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 -- 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 -- The USSR's Bureau of Free Love -- (Chapter X, Part 3)

For his part, the 'Father of the Russian Revolution' appears to have been appalled by the other revolution he'd unwittingly conceived.

Lenin confided to a comrade that the 'the so-called new sexuality of our young people and adults alike often seems to be merely petty bourgeois, like a version of the fine old bourgeois institution of the brothel.'

Lenin himself ended his days chaste and childless—Stern reckons 'the Communist titan was in fact a sexual pygmy'—and his successor eventually forced the USSR to do a U-turn on its disastrous (and often contradictory) sex laws.

By encouraging copulation, the Bolsheviks had hoped to boost the population.

One of the letters in the Erotic Alphabet designed by
Soviet artist Sergey Merkurov in 1931,
supposedly to combat illiteracy

An early Communist decree in Vladimir had ruled that 'from the age of eighteen all young women are hereby declared to be the property of the state,' requiring them 'to register, on pain of the strictest prosecution, with the Bureau of Free Love.'

When it came to choosing a spouse, frisky Vladimirians were allowed to pick a new one each month, with any offspring deemed 'property of the state.'

Paradoxically, in 1920, the Soviet Union had also become the first major country since antiquity to legalize abortion, effectively making it the birth control of choice.

By 1934, the ratio of abortions to live births was three to two in the countryside—and three to one in Moscow.

With Stalin purging Soviets almost as fast as the proletariat could pump them out, however, the USSR soon outlawed abortion (and homosexuality) and scrapped 'divorce postcards' in favor of red tape and taxes.

By the end of World War Two, the government had started lauding heavy breeders as 'Heroine Mothers,' and a survivor of the gulag recalled that male and female prisoners in his camp were suddenly allowed to commingle; the resultant bastards were spirited away—to be trained as policemen.

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: Graz and Vienna -- 'To Kill What One Loves' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 11)

These farcical situations turned Sacher-Masoch's life into a tragedy.

Wanda left him for another man, and his second wife, Hulda, ended up having him committed.

According to Sacher-Masoch's biography (The First Masochist by James Cleugh, recommended to me by Finn in Lacoste), one day Hulda found the writer in his study with his favorite cat dead on his lap, ranting about how he'd had an urge to kill the Angora kitten while he was stroking it:

'Ah, to kill what one loves, Hulda! What appalling rapture! It is like killing oneself! To crush, tear, suffocate and destroy another's handiwork, to set the seal of death, of annihilation where God Himself has enthroned life!'

Predictably, he then had nightmares about cats getting their own back:

'I am being eaten alive! It's the cats—they're after me!'

And during the day, he resorted to ever more extreme remedies, including whips of hooks and nails, boiling poultices, red-hot needles, razors, and plenty of salt to rub into his wounds.

Officially, the renowned writer, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, died of heart failure in 1895, aged 59.

In reality, according to his biographer, he lived for another decade in a German insane asylum—ironically, in the hometown of Krafft-Ebing, the man who ensured his name would never be forgotten.

Leopold and Hulda

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- The Killjoy Capital of the World? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 6)

But if all this makes the Protestant Rome sound like the Killjoy Capital of the World, at the time it had the opposite image problem, thanks to exiles who slandered it 'as a cauldron of debauchery and lust,' according to one historian.

Besides all the frolicking among the defrocked, the Protestants' new marriage laws created the need for another innovation: divorce.

However, Calvin and Co. didn't sanction it as an easy way out.

Divorce was meant to free husbands and wives if their spouses were at fault, especially if they'd committed adultery—a crime punishable by death in Geneva.

Though that may seem a bit harsh (maybe it's just me), Calvin's draconian code was designed to defend the City of God's reputation abroad and quash sex scandals at home.

When it came to the latter, not even the Reformer was safe: Calvin himself helped prosecute his sister-in-law not once but twice for alleged hanky-panky under his very own roof.

Jean's brother, Antoine, and his wife, Anne, had lived for years in the Reformer's house in Geneva.

HUNCHBACK LOVE

In 1557, though, the Calvin brothers publicly accused Anne of having cheated on Antoine with a former employee who was also a hunchback—several witnesses had seen him pulling up his trousers after being alone with her.

What's more, Anne had previous: eight years earlier, the Calvins had hauled her up in court for consorting with a member of the bourgeoisie.

The young man admitted having tried to seduce her, but both he and Anne swore they hadn't had sex.

That trial had ended with Anne on her knees, begging forgiveness from the Calvins, who in turn accepted her apology.

When she brought them into disrepute again, though, they weren't so forgiving.

Anne's hunchbacked friend had fled, so she faced her interrogators alone.

Tortured at least twice with thumbscrews, she steadfastly denied adultery (and may well have been innocent), saving herself from the death penalty.

Instead, the judges banished her.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.

The History of Sex: South of France -- A (Relatively) Chaste Interlude (Chap. III, Pt. 1)

Chapter Three 

A (RELATIVELY) CHASTE INTERLUDE Romance and Celibacy in the South of France 

'To be always with a woman and not have intercourse is more difficult than to raise the dead.'

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, persecutor of the Cathars and venerator of the Virgin Mary, c1100 AD 

So where do we in the West get our notions of romance from?

A friend of mine has a theory. 'Jack' is a good decade older than me, and he was confessing how he'd put an entire continent (and ocean) between him and his wife.

But somehow, it wasn't enough. They've been married for over twenty years, plenty of time for their love to ferment into a sour mash of kids, bills and mutual recrimination.

Divorce is out of the question, partly because Jack can't afford it, but mainly because his wife is Irish Catholic.

'D'y'know why ye-olde poets used to write all that crap about romance?' he slurred into his beer. 'It's because the average age back then was 25. Most men didn't live long enough to see what love looks like when it has liver spots and cellulite.'

'They didn't have to put up with wives moaning "What about my needs? What about my Botox? What about the SUV to drive to the supermarket to buy food I can't even cook?" They didn't have to deal with that, did they? Lucky bastards.'

You'll have gathered that Jack was having a midlife crisis.

Buffoon Playing a Lute by Frans Hals

Anachronisms aside, though, I wondered if he didn't have a point.

Whereas the Islamic East enjoyed polygamy—at least the men did—the Christian West begrudgingly sanctioned sex as a reproductive necessity.

A Muslim man might have four wives and a slew of 'favorites,' but a Christian was meant to have just one spouse his entire life: ideally, his soulmate.