The History of Sex: Prague -- 'I Don't Do Porn' -- (Chapter X, Part 32)

But John's unimpressed.

One woman in particular is an affront to his aesthetics: a blonde with collagen injections and perfectly formed fake breasts.

'She's plastic,' he frowns. 'I like my girls fresh off the farm. Ohhhh naturell.'

The Goldfingers logo

He perks up, though, as a black-haired girl with dark eyes and caramel skin returns to the stage.

She's got the mischievous, dimpled grin of the girl next door—the cheeky tomboy you played with as a kid—but the body of a woman who's all grown-up now.

John's sure she's aiming her seductive charms right at him. 'She knows me. Her name's Adriana. I met her two weeks ago through Tarra White—'

—the star of Dude, Your Girlfriend Is In a Porno! 3 and Meet the Fuckers 5, in case you're wondering—

'—she was trying to convince her to do porn, but I told her not to. If a girl has never done porn, I tell her it'll fuck up her life. No man will want her, so she won't be able to have children. Czech girls don't always realize the consequences.'

That doesn't sound like the John I know, but Adriana does seem to recognize him as she trawls the tables afterwards offering lap dances.

She confirms to him that she doesn't do porn. She may dress up like a nun, strip to a Gregorian chant, writhe around onstage and finger another dancer while engaging in simulated or actual oral sex, but she definitely doesn't do porn. 'I have a boyfriend.'

'Does he mind you doing this?'

Adriana's surprised that I should ask. 'No. We're getting married next year.'

John seems somewhat embarrassed as he escorts me and my faux paus out of the club.

'Czech men don't mind their girlfriends doing this,' he explains. 'But for us Westerners, it's different.' 

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Another Kind of Christmas Market -- (Chapter X, Part 31)

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The History of Sex: Prague -- 'A Lot of Clients Don't Like Stretchmarks' -- (Chapter X, Part 30)

'Well, how was it?' my 'friend' leers afterwards, sitting alone in the bar. (Martina's off screwing another john.)

'She was gorgeous.'

'Were you happy with the service?'

'Yeah. She was gorgeous.'

That's my line, and I'm sticking to it.

And anyway, John pretty much fills in the rest of my hour for me: 'Did she give you a shower? Was she enthusiastic? Because some of them just lie there. Was she shaved? They're very clean, don't you think?'

I nod knowingly.

'What was the name of that girl again? Linda? I'll have to remember her: Twenty-four. Lives in Prague. No kids—and no scars or anything?'

I couldn't say, but the best answer is probably no.

'Good. No stretchmarks. A lot of clients don't like that.'

Sweet Paradise club: Catering to pigs

I can't help but feel sleazy. Just one night of this warps me; maybe that's what happened to the nice guy John used to be.

At my insistence, though, we round out the night by returning to Wenceslaus Square and an upscale strip club that used to be a Communist hangout.

Ladislav Bittman told me he took the KGB's chief of disinformation to the Alhambra during a night on the town in 1965, joking that by leaving their panties on, the girls had performed a 'socialist striptease.'

But even that was too decadently Czech for the visiting Soviet. 'During the first break indicated he was ready to return to the embassy.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'No Kissing and No Licking' -- (Chapter X, Part 29)

After collecting a towel at the bar, Linda leads me down a dark passageway past the beach hut, another Christmas tree and the fake fireplace in the back bar.

The red bedroom is fitted with a blue light that makes the white sheet glow eerily as she lays it on the bed.

Linda points toward the cubicle in the corner and asks if I want a shower.

Instead, I tell her I just want to talk. Maybe it's my pride, my upbringing or fear of the Latin South African, but I don't ask her to fulfill her side of the bargain.

'Is it true that most girls save kissing for their boyfriends?' I ask.

'You have to have something to make different between work and love. No kissing and no licking.' 

'Licking?'

Naïf that I am, I imagine some guy trying to lick her face.

She points between her legs. 'No licking here.'

Ohhh.

Linda claims she's studied economics but went on the game after getting into debt.

She's worked in clubs for a total of two years now, taking month-long breaks at a time.

'This work is very difficult for your mind. For many people, Prague is a big city. But for me, in this work, it is very small. Sometimes I see clients on the tram and I have to hide to make sure they don't see me. Many people like to live in Prague, but I would like to go back to my village to live.'

And marry and have kids?

'Yes. Someday.'

But not to a foreigner.

'Because when you divorce, he might take the kids to his country,' she reasons. 'Your friend wants to make photos of me for erotic modeling, but that is different from this job. I do this job for money. But photos, anybody can see. When I'm finished with this, the chapter is closed.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Pervy Pidgin -- (Chapter X, Part 28)

Determined to pimp me, in effect, he asks me to pick the hottest whores in the joint.

I nod towards a sultry pair who look like they don't want to be here, either.

'I'm starting to like brunettes, too,' he agrees quickly. 'With dark hair and skin—that gypsy kind of look.'

I don't know what he's talking about—I wouldn't recognize a gypsy unless she had a headscarf and crystal ball—but there's no doubt the two girls are gorgeous—especially the one with the butterscotch hair and matching eyes.

John's more than happy to invite her over for a drink, informing me that her name's Linda and she's twenty-four.

'She's nice—and she's got big tits!'

He's more than happy to say this to her face, lavishing praise on her cleavage the moment she joins us, telling her in pervy pidgin how much he'd love to take photos of her for 'erotic modeling.'

And it's at precisely this point that I begin to feel sorry for her.

She obviously resents the degradation but needs the money, and here's this creep trying to wear her down even though she's said no.

So I decide to get her alone.

And the most obvious way to do that in a brothel—while also getting a peek at the rooms—is to buy an hour of Linda's time.

The going rate is about 2,400 crowns—not even $100.

The History of Sex: Prague -- I Blame Gauguin -- (Chapter X, Part 27)

Noting my discomfort, John reckons we should double back to a place called Sweet Paradise, yet another oasis of kitsch in a concrete desert, a pseudo-tropical bar burrowed into a wintry grey street.

Not for the first time on my journey, I can't help but wonder: why do sex clubs have to be so tacky? Why do plastic palm trees and Pavlovian neon signal SEX to the male psyche?

Personally, I blame Gauguin, the artsy stockbroker who ditched his day job in Paris for a life of getting laid in paradise.

Unfortunately, he took his syphilis with him, sharing it with the fourteen-year-olds he purchased with sweets and alcohol until his running sores made him so repulsive even the poorest Tahitians wouldn't touch him.

Paul Gauguin's portrait of Tehura, his 14-year-old 'wife'
in Spirit of the Dead Watching

His paintings, now in every major gallery on the planet, are like The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse: immortalizing an innocent sexual Eden, whereas the reality was sordid and syphilis-ridden, thanks to colonialist cretins like him.

Since Gauguin, the tiki-plasticky look has been the décor de rigueur of dodgy clubs and cocktail bars around the world.

In its own way, Sweet Paradise, promising 'luxurious ambience and almost family atmosphere,' is more surreal—and depressing—than anything Kafka ever dreamt up.

Outside, it's Christmas in the Old Country; inside, it's the Land of the Yuletide Luau, with a full-scale beach hut in the corner adorned with a snowman and accompanying conifer.

A dozen prostitutes sit drinking and smoking on the ledge lining the lounge, facing the few men on hand with expressions ranging from bored apprehension to fabricated lust.

John reckons he's getting the evil eye from the Queen of the Brothel, a pretty enough twenty-year-old, though her hair's so bleached you wonder if it's fallen out in clumps and been superglued back onto her head.

'She's one of the most popular girls here. Clients end up feeling sorry for her,' he laughs. 'She doesn't want to be here. She's got a kid.'

John knows this because he and Martina used to be an item.

'To have someone who you liked as a boyfriend, and who kind of liked you as a girlfriend, pimping you—well, it's not very nice.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Skanka, Hasbeenka and Nothankya -- (Chapter X, Part 26)

Our next stop is a suburban house-turned-brothel that's owned by Russians and run by a sour Romanian.

'It's interesting what they've done with the place,' John remarks.

That's one way of looking at it.

What was once the front room of the house is now a bar, and the large sitting room is lined with cracked, fake-leather couches and Klimt prints.

The nook in the corner where the TV might have been is now home to a live entertainment system: a small dancefloor with mirrors on three sides and a pole in the middle.

The hookers make their entrances and exits via the sliding patio door.

John highly recommends a blonde in a black catsuit named Christina.

'She charges 6,400 crowns for nine hours. You can't beat that anywhere,' he says, stroking the back of her arm. 'That's about two hundred euros.'

'Two hundred and twenty-five euros,' she corrects him.

Or just £17 an hour (around $25).

'She's one of the best in Prague. She's really enthusiastic and lots of fun.'

Frankly, she'd have to have enough enthusiasm for both of us.

Ditto the girls at a couple other dives.

I'll spare you the one where the strippers are so uncomely they don't even dare take their tops off and skip straight to the basement joint where the head whore supposedly insists on the manager shagging her every day; otherwise, she and the other girls will walk.

Sadly, Vanessa's not here tonight.

So John introduces me to Lenka and her co-workers, Skanka, Hasbeenka and Nothankya.

A tall redhead with a big nose and small chin, Lenka's gussied up in black lingerie and walks with a stoop, as if her suspenders are too tight.

A price list from one of the clubs

According to John, Lenka started her career on a non sequitur: she was so keen to lose her virginity, she decided to become a prostitute.

She's now fallen in love with a British john named Nicholas, after the patron of Christmas and whores.

When ol' Nick came back for more jollies, however, Lenka told him she wouldn't sleep with him again—because she loved him.

He promptly left for London, and she's been texting him ever since.

'Half the girls get into this business because they want to find a boyfriend or a husband,' John claims.

Indeed, Lenka goes gooey-eyed at the mention of Nicholas, tilting her head and clasping her heart... while rubbing a gartered leg against my thigh.

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 -- 'They're Really Nice and Feminine Like That' -- (Chapter X, Part 24)

Which is probably true.

But many of his other observations are far more controversial.

'I come from the Land of Ugly Women,' he announces. 'It's all plastic.'

Apparently his American clients are the second easiest to please—surpassed only by the British.

'British girls are brutish. They're the ugliest I've ever seen. I was expecting Mary Poppins, and they come over and shout'—he affects an accent that would make Dick Van Dyke cringe—'"Where's the pub?!?" With my English clients, it's like they've been eating out of a garbage can their whole lives, and suddenly they're being treated to a gourmet meal.'

Not just a modern phenomenon:
Mug shots of an Edwardian ladette,
complete with tattoos (True Love K.B. on her back left arm)
and a drink problem
(The Daily Mail)

John keeps going on about how gorgeous Czech strippers are, but I keep doing double-takes to make sure they aren't transvestites. Something about the way they sculpt their make-up makes them look oddly hard and masculine.

Call me paranoid, but any woman who needs to dye and paint herself that much must be hiding something.

The fact that most of the strippers don't remove their G-strings isn't reassuring, either.

However, John swears the girls are 100% woman.

'Czech women get their sense of self-esteem from male attention. If they don't have a boyfriend, they think they're the lowest of the low—they're really nice and feminine like that,' he says blithely.

'They find it very hard to take a compliment. If you tell them they're beautiful and then touch their arms or their backs, they'll actually break out in a sweat.'

Maybe 'cause pervy strangers give them the creeps.

But John fancies himself a connoisseur.

As a redhead with a six-pack cedes the pole to a blonde with a belly, he gabbles appreciatively about the latter's perfectly formed breasts: 'The shape here is very good. B to C cups—those are typically Czech breasts; the larger sizes, D and up, are rarer.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Hail, the Emperor of Perversion! -- (Chapter X, Part 23)

To keep a safe distance, one of John's ideas is to set himself up as a 'broker'—the respectable term for pimp, I believe—catering to men who will pay big money to bone a bona fide porn star.

Again, this seems ingenious, offering women extra revenue in these hard times.

Not so long ago, he tells me, a woman could make €20,000 for one porn-movie shoot; now it's just five to seven hundred, simply because so many women are willing to have sex on film.

'It's getting nasty now because there's no money.'

John says this in a hole-in-the-wall, pole-in-the-floor kind of place just off Wenceslaus Square where the manageress and most of the girls know him.

The strippers are lounging around, taking turns on the little dance square, even though we're the only men here.

'It's Christmas,' the manageress shrugs.

'Enjoy your own fairy tale!'

John leans back in the red-upholstered booth, spreading his arms to enjoy the view, the good fortune of his first-world provenance making him a virtual aristocrat.

The woman on the pole—or is it a stick?—jiggles her breasts at him—hail, the Emperor of Perversion! 

He waggles his eyebrows in return.

'The Czech girls typically move very well. They really feel the rhythm.'

'Your clients must think you've got the best job in the world,' I observe.

'That's right,' he grins. 'Want to be in porn movies? I've done that. Want to pimp girls? I've done that. I'm the candyman! The doctor! The love broker!'

Or, you may think, a forty-year-old loser leeching off the less fortunate—a 'social parasite' if ever there was one.

But in the capitalist Czech Republic, this American newcomer is classed as an 'entrepreneur,' a glamorous term imported from the West to cover any legion of sins.

In person, though, the overriding impression you get is that deep down he's a gentle soul who somehow got twisted along the way.

Whether it was his divorce from an American after a decade ('she turned real arrogant') or all that internet porn or his celluloid stint as a flesh-and-blood dildo, he comes across as profoundly damaged, as much a slave as the master of his urges.

Having gone through fifty girls when he came here, he's tried to stop mixing business with pleasure because of his addictive personality.

'I'm too soft-hearted,' he reckons. 'I fall in love with all the girls. Whenever I'm around them, it's intoxicating—like a drug. They're too pretty for me.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'There's No Trafficking Here' -- (Chapter X, Part 22)

As a middleman of minge, then, John aims to ensure that other foreign johns don't get fleeced.

Although this might seem like a cunny plan, he says it's been 'fucking hard' because the Czechs just don't understand business.

'They'd rather see their clubs fail than make changes. And when they do fail, they blame it on the Russian mafia.'

Which doesn't exist, by the way—just like there's no such thing as female trafficking in Prague (no matter what the UN, countless aid agencies, and the police say).

'There's no trafficking here. Not at all. That's just something made up by the newspapers. They write stories in media to sell newspapers,' John claims, lapsing into the laborious pidgin he uses with Czechs to emphasize key words.

Sex trafficking? What sex trafficking?
Ladislav Burina and Angelika Bacan were convicted in the UK
for trafficking two Czech women to work as prostitutes
(The Prague Post) 

To his credit, in a city stuffed with monolingual expats, John is attempting to learn Czech, having left California a little over a year ago.

'I'm never going back,' he says. 'I love it here!'

In a way, he loved it even before coming here, having admired Czech women from afar—via the Internet—while working in IT and marketing.

Since then, John's been living the porn-geek dream, doing IT for a porn company in Prague until he decided one day he'd actually like to do it in front of the cameras.

A porn star was born, apparently.

'I could have sex for two hours without any problem. Not many guys could do that. But I'd been married for ten years, so it was no problem for me.'

John's thespian aspirations soon flagged, though: he fell in love with every actress he screwed.

'The female porn stars turn vain,' he tells me. 'You wouldn't think it, but they do.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- A Little Night's Whoremongering -- (Chapter X, Part 21)

Aptly enough, my guide goes by the nom de screw of 'John.'

With the face of a pug and the body of a bulldog, he could be any nationality.

Come to think of it, he's got the blend-in-ability of a good spook—he even picked me up in the cobbled Old Town, lurking under a streetlamp like a character out of a spy novel.

OK, well, not this character
George Lazenby hamming it up as James Bond

The moment he opens his mouth, though, he's all matter-of-fact American, rattling off our schedule as if it were a ten-point marketing plan rather than the itinerary for a little night's whoremongering. 

John charges just over €100 (around $130) for his VIP Brothel Tour, including entrance fees, cheap drinks and his questionable translation skills.

'If you want to be with a woman, I can talk to her and tell her how beautiful she is and get her warmed up.'

The tour runs for six hours and takes in at least four brothels ('depending on your stamina'). 

'YOU CAN EXPECT SOME LIES... THIS IS NOT TRUE'

Ironically, despite Prague's status as Europe's Sex Central, there's no centralized sex district in the Czech capital.

Wenceslaus Square and its sidestreets host some of the glitzier establishments—one 'cabaret' has a mannequin in a Santa cap perched over the door—but Prague's carnal side is far less visible than that of its Western counterparts. Four decades of Communism effectively snuffed out the red-light district.

For foreigners who don't speak Czech, this can make it hard to sniff out sexual bargains.

Throw in the perils of clip joints and taxi scams, and, well, it's a Slavic jungle out there.

In fact, the abuses are so bad one club has taken to stating on its flyers, in perfect doublespeak:

'WE DON'T PAY COMMISSION FOR TAXI DRIVERS, SO YOU CAN EXPECT SOME LIES OR BAD COMMENTARY ABOUT OUR PLACE. BE SURE, THIS IS NOT TRUE.'

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 -- Bliss Without Risk? -- (Chapter X, Part 19)

At present, though, you could be forgiven for mistaking the modern 'heart of Europe' for its throbbing groin.

The Czech Republic ranks not only as one of the world's biggest sources of trafficked women (and children) but also a major destination and transit country, with 'Romeo spies' having been replaced by 'loverboy' pimps who seduce girls into prostitution.

And whereas a British prime minister once betrayed Czechoslovakia to the Nazis by calling it 'a small country about which we know nothing,' nowadays hordes of British, German and American tourists fly into Prague to get to know it in the Biblical sense.

FROM BIG BROTHER TO BIG SISTER

Many aid agencies work from the premise that the sex trade is simply a fact of life.

'Bliss Without Risk' is a catchy name, but it seems an odd choice for a group trying to help prostitutes (surely most of the 'bliss' they encounter is male-oriented).

In its fight against sex diseases, the charity distributes comic books that are so graphic, they could be called 'How to Be a Whore,' complete with pictures of infected penises and blowjobs, handjobs and hotdogging.

Meanwhile, would-be prostitutes have a plethora of job opportunities, including specialist agencies like 'Oral Without Condom' and a club that's put a postmodern twist on the Big Brother sexpionage of yore: at the BigSister brothel, punters pay a cover fee of €10 for toiletries, but the sex is free—provided they sign a contract allowing BigSister to broadcast the video footage on the World Wide Web.

One client in 2008 was a lardy socialist from Scotland, a former candidate for the Solidarity party.

'Yes I did it,' he told The News of the World, 'but I was drunk.'

In other words, sex is so cheap in Prague, they're virtually giving it away.

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: Graz and Vienna -- Anna Freud, Guinea Pig -- (Chapter VIII, Part 33)

As feted as he was at his death, though, Freud's legacy climaxed after the war.

His nephew taught his clients, namely the White House and major multinationals, to 'engineer consent' by appealing to the irrational sides of consumers.

Politically, this was meant to keep the masses in check and the Commies at bay. (Goebbels, Hitler's propagandist, had also hailed Bernays as an inspiration.)

By constantly stimulating people's irrational sides, though, companies conditioned them to behave more irrationally.

Consumers no longer looked to advertisements mainly for information but for entertainment.

Here we are now
entertain us

And as admen increasingly used sex to sell consumer goods, they created the modern concept of sex as a consumer good.

Meanwhile, Freud's daughter Anna was trying to set the world straight by re-educating the masses in America.

Unfortunately, she was profoundly screwed up herself.

As a young woman, Anna had been psychoanalyzed—not by one of Freud's colleagues—but by her father, whose analysis inevitably focused on sex.

Freud secretly used his favorite daughter as a guinea pig to develop his theories on masochism.

Without acknowledging that she was the subject in question (or her father the analyst), Anna later wrote a paper on 'Beating Fantasies and Daydreams' that told of a girl who'd supposedly fantasized about incest with her father, which then led to fantasies about being beaten when she was five or six years old.

And whenever she dreamt of being beaten, she would masturbate (not for nothing is it called 'beating off').

However, given Freud's dodgy ethics and obsession with sex, it's very likely that he planted these fantasies in the mind of his impressionable young daughter.

Anna admitted as much, noting in her paper that 'the girl never gave any detailed account of any individual scene of beating… which left to the analyst the task of completing and reconstructing a picture of the original situation.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Why We're All Freudians Now -- (Chapter VIII, Part 32)

But perhaps the main reason 'we're all Freudians now' is because of the insidious way his doctrines conquered America—and consequently, the rest of the world.

A must-see BBC series called The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis starts off by profiling the man who founded PR. Edward Bernays also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Born in Vienna in 1891, his family emigrated to New York, where Bernays made his name drumming up public support for the US to enter World War One.

When postwar inflation wiped out much of Uncle Sigmund's savings, Freud wrote to his nephew for help, and Bernays arranged for his works to be published in America.

A SUBSTITUTE PENIS?

While hyping his uncle and making him palatable to the public, Bernays also capitalized on his theories, advising corporations on how to convince people to buy things they didn't need.

Aptly enough, one of his first big commercial breaks used Freud's misogynistic notion of penis envy to harm women: he convinced them to smoke.

'Today, legally, politically and socially, 
womanhood stands in her true light. 
AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE has cast aside the ancient prejudice that held her to be inferior.
Gone is that ancient prejudice against cigarettes...'

Up until then, smoking was still taboo for American women.

So Bernays consulted one of his uncle's acolytes, who told him—you guessed it—that cigarettes were phallic symbols.

To get women to smoke, Bernays needed to get them to viewing cigarettes as symbols of power—et voila! they would have their very own penis substitutes.

Of course, a cigarette is no more phallic than an ice-cream cone: in fact, it probably has more dis-similarities than similarities to a penis. I, for one, wouldn't want a woman to try and light mine with a match.

Nevertheless, Bernays engineered a maiden 'media event' in 1929: he tipped off the press that some women's rights activists were planning to light up during a New York parade; in reality, the photogenic young flappers were debutantes hired by Bernays.

The scam worked, and the media parroted his line that the 'suffragettes'' smokes were actually 'Torches of Freedom.'

'...Progress has been made.
We removed the prejudice against cigarettes
when we removed from the tobacco harmful corrosive ACRIDS.
Thus "TOASTING" has destroyed that ancient prejudice
against cigarette smoking by men and by women.'

Somewhat ironically—female cancer victims might even say deservedly—it was Uncle Sigmund's own nicotine habit that ultimately killed him.

Freud relied on the steady buzz of at least twenty cigars a day for literary inspiration, eventually contracting cancer of the jaw.

After the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Freud's high-placed friends and fortune enabled him to escape to London, where he fulfilled his wish to 'die in freedom' at the age of eighty-three.

Or have we?
A cigarette ad, c1971

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Freud Sells Out -- (Chapter VIII, Part 29)

The sinister twist that Freudianism put on child sexuality is that it inverted traditional taboos against incest that were almost always targeted against adults.

In fact, there's a convincing argument that Freudian guff about babies being 'anal-sadistic' and wanting to consume and destroy their mother's breasts is nothing more than adults 'projecting' their own hang-ups onto innocent victims.

LastKissInc.com

Thanks to Freud and his disciples, it became possible for pedophiles to claim that the toddlers they abused were gagging for it.

Even worse, Freud's dogmatic view that children fantasized about being seduced by their parents led generations of his followers to dismiss actual cases of sex abuse as mere wishful fantasies.

Freud himself remained convinced to the end.

'If psychoanalysis could boast of no other achievement than the discovery of the repressed Oedipus Complex,' he wrote, 'that alone would give it a claim to be included among the precious new acquisitions of mankind.'

Before his retirement, Krafft-Ebing was kind enough to support Freud's quest for a professorship, though he was markedly ambivalent, noting that it was too early to judge the 'import' of his work: 'It is possible that Freud overrates these (findings) and generalizes his discoveries too far. In any event, his researches are evidence of unusual talent and the ability to direct scientific investigations into new pathways.'

Nevertheless, at forty-five, Freud still wasn't a full-fledged professor.

'So I made up my mind to break with strict virtue and take appropriate steps, as other humans do,' he told Fliess. He persuaded a couple of influential patients to pull strings for him with the Minister of Education, and Freud soon found himself promoted to respectability as a university professor.

'The old world is ruled by authority, as the new is by the dollar,' he concluded. 'I have made my first bow to authority and so may hope to be rewarded.'

Thus Freud's fame and fortune coincided with the beginning of the twentieth century: his selling out began the modern era of 'sex sells.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Born This Way? -- (Chapter VIII, Part 14)

While casting around for info about the home of masochism, I found a reference to Graz on a whoremongers' website.

The businessman writing the review said he'd had a few hours to kill en route to Munich, so rather than read a book, go to a museum or do anything productive with his time, he decided to do something anti-reproductive: he went to a whorehouse.

Having ordered himself a Thai, he offered her €200 ($270) 'for fucking and pissing into her mouth… She reluctantly agreed for three hundred. I pissed, she even swallowed some, but was not enthusiastic.'

And rrrrrrrrriipppp!

Off went another layer of innocence from my psyche.

Of course, I knew about 'golden showers' and the like—Lena had a girlfriend aroused by the sight of defecation; she used to a sit under a glass coffee table to watch, raising an obvious question about friends and enemas.

But what kind of cretin expects a complete stranger to swallow his waste with a smile?

Ah, the innocence...

The typical reaction to this is to spout the relativist view that such vices have always existed and always will.

But Krafft-Ebing's work makes you wonder whether the percentage of kinksters has actually increased over the past century.

In other words, are there more 'perverts' now than there used to be? 

SEX AND CONSUMERISM

To try to find out, I phoned Krafft-Ebing's Dutch biographer before coming here.

'I think it has to do with opportunity,' Professor Harry Oosterhuis told me. 'I don't believe in a kind of essentialist sex drive. Sexual drive and desires are also recognized and realized because you have the opportunity and possibility of developing them. If you have no examples around you, perhaps you wouldn't get the idea.'

'What I know of a lot of people in Amsterdam is that they experiment. People start from heterosexuality to also experiment with bisexuality and homosexuality. They start to develop a fetish. They might be involved in S&M because there are S&M parties. It has to do with lifestyle, with consumerism, with people wanting to do something with their fantasies and having the opportunity because we live in quite a liberal and affluent society in which you can realize lifestyles.'

Notably, almost all of Krafft-Ebing's case histories came from the upper classes.

'You find very few laborers. And this sexual culture that was already there and was very elitist has simply been democratized after the Second World War.'

Defend Buttman? You're Not a Liberal, You're a Libertarian

From the archive: 2010

The trial of 'Buttman' in our nation's capital shows just how confused many self-styled liberals are about porn.

For those without sphincter fixations, John Stagliano is the porn mogul who's arguably done more than anyone to popularize anal sex among heterosexuals.

Toward the end of the last century, Stagliano spotted, well, a gap in the market and cast himself as Buttman, a sniggerworthy alter ego who not only sodomized women but also pioneered forms of exploitation that are now routine in the porn repertoire. 

The success of his Evil Angel outfit--and the fact that society tolerated it--inspired established porn players to follow in his fetishistic footsteps, creating what has become, quite literally, a 'race to the bottom.'

As one of Stagliano's porn allies in LA told me while I was researching The History of Sex: 'Back in the early Nineties, (anal sex) wasn't rare, but it was like a step up from normal porn. Now it's kind of almost normal, because with the sex business, you gotta keep ratcheting up.'

'It's kinda like violence in movies. People get inured at a certain point—it's gotta be more, greater, nastier. Filthier.'

Buttman is HIV positive -- as is his porn star wife
(thankfully, their nine-year-old daughter is negative)

In the People v. Buttman case, Stagliano faced up to 32 years in prison on obscenity charges, but the judge threw out the case on technicalities. 

Bizarrely, throughout the proceedings, many so-called liberals parroted the same clichés used in Stagliano's defense: consenting adults… their own privacy… First Amendment… freedom of speech… yadda, yadda, yadda.

But if you think there's anything liberal about supporting or tolerating porn, chances are 1) you don't know how hardcore it's become or 2) you have a vested interest in the industry.

Stagliano, for instance, is renowned for pioneering 'asshole milkshakes' and 'ATMs' ('ass-to-mouths'), in which women are not only subjected to anal sex but induced to swallow the ejaculate, thereby tasting their own feces.

And if you can tolerate that, here's a sample of the dialogue from Milk Nymphos, an Evil Angel video that was played to the court, as cited by a local paper.

'One of the female performers repeatedly refers to her male co-star as a "nigger," declaring, for example, "Come on, you nigger, fuck me in the ass," and imploring the other female performer to "look in his eyes when you suck his nigger cock."'

True liberalism holds that we're all in this together: that what I do has an impact on my fellow human beings, and if I see someone being exploited or treated unjustly, it's my duty to do everything in my power to help them.

That's why so many of the early liberals--not least Nonconformist women--fought to regulate porn and prostitution.

Libertarianism is almost the exact opposite, a kind of rabid conservatism that's perverted the American Dream.

Libertarians like Stagliano believe they should be free to make a buck any way they see fit unless the law can stop them.

In their twist on history, they'd have us believe that George Washington and his boys were eating their boots at Valley Forge so that centuries later, Buttman & Co. could get rich by degrading women for money.

Sure enough, one of Stagliano's media defenders was a research fellow at the DC-based Cato Institute, a group with the lofty-sounding ideals of promoting 'individual liberty, free markets and peace'.

In reality, it's a libertarian thinktank that thought nothing of taking Buttman's money.

If you want to proclaim the Buttman trial as a victory for free speech, then go ahead: that's your right.

But please: don't call yourself a liberal.

***