The History of Sex: Berlin -- A Jumped-Up Chicken Farmer -- (Chapter IX, Part 12)

To justify the murders of so many loyal Nazis, Hitler backed up his prefabricated charges of treason by denouncing Röhm as a homosexual and declaring that gays would be expelled from the Party.

On the first anniversary of the purge, the Nazis reinforced Paragraph 175, revising it for the first time in its history.

The new law enabled the Gestapo to arrest gay men not just for 'unnatural acts'—namely, sodomy—but also any 'sex offences,' including hugging and having homosexual fantasies.

TIME TO RUN

By this time, the Nazis' Communist arch-enemies had also turned against homosexuality.

Ironically, Soviet media called it a 'manifestation of Fascist bourgeois degeneracy' and exhorted Communists to 'exterminate homosexuality and Fascism will disappear.'

In hindsight, for gays, this was definitely the time to run.

Whereas Hitler's artistic bent led him to view homosexuality as a sort of supremely bad habit for the master race, the man he put in charge of hunting gays was an animal breeder who believed they were genetic degenerates.

A jumped-up chicken farmer turned head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler took Darwinism and 'survival of the fittest' to its logical extreme.

He established the Lebensborn—or Fount of Life—to encourage 'biologically fit' Aryan men and women to reproduce (and provide maternity care for Teutonic prostitutes), while also telling his generals that the ancient German practice of drowning a homosexual in a bog 'was no punishment, merely the extinction of an abnormal life.'

Himmler condemned convicted gays to Level Three concentration camps, described by one historian as 'human death mills reserved for Jews and homosexuals.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- The Problem With Being 'Born That Way' -- (Chapter IX, Part 7)

Whereas buggery had been legal in France since the Enlightenment, gay sex was still very much against the law in Germany.

An effeminate lawyer from Hannover was possibly the first man to 'come out' in the modern sense of the term.

In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published The Riddle of Male-Male Love, expounding his theory that homosexuals belonged to a congenitally different 'third sex' that deserved the same rights as the other two.

Ulrichs argued that the male homosexual had the disposition of a woman in a man's body—a precursor of the modern 'gay gene' theory, in the sense that he believed sexual 'inverts' didn't choose to be 'perverts;' they were born that way.

But it's not that simple...

In retrospect, the major problem with the third-sex argument was that it was based on false assumptions.

At the time, even the most forward-thinking scientists believed that men were naturally promiscuous and women passive; that was the only way to hold civilization together.

'If a woman is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small,' Krafft-Ebing wrote. 'If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel, and marriage and a family impossible.'

Hmm…

Confronted with the Rigid-v.-Frigid division, you can see why many men (and women) must have felt like misfits, simply because they didn't conform to either stereotype.

With his third-sex theory, Ulrichs tried to win the public over by contending that homosexuality was entirely natural.

Unfortunately, after Darwin, the claim that homosexuals were biologically distinct could also be used to justify their extermination.

'Precious' the Neanderthal and Caveman Nookie

From the archive: 2010

It's been a big year for Neanderthals, with the latest revelations being that they had 'Popeye-like arms.'

What struck me, though, is the equally cartoonish image of a Neanderthal striking a sensitive pose, reminiscent of Rodin's Thinker.

Discovery

That's not science; that's make-believe. I think they should call him 'Precious.' 

NEANDERTHAL NOOKIE

Earlier in year, a study argued that there's a little Neanderthal in most of us.

Scientists claim to have found traces of Neanderthal genes in modern DNA after studying nearly 2,000 people from around the world.

That can mean only one thing: homo sapiens had sex with their supposed evolutionary inferiors. ‘This is not what we expected to find,' says Jeffrey Long, a genetic anthropologist at the University of New Mexico who led the study.

Maybe not, but I get extremely skeptical when scientists start talking about the prehistoric past.

One thing I've learned in writing The History of Sex is just how little we know about the past 3,000 years of ‘known' history, let alone the past 300,000 of prehistory.

And all joking aside, research like this inevitably causes people to question whether some groups might be more ‘Neanderthal' than others.

Sure enough, here's the first message on the comment boards:

‘I have always wondered if Basques, which are known to have striking differences in the frequency of blood groups and the form of the skull from the rest of the European population could not be such a population,' writes one Jacques Lerin. ‘I do not mean to be offensive in anyway...'

Offensive? Surely not.

Now if we could just prove that Neanderthals knew how to make bombs...

***

Let's Talk About Sects, Baby

From the archive: 2010

Will the religious inherit the earth?

Apparently so, according to an article in The New Humanist, 'the magazine for free thinkers' (so long as they think like we do).

Sorry, I added that last bit in.

Editor Caspar Melville features the work of American political scientist Eric Kaufman, who's written a book called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?

'Kaufmann is arguing that the secularisation thesis, the assumption that modernity leads inexorably to a lessening of religious belief and a day when we are all rational humanists, is wrong...'

'Further, he is saying that there is something about our current form of liberal secularism that contains (here's another headline) the seeds of its own destruction.'

'Since the birth rate of individualistic secular people the world over is way below replacement level (2.1 in the west), and the birth rate of religious fundamentalists is way above (between 5 and 7.5, depending on the sect), then through the sheer force of demography religious fundamentalism is going to become a much bigger force in the world and gain considerable political muscle.'

'Literalist religious conservatism is being reborn, and we secular liberals are the midwives.'

They have to be carefully taught:
'Secular Baby' by Martin Rowson
for The New Humanist

By 2050, Kaufmann projects that:

• Israel will be mostly Orthodox Jewish (Haredi). 
• America will still be more 'religious' than Europe, though slightly more secular than it is now, with the non-religious portion of the population plateauing at about 17% versus 14% now. 
• Mormons will displace Jews as the third-biggest religious group in America (and Muslims will be fourth, pushing Jews to fifth; I'm guessing that Protestants and Catholics will stay at numbers one and two). 
• Europe won't quite be 'Eurabia,' but Muslims will make up 10-15% of the population in countries like Germany, France and the UK. 

WHY ATHEISTS? 

Unfortunately, neither Kaufmann nor Melville make much distinction between religions: they seem to think they're all equally delusional.

But it's notable that humanism has its roots in Christianity. Even the word 'secular' comes from the Church. 

And while non-Christian, secular 'new humanists' wonder why 'fundamentalists' are winning the 'battle of the babies,' it seems the answer is, well, fundamental.

In What's So Great About Christianity (not at all biased, that), author Dinesh D'Souza turns around the old evolutionary question of 'why has religion survived?'

He imagines two tribes, one religious, the other secular, asking: 'Which of the two tribes is more likely to survive, prosper, and multiply?'

'The religious tribe is made up of people who have an animating sense of purpose. The secular tribe consists of people who are not sure why they exist at all.'

'The religious tribe is composed of people who view their every thought and action as consequential. The secular tribe is made up of matter that cannot explain why it is able to think at all.'

'Should evolutionists... be surprised, then, to see that religion is flourishing?... It is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation... It seems perplexing why nature would breed a group of people who see no higher purpose to life or the universe.'

And when you put it like that...

You can read the rest of D'Souza's book here.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Sadism: The Most 'Natural' Way to Live -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 10)

When the parents of four of the girls claimed that their children had been abducted, the Marquis' wife spirited them away to hide the signs of her husband's abuse.

One of the girls chose to continue serving the Sades, but three others were packed off to convents (the Marquis' wife told the nuns not to believe their confessions), and the most traumatized teenager was sent to be guarded by the Marquis' uncle.

Seeing that he was a priest, the raving girl tried to confide in him; little did she know that the Abbé de Sade—an expert on the troubadours—was almost as bad as his nephew: rumor had it he'd also recently kidnapped a girl from her parents.

But the cover-up didn't end there.

AN ABUSIVE FAMILY TREE?

In the spring of 1775, Sade's chambermaid, Nanon, had a child and claimed he was the father (which may very well have been a lie).

Just in case, to prevent her from joining forces with the parents of the abused girls, the Marquis' wife framed her for stealing some silver and succeeded in getting her locked up.

Nanon didn't find out until months later that her newborn had died while she was in prison.

Which makes me wonder: just as the Marquis' descendants are still kicking around—his great-great grandson lives in the Loire Valley—it's feasible that the victims of his victims might have survived down the ages, forming a kind of abusive family tree.

If it's true that many pedophiles have been victims themselves, and some of Sade's victims went on to abuse more than one child each, and their victims did the same, then even allowing for war, disease and margin of error, it's possible that someone somewhere is being abused now because of what took place in Lacoste less than eight generations ago.

Maybe that's why Sade gets so little publicity here.

Not surprisingly, Finn doesn't like to talk much about his hero's sex crimes, preferring to paint him as an important figure in the history of thought.

And to a certain extent, he's got a point.

For example, Sade mocked Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers for idealizing Nature.

Decades before Darwin, the Marquis preached that Nature was cruel, not kind; in his brutally reductive view, the most 'natural' way to live was to revel in Nature's cruelty.

A sculpture on the grounds of the Marquis de Sade's castle,
part of Pierre Cardin's Festival de Lacoste
(with a not-so-ghostly specter in the foreground)

The History of Sex: Seville -- Has Anybody Seen My Daddy? -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 3)

Of course, this isn't the first time in history that the leader of a newish movement says one thing (like 'give up your riches and follow me') and his followers do another (viz. the pre-Reformation Popes).

The problem is, once you start teaching people to bend the rules, there's no telling where they'll stop.

The Game has fathered at least one TV series, countless DIY Don Juans and—perhaps most surprisingly—even a Spanish imitator.

Like the original, which was published as a Bible lookalike in America, its Latin copycat also has a black jacket and purports to be nothing less than 'the Bible of Success with Women.'

In addition, the cover of Sex Code: El Manual Práctico de los Maestros de la Seducción sports a female silhouette in the crosshairs.

As with American MPUAs, the author of Sex Code tries to justify his actions by regurgitating sub-Darwinian gobbledygook from celebrity philosophists like Richard Dawkins, with plenty of supporting parables from pop-culture sources like The Matrix.

In the beginning, you see, evolution hardwired us to crave certain traits in mates ('The Promiscuous Woman Does a Disservice to Her Genes' declares one heading), but scientific advances like the Pill have made our bodies outdated replicating machines, transforming 'the battle of the sexes' into nothing but 'a game.'

Though it may defy logic, brethren, we can have our cake and eat it. Evolution is all-powerful, but we're so clever we can also outwit it:

With this knowledge, ye shall be as gods! 

IT'S ALL ABOUT ME

Whereas The Game is constructed as a typical underdog-to-topdog story—Strauss is just a little guy pursuing the American wet dream—Sex Code begins with the author explaining why he's 'consecrated his life to the study of seduction' (I was going to serve the poor but instead I consecrated myself to poonanny).

The scene-setter is straight out of a B movie: Mario Luna wakes up with a whiskey bottle in one hand and a woman in the other.

While he's smoking, the girl stirs, so he rolls her over and pulls down her panties.

And as our hero ties off yet another used condom, the girl tells him: 'That'll be €120.'

'I'd paid to fuck—again,' he muses.

Then he adds, in case the reader has mistaken him for a missionary:

'There wasn't anything altruistic about my behavior. Blowing my salary on whores didn't have anything to do with charity. I knew perfectly well what had driven me to waste my savings on prostitutes: my low self-esteem.'

Has anybody seen my daddy?

The History of Sex: Seville -- A Pox Upon Your PUAs -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 2)

'Style's' sexploits climax with him acquiring a 'harem' of ten and coaxing a couple of girls to have a threesome in which they spitball his sperm between their mouths.

He also hobnobs with celebs in LA ('Tom Cruise was teaching me more about inner game than my father ever had') and finds true-ish love in the form of a rocker girlfriend who keeps his penis hard (for a while—they've since broken up).

Towards the end, he even reaches a cod-epiphany of sorts (though notably after a teary encounter with another male PUA): 'Perhaps it was really shared emotion and experience that creates relationships, not seven hours of routines followed by two hours of sex.'

Ya think?

But because this is inevitably 'Coming to a Multiplex Near You'—it must have been like this in the Middle Ages, waiting for the plague to hit your village—Strauss is keen to keep reassuring you that deep down, he's not a sociopath; he's a really nice guy: 'All I wanted was an evolutionary edge.'

We geeks should get to pee in the gene pool, too!

And he really loves women. Kinda like Jack the Ripper loved prostitutes:

'One of the tragedies of modern life is that women as a whole do not hold a lot of power in society,' he empathizes out one side of his face, then adding out the other: 'Sexual choice, however, is one of the only areas where women are indisputably in control.'

And me and my buddies are doing our best to take even that away!

Having been among the first to cash in on the trend, Strauss can then afford to take the high ground, proclaiming himself shocked—shocked—that teaching other pretend-men to 'neg' women and treat them like 'targets' causes them to, well, have a negative attitude and treat women like targets!

It's uncanny, dude! I keep pumping rubbish into these men—and they turn into rubbish men!

Poseurs or PUAs?
VH1's reality show for pretend-men

The History of Sex: London -- 'The Woman of the Millennium' -- (Intro, Pt. 2)

Of course, it was no surprise to learn that, like most good things (ahem), the Masturbate-a-thon came from my homeland, America, though I doubt that's what Churchill had in mind when he christened our countries' 'special relationship.'

What astounded me was the Wank-a-thon's financial link with that grand-dame of family planning, Marie Stopes International, a New World-Old World match made in heaven—or hell, depending on your grasp of history.

The English poet Larkin famously joked that sex began in 1963, and invariably each generation thinks it invented sex.

When it comes to wanking, though, the first self-styled 'citizen of the world,' Diogenes the Cynic, went around Athens masturbating way back in the fourth century before Christ—without any pretensions about 'coming for a good cause.'

And as a gauge of our collective ignorance about sex, it's hard to beat Marie Stopes' reputation as a noble pioneer of birth control, a crusader for erotic freedom and Empowered Womyn who stuck it to the Man—especially the Church!

THE 'WOMAN OF THE MILLENNIUM'

Back in 1999, readers of the Guardian inexplicably voted her the 'Woman of the Millennium.'

Not Elizabeth I, that old 'Virgin Queen,' or Marie Curie, the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, or even Margaret Sanger, the Yank who coined 'birth control' and beat Stopes to opening the first such clinic in New York.

No, otherwise educated readers hailed Stopes, the British underdog, as 'the great liberator' who 'freed women from the drudgery of unwanted pregnancies.'

'No other woman has done so much towards freeing women from their purely biological role,' gushed one correspondent.

Never mind that Stopes—like Sanger—had some rather controversial views about reproduction; specifically, that it should be limited to married couples who were healthy, intelligent and attractive (in Stopes' utopia, 'half-castes' and other undesirables would be sterilized—she disinherited her only son for the 'eugenic crime' of marrying a woman who wore glasses).

Though now portrayed as a patron saint of women's rights, Stopes was rabidly against abortion, as well as contraceptives for singletons.

'BREEDING RUBBISH'

An avowed Darwinist, she criticized residual 'Christian impulses of saving and safeguarding the weak' and ranted that postwar society was 'breeding rubbish:' 'The British race has tended for too long to foster the inferior stocks.'

Lacking the power to issue 'inviolable edicts'—not unlike Hitler's—Stopes opted to campaign for birth control as a means of ensuring that her beloved 'British race' produced strong offspring for the Empire.

Who says eugenics is unfashionable?
The Royal Mail's Marie Stopes stamp,
unveiled in 2008

But what seemed most surprising to me, in light of Marie Stopes International happily reaping the proceeds from a US-inspired Masturbate-a-thon, is that Stopes herself condemned masturbation as 'self abuse' (and she wasn't keen on Americans, either).

And now, with birth rates in Western Europe in terminal decline, Ma Stopes would have been horrified to find that the organization bearing her name was encouraging the Great British Public to have orgasms in vain. 

That's why a Marie Stopes Masturbate-a-thon struck me as so outrageous: not because of moral issues, but because it seemed to reflect our boundless ignorance of sex history—the not-inconsequential question of where we come from.

With the amount of info available to us in the twenty-first century, how is it possible that we—that I—know so little about the roots of Western attitudes toward sex?

Thinking ourselves wise, how have we become such fools? Without getting all ontological about it, how on earth did we get here?

So I set off to find the 'truth'—or the closest thing to it—about our sexual past.

* * *