replace it with civil registration.

A series of truly revolutionary laws put cohabitation on a par with marriage and made it so easy to divorce that a husband could dump his wife without even consulting her: his ex would be informed via an official 'divorce postcard.'

A dissident Soviet sexologist, Dr. Mikhail Stern, later described the social chaos as a 'total collapse of moral values;' by comparison, America's Roaring Twenties were a feeble meow.

'DOWN WITH VIRGINITY!'

While a few bohemians in the West fooled around with 'free love,' Russia's Young Communists went for the full shag, hailing it as the perfect anti-bourgeois model for society.

In one of the more bizarre episodes, crowds marched naked through the streets of Moscow and other cities in 1922 shouting 'Love! Love! Down with Shame! Down with Guilt!'

In the countryside, wily peasants capitalized on the Communists' sex laws by getting hitched to starving 'seasonal wives' in the spring, using them to help plant and harvest, and then throwing them out during the winter.

In the cities, too, the new economic approach to love tended to be freer for men than women.

'Male students despise the girls who refuse to sleep with them,' a female comrade complained to Pravda. 'They consider them to be politically backward petty bourgeois who haven't been able to free themselves from the prejudices of the old society.'

To liberate their classmates, students at Odessa School Number 49 set up a porn group, while a secret society at another school published a magazine called 'Down With Virginity!'

Meanwhile, their elders held public meetings to discuss whether they should build special booths next to public toilets for the sexually incontinent.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Spies and Czech Mates: From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis -- (Chapter X, Part 1)

Chapter Ten 

SPIES AND CZECH MATES 

From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis 

'The twentieth century has taught us that every society, every social and political order, has imposed certain prohibitions on sexuality.' 

--Soviet dissident Dr. Mikhail Stern, Sex in the USSR, 1979 

While hounding homosexuals, the Nazis also snooped on heteros, combining the latest technology and the world's oldest profession to pioneer a sinister new form of espionage.

In 1940, the SS converted a brothel in Berlin into a high-tech booty trap with microphones in the walls and a monitoring station in the basement.

Code-named 'Salon Kitty,' the project recruited twenty women to give their bodies for the Fatherland, plying diplomats and potential dissenters, including the Führer's own foreign minister.

The poster for the movie
based on the book by Peter Norden

Of course, sex and espionage were old bedfellows.

In the Old Testament, before the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin' down, two Israelite spies spent the night hiding in a prostitute's house.

As they made their escape, they promised the archetypal hooker with a heart of gold that she could save her family from being massacred by hanging a dyed rope from her window, forever linking the color scarlet to illicit sex.

Several millennia later, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that preventing The End justified the means.

As a result, the Cold War finessed the use of sex bombs, making old-timers like Mata Hari look like deluded amateurs.

'I would not have kept her on my payroll,' sniffed Markus Wolf.

The East German über-spy was best known for infiltrating his spies into West Germany while keeping his own identity secret—for 25 years, Western intelligence didn't even have a photo of the spymaster they were fighting.

Wolf after the Cold War

In his memoirs, though, Wolf boasted that his real claim to fame should be his use of 'Romeo' spies.

'If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.'

Never mind that he was using similar techniques to those pioneered by the Nazis.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- An Uncomfortable Question -- (Chapter IX, Part 27)

At which point, I decide to go for broke and ask a question that sounds more controversial than it should be.

Let me explain: lots of people parrot the Nietzschean maxim that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger; Roman persecution, for instance, actually stoked the wildfire-growth of Christianity.

However, when you apply that same terrible irony to recent history and the groups that the Nazis tried to kill, well, people start to get uncomfortable: somehow it's not very politically correct.

But I've got to ask.

'In the long run,' I ask, 'do you think it was Nazi persecution that helped make Germany's gay movement as strong as it is today?'

Berlin's monument to the homosexual victims
of the Nazi regime

Karl-Heinz is speechless for a second, struggling to find the right words. 'I—I—I'm not a fan of arguing like that,' he says, gazing out the window.

'Because that gives all these activities a kind of shadow. It means that you're always reacting against something and you don't have your own ideas. If you want to live with all the rights that other people have, you should always fight for your rights.'

He mentions that this struggle is continually evolving.

'There is a new situation now, for example, with the children of immigrants who grew up with their religious thinking that does not fit in with our open thinking. And they would kick me out of this place if they could. So the forms of struggle and the aims will always change,' he concludes.

'There are always other questions and other conflicts.'

* * *

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: Berlin -- 'This Righteous Little Jew' -- (Chapter IX, Part 22)

Bizarrely, there's even a burgeoning subgenre of memoirs by the descendants of Nazis trying to atone for their families' sins.

The great-niece of Heinrich 'Holocaust' Himmler, for instance, wound up marrying an Israeli, claiming in her book that 'it was as if we were predestined to meet.' 

Imagine the pillow talk.

Meanwhile, a distant relative of Hermann 'Jew-Looter' Göring, a physiotherapist who grew up bullied by his classmates with his parents complaining that 'all our money's gone to the Jews,' has said he's thinking of converting to Judaism.

Matthias Göring already keeps kosher, wears a kippah, a Star of David necklace and even an orange 'anti-disengagement bracelet' in sympathy with Jewish 'settlers' in the West Bank.

According to Gad, many German converts to Judaism actually turn out to be homosexual (though not Matthias Göring, apparently: he's been married.)

'THEY HATE THE BEAUTY IN ME'

'A problem with coming out is that your conflict with society is based on sexuality,' he says. 'Now, that is… not… pleasant. It's disgusting. You can't build self-esteem on sexuality—especially people who come from villages. So I think they shift their identity from homosexuality and turn it in their minds into a conflict (with society)—"I was always a bit different". It's something righteous; it's not dirty sexuality. It's "As a matter of fact, I'm Jewish. I'm different because somehow in my inner self I'm this righteous little Jew. That is why they hate the beauty in me."'

He laughs—and oddly switches pronouns. 'You can't accept the beauty in you because you're homosexual, because there you really have to go very far to think that being homosexual is beautiful. So they try to find an identity that will explain their conflict and make it—dignified—that's the word. It's very dignified to be Jewish, especially in Germany now. Whereas if it's just your dick moving the wrong way, and you start lickin' somebody's ass and fisting—it's disgusting! That's not dignified! Are you fighting with your parents, who love you and raised you and sent you to school, just because you wanna fist?'

He cackles. 'And it's very funny, because these German converts—these awful, lower middle-class people, these Christian homos with their Aryan noses and their blonde hair—aagh!—and their glasses, to make them look like intellectuals—sit in the front rows of the synagogues.'

'Do they get circumcised, too?'

'If they want to become Jewish, yes, they have to. But quite a lot of homosexuals get circumcised nowadays. It's a sort of fashion now to get themselves cut—which is quite an operation, by the way.'

I don't doubt it.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'The Hottest City for Israelis' -- (Chapter IX, Part 20)

Gad's family already knew he was gay when he told them he planned to study in Berlin in 1986.

His grandfather was fine about the move; it was the Middle Eastern side of the family that was the problem.

'It was more about being afraid of the unknown. It wasn't Germany itself. They had the idea that Western Christians were against Jews; not that the Muslims were against Jews.'

'But of all the cities in the world, why here?' I ask.

'Berlin was very free, in all sorts of ways. It was punk, it was hip, it was dangerous—not real danger; I mean, I came from danger—but there was squatting and you could have sex whenever you wanted to. There was freedom.'

A new 'Fatherland' or 'Time Bomb'?
A street mural of an Israeli flag superimposed
on a German flag

He points out that Germany now has the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, though admittedly off a very small base.

'There are almost 200,000 Jews in Germany now—200,000! England has 300,000, and it's falling.'

Most of the newcomers are Russian Jews, who receive social benefits the minute they arrive. In fact, the number of Jews immigrating to Germany rivals that of those going to Israel.

'Berlin is the hottest city in Europe now for Israelis,' he says. 'There are two or three thousand Israelis here; there used to be only two or three hundred. It's an enormous community.'

'Why is that?'

'Time heals all wounds,' he says grandly.

Then he snaps back into his camp Irish persona. 'It's true. I wouldn't have thought so. I would've thought the way you're thinking. But things are changing, and they're changing quite quickly. Like, you hear Hebrew here. I'm amazed! But they love it here! You can go out all night, fuck all night and have drugs all night. The drinks are cheap, and the livin' is easy.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Don't Even Know What That Is' -- (Chapter IX, Part 14)

Likewise, whereas the modern view of homosexuality tends to focus on anal sex and penetration—one expert on 'Greek Love' dates this 'sodomania' from the Seventies—Beck's memoir is a reminder that gay relationships haven't always been about buggery.

Though we're conditioned to think of pederasty as a rite of passage, so to speak—even for heteros these days—many of Krafft-Ebing's homosexual correspondents claimed they preferred everything but anal.

That's not to say that sodomy wasn't part of the gay repertoire—Isherwood was an avid butt man, while Auden had to be treated for a 'rectal fissure'—but anal sex was far riskier before the discovery of penicillin (indeed, that's one theory why Judeo-Christians banned sodomy: to keep their 'chosen peoples' clean and infection-free).

OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT

Recalling his first love, a fellow Zionist named Manfred, Gad says:

'Whatever we did, it was not much like gay sex as one thinks of it today, but then again, Manfred was not homosexual anyway. With him, as with many of the lovers my age, it was more about joy and fun and sharing hugs and caresses—to feel that the other person was just as aroused as you were… His parents and siblings noticed our relationship, but it didn't have to be talked about. Anyway, there really were other things to worry about.'

Like getting caught.

When Gad was finally captured near the end of the war with another lover, they were both interrogated by the Gestapo.

The officer torturing his friend Zwi taunted them: 'Did you fuck each other in the ass?'

Gad denied it and told him to also confirm it with his partner.

'And the man really did go back in to ask. The door was still ajar, and I could hear Zwi answer, surprised but truthfully, "No, I don't even know what that is."'

Larry Flynt Was My Fleece (or How a Book about Sex Turned Me Into a Christian)

by JR Daeschner

In the end, it was the lies that got to me.

I was in Pompeii, you see, researching what I hoped would be my next big book, a History of Sex that would venture between the past and present, revealing the origins of our notions about love and romance.

Besides the obvious reasons, I'd picked Pompeii because of one little-known fact: the Roman ghost town is the site of the first known reference to the word 'Christian,' dating from around the time that the Apostle Paul visited nearby.

Even more intriguingly, the house that contained the 'CHRISTIANOS' graffiti stands across from Pompeii's brothel (and may have been a whorehouse itself).

But what struck me most was an offhand remark by Pompeii's chief archeologist as he tried to explain the exponential growth of an obscure Semitic sect just a few decades after Rome had crucified its leader like a criminal:

"No religion had ever spread so rapidly in such a capillary manner before."

And that got me wondering why.

Having been raised a Christian, I'd turned my back on the faith partly because I believed the lie that Christianity was anathema to knowledge--I thought that the more you learned about the "real world," the less faith you inevitably had.

As I began to discover, though, that wasn't necessarily true.

If anything, I came to realize that Christians have nothing to fear from learning--while the secular world has a lot to lose from an unbiased look at our past.

I soon learned, for instance, that it was Christ and his followers who gifted the concept of redemption to Western culture--the revolutionary promise that even a prostitute could be redeemed (as opposed to the once-a-whore, always-a-whore ethos of the ancient world).

And it was the early Christians who fought to stop Roman infanticide (making the modern Church's stance on abortion remarkably consistent), while it was Christ's gender-neutral character that enabled women to identify with Him and call themselves Christians--or 'little Christs.'

Contrast Jesus with Mohammed--a celibate pacifist versus a warmonger with a harem--and you can see why feminism took root in traditionally Christian societies.

Whereas polygamy inherently devalues women, it was Paul--the supposed source of Christian "misogyny"--who officially broke with Jewish custom and made marriage one-to-one, mandating that each Christian leader have only one wife and (contrary to Roman practice) actually be faithful to her.

In other words, it's very likely that the only reason Western women dare to demand monogamy from men now is because of centuries of Christianization.

Yet somehow the world continues to slander Christianity as "sex-negative"--and misogynistic to boot.

FREUD'S FRAUD

The cognoscenti will tell you that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is largely disregarded now, while blithely overlooking his pervasive impact on pop culture and the wreckage it's caused.

For instance, thanks to Freud's declaration that all children want to have sex with their parents (the Oedipus complex), many of his followers dismissed actual cases of sex abuse as wishful fantasies.

And it was one of Freud's disciples, Wilhelm Reich, who helped inspire the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, a period that most documentaries depict as an eminently groovy time to be alive.

But have you ever heard them mention its seedy side?

At a time when erstwhile "perversions"--homosexuality, sadomasochism, etcetera--were being declared perfectly normal, many "revolutionaries" argued that pedophilia was just another avenue for sexploration.

After all, who was to say that consensual sex with children was wrong? Or, as a Dutch magazine for gays put it in 1969, "Why Not Go To Bed With Your Son?"

Modern "pedophile activists" still regard those as the good old days. In the Netherlands, I interviewed the co-founder of an ultra-fringe political party trying to legalize pedophilia.

Who did he blame for putting an end to the child-sex movement? An alliance between an all-but-extinct branch of feminism (they wouldn't have called pole dancing "empowering") and--you guessed it--devout Christians.

That was a truth I heard repeatedly, be it from a dodgy Russian biznesman in Venice or an American pimp in Prague: Christianity acts as a check on decadence.

And time and again, I came across Westerners who were having to relearn history's lessons the hard way.

In Amsterdam, I met a former prostitute turned politician who led a crackdown that shut much of the Red-Light District.

"If you're a Christian organization, people don't want to hear (your views on prostitution) because you're Christian," she told me. "But it's new when a politician from the leftwing says it's not good!'

As for pornography, I interviewed one of the makers of the "Max Hardcore" franchise in LA, a man who's filmed some of the worst violence against women outside of warzones.

"With the sex business, you gotta keep ratcheting up," he said. "It's kinda like violence in movies. You gotta keep ratcheting up. People get inured at a certain point—it's gotta be more, greater, nastier. Filthier."

Funnily enough, that's just what porn's (Christian) opponents say.

JUST ANOTHER CASUALTY

Meanwhile, the media routinely hail Hustler founder Larry Flynt as a hero of the First Amendment, a martyr to free speech.

But did you know he once claimed to be a born-again Christian--and that during his conversion, he had a premonition of himself in a wheelchair?

I asked him about it at his headquarters in Beverly Hills. He admitted that if he had closed Hustler after his conversion--rather than continue defending it in court--he might never have been shot, and he wouldn't be paralyzed today.

Up close and in person, rather than a hero, Flynt looks like just another casualty of porn, a man who's made millions but lost everything that counts, including his "soulmate" and much of his family.

All of this eventually resonated with me.

Lie after lie, I kept coming back to the faith whose truths had been proven over centuries: rules and values that built Western civilization, not because God is a god of arbitrary demands, but because "God so loved the world."

Sure, I also experienced some personal and professional disasters (it's surprising how low some of us have to go before finally surrendering).

But ultimately once I realized the truth, the inevitable question became--what do you do with it? Or "who do you say that I am?"

Some may question my decision to publish The History of Sex.

Well, all I can say is I prayed about it. A lot. And Larry Flynt was my fleece (but that's another story…)

For those of you who struggle to reconcile faith with the "real world" (particularly sex), take it from someone who's had to learn the hard way: the Truth really will set you free.

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Concocting the Oedipal Complex -- (Chapter VIII, Part 28)

What was novel about Freud's take on the Unconscious was his contention that people were ruled from infancy by their libidos.

Around the time that he was exculpating himself for having helped one friend to kill himself with cocaine and another to disfigure a patient, he claimed to remember that his own libido had been awakened towards his mother when he was roughly two years old.

Freud reckoned he'd made a journey with his mother to Vienna 'during which we must have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her nudam,' he told Fliess.

As if that weren't speculative enough, Freud then admitted that the inspiration for this was Fliess himself and his remark about his own young son supposedly having an erection after seeing his mother naked.

So Freud cobbled together a pseudo-memory of his own and a disparate anecdote from a colleague to concoct a grand unified theory of child sexuality.

Incredibly, Freud then congratulated himself for his candor.

'Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise,' he wrote, claiming that he realized he'd been in love with his mother and jealous of his father. 'I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.'

Eh?

To this day, there's no proof to support Freud's very specific claim that all boys aged two to three literally want to have sex with their mothers (or vice-versa little girls and their fathers).

Ironically, though, one reason that the Oedipus Complex has been accepted into popular mythology is because it ties in neatly with the old Christian view of sex and Original Sin: it's probably no coincidence that Freudianism took off in traditionally—or perhaps formerly—puritanical countries like England and America.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Freud's Scientific Fairy Tale -- (Chapter VIII, Part 27)

Nevertheless, when Freud confidently unveiled his 'seduction theory' to his peers just a few days before his fortieth birthday, he was expecting adulation for having discovered 'the source of the Nile' in neuropathology:

'The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth,' he recalled.

Instead, he was publicly humiliated.

by Doug Savage

The meeting was chaired by none other than Krafft-Ebing, who had documented cases of actual child abuse—and even come up with the name for the perversion: pedophilia.

The best he could say about the junior lecturer's thesis was: 'It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.'

Unable to accept his own failure, Freud told himself that he was a prophet ahead of his time and set about transforming his 'fairy tale' into a seductive fantasy.

Instead of claiming that his patients had suffered abuse as kids, he decided that all children fantasized about having sex with their parents.

He based this highly dubious 'universal truth' not on any truly empirical scientific research but on his pseudo-mystical ability to interpret dreams.

And it's his exploration of the Unconscious that Freud's apologists like to emphasize nowadays.

However, leaving aside the current doubts in neuroscience about whether such a thing even exists, Freud certainly wasn't the first to realize that people often acted without really understanding why.

As a (Christian) philosopher, Blaise Pascal, had put it two centuries earlier: 'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- 'Habemus Papam!' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 26)

The reason Fliess was able to lead Freud around by the nose, so to speak, was because his friend thought that he, too, was 'on the scent' of a world-changing discovery.

Building on Charcot's cockeyed theories about sex and hysteria, Freud tackled another ambiguous 'disease' that was all the rage at the time.

A doctor in the US had coined the term 'neurasthenia' to describe a general state of nervousness in modern society caused by factors ranging from rapid urbanization to, um, religious freedom.

But Freud declared to Fliess that the one and only cause of this neurosis (nicknamed 'Americanitis') was an abnormal sex life, specifically masturbation and coitus interruptus (predictably, Fliess thought that wanking also caused inflammation of the nose). 

Of course, onanism had long had a bad rap in Judeo-Christian culture—there was even a theory of 'masturbational insanity' at the time—but Freud managed to convince himself he was onto something new.

He began routinely interrogating his patients about their sexual habits and soon jumped to a truly shocking conclusion: all neurotics had been molested as children by their parents.

'Sending a a woman to a Freudian therapist
is not so far distant from sending a Jew to a Nazi.'
--Gloria Steinem

The myth created by Freud—and perpetuated to this day in books and museums—is that he deduced this from what his patients were telling him.

The reality, though, is that he prodded and bullied them into telling him what he wanted to hear, forcing them (in his own words) to focus on 'repressed sexual ideas in spite of all their protestations.'

A case in point involved a woman who supposedly had symptoms of hysteria: namely, a speech impediment, with cracks and eczema around her mouth.

BUSINESS RULE #1: NEVER PEEVE THE BILL-PAYER

Freud outlined his tortuous thinking, noting that both the patient and her father spoke as if their mouths were full.

'Habemus papam!' he exclaimed.

In what must be an early example of a Freudian slip, the doctor said he 'thrust the explanation at her.'

Much to the patient's surprise, and without any evidence whatsoever, Freud informed her that her dad had forced her to give him fellatio as a girl—and that was why she now had cracked lips and talked funny. 

Unfortunately, he noted, the woman then 'committed the folly of questioning the old man himself,' and her father swore he was innocent.

Most likely he swore a good deal at Freud, too.

The doctor quickly realized that although sex talk with women was good for business (and more pleasurable than he ever admitted), accusing the men who paid their bills of molesting them wasn't.

More importantly, Freud noted that his own siblings were also high-strung, raising inevitable questions about his own papam.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- It All Comes Together in the Sacher-Masoch Suite -- (Chapter VIII, Part 13)

So far, that seems premature.

Sacher-Masoch's house in Graz is now a place where people go to treat their ills; apparently, the pharmacy even has a plaque commemorating the author of Venus in Furs, but I'm too distracted by the billboard across the way advertising Der Venus Club, a girlie bar that takes its symbol from another Renaissance masterpiece—Botticelli's Birth of Venus (gold and silver plated)—and charges €75 for half an hour with a 'Top Girl' in themed rooms spanning Hollywood, Africa, Harlem… and, um, Britain. 

If only I'd known…

Instead, I've booked the 'Wanda Sacher-Masoch Suite' at a hotel in the center.

Leopold and Aurora used to dine at the Erzherzog Johann after the opera, so as part of the 2003 festival, the hotel's owners concocted a cake fit for masochists—the Sacher-Masoch Torte, natürlich (with layers of fruit and marzipan)—and dedicated a suite to the unhappy couple.

Its designer is the same Austrian woman who bullied the Pole for performance art, and the centerpiece is a large portrait of her posing as Wanda in the middle of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, right in front of Titian's Venus in Furs as well as his Ecce Homo/Christ Before Pilate.

Irene Andessner as Wanda

Now, this is all very exciting for me because the photo ties together Titian, his pornographer mate Aretino (as Pilate)...

...and the same saucy model from the Venus of Urbino...

...posing as Venus in Furs (aka The Woman in the Fur Coat)...

—plus an Austrian artist playing Sacher-Masoch's muse.

Irene Andessner's Wanda wears thigh-high boots, a corona and a satin-lined cloak with a massive train: the fake fur in the portrait is actually the bedspread of the four-poster in the Sacher-Masoch Suite.

Though the room's color scheme is predictable—black and white with red velvet features—it's the details that take the room gloriously over the top: the (somewhat disturbing) cameo of the artist as Wanda inside the bed's canopy—gloating over you while you sleep (or not)…

...the quote from Venus in Furs on the glass panels in the bathroom… the life-sized projection of Venus on the shower wall when the lights are dimmed… and the pièce de résistance: a Gideon's Bible next to the telephone.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pleasure-Seeking Pagans -- (Chapter VIII, Part 8)

Venus in Furs is a remarkably modern tale about a Galician nobleman who falls in love with a rich, young Russian and turns her into a sadist.

Severin and Wanda von Dunajew initially bond over their belief that the Christian world is corrupt; it's more honest to live as pleasure-seeking pagans.

Unlike many modern hedonists, though, they're realistic about 'the world of the ancients:'

'Pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand. People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish ponds, and gladiators who do battle while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters them.' 

As in his real-life fling with Fanny, Sacher-Masoch's alter ego in Venus in Furs adopts the common servant's name of Gregor and follows his Mistress to Italy, where she seduces a Greek.

Besides their contract, Wanda goes the extra mile by having Severin write a suicide note in case she opts to kill him.

Sure enough, the crueler she treats him, the more he worships her, especially when she's wearing fur.

'Furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures,' Severin explains. 'Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth… This is why cats exercise such a magic influence...'

'A woman wearing furs, then, is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?' 

'Certainly.'

You'll have guessed that the ending isn't warm and fuzzy: Severin is 'cured' by being whipped within an inch of his life; he then turns into a sadist himself.

Years later, the Galician tells a friend what he's learned: in love, a man 'has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman.'

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).