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 -- 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 -- The Wall Comes Down -- (Chapter IX, Part 18)

Homosexuality wasn't legalized in West Germany until 1969 (once again, East Germany's Communists one-upped their democratic counterparts, having repealed Paragraph 175 the previous year).

By then, though, the main battleground for gay rights had shifted across the Atlantic.

In June that year—just days after West Germany abolished its Nazi statute on sodomy (and the same day as Judy Garland's funeral)—gay men in New York fought back against a police raid of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, inspiring 'Friends of Dorothy' around the world.

West Berlin held its first Christopher Street Day festival a decade later and, by the time the AIDS epidemic took off in 1983, the gay scene was well established.

On the other side of the Berlin Wall, though, the scene was more subdued.

The first East German film about homosexuality, Coming Out, didn't come out until November 9, 1989—the same night the Wall fell.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'Berlin Meant Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 9)

Among the countless foreigners attracted to this milieu was Christopher Isherwood, who'd heard about Berlin from his friend, Wystan (WH Auden to the rest of us).

Writing in the third person, Isherwood made it clear why he moved to Germany in 1929: 'To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.'

Auden had introduced him to his favorite rent-boy bar, where another regular recalled that the blond Aryans wore 'extremely short lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs to delectable advantage'—with the pockets cut out for ease of access.

Soon after his arrival, Isherwood visited the world's first Institute of Sexology, founded by Hirschfeld a decade earlier in a grandiose building in the Tiergarten.

The doctor's much younger lover—and later Hirschfeld himself—took him on a tour of the center, where Isherwood giggled with embarrassment at the menagerie of 'sex in every manifestation.'

Photos of hermaphrodites decorated the walls, and live specimens were on hand for inspection—including a young man with 'two perfectly formed female breasts.'

Hirschfeld dubbed cross-dressers 'transvestites' and ended up counseling the first sex-change patient, a Danish painter (Einar Mogens Wegener / Lili Elbe) who died after his final operation—a failed attempt to transplant a woman's ovaries into his body so that he could become a mother.

The same year that Hirschfeld opened the institute, he'd also produced and starred in the world's first gay film, shot in the Schöneberg district.

Different From the Others (or Anders als die Andern) was released in 1919 and told the highly didactic tale of a gay man driven to suicide by a blackmailer exploiting Paragraph 175, with a star turn by Hirschfeld as a sexpert.

Classic dowager line at 29:29 -- 'If that boy's completely normal, then I'm a virgin.' Hirschfeld himself appears at 30:50 in this hour-long clip.

The silent film had been banned in the Nazi stronghold of Munich, as well as Vienna, where a gunman fired into the audience.

Hirschfeld himself had been attacked by anti-Semites in Munich in 1920.

'He was so beaten that his eloquent mouth could never again be kissed by one of his "disciples",' a Nazi noted.

Nevertheless, the fifty-two-year-old doctor had bravely returned the following year—and received such a hiding that some papers ran his obituary.

Hirschfeld survived, however—only to be shot at during a lecture in Vienna.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- A Polysexual Party Capital -- (Chap. IX, Pt. 3)

It was while I was over at MORE that I got some useful bondage-bar guidance from the author of Sextips für Schwule Männer, or Sex Tips for Gay Men.

Stephan Niederwieser had recommended the restaurant, which is on the main drag in the gay district, right around the corner from where Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that became Cabaret, which in turn spawned its own gay icon: Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy 'Dorothy' Garland.

Stephan had given me good advice when I told him I wanted to see a darkroom.

'You shouldn't go in there with those shoes,' he said, glancing under the table at my feet.

In truth, I'd expected as much—I may be in the ancestral land of Dr. Scholl, but comfy, Velcro-strapped sandals probably aren't the footwear of choice in gay clubs, even on a hot night in Berlin.

'Is that because there's a dress code?'

'Well, that—and you might step in something. Sometimes there are pissing games down there.'

Ohhhh.

My immersion into gay culture has just begun.

In recent years, Berlin has recouped its reputation as a polysexual party capital.

The city's first openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, outed himself in 2001 (before the press could) and has since been re-elected, appearing in public with his partner at events like Pride Week and shocking the tabloids by going out of his way to welcome a hardcore S&M festival to the German capital.

The city boasts not one but two monthly queer-listings magazines, including one named after the Victory Column, or Siegessäule, erected to celebrate Prussian military conquests but now an adopted symbol of triumphant gays.

While Germany's overall birth rate has hit rock bottom—like many European nations, the Germans are effectively dying out—some estimates claim that one in four adult Berliners is homosexual.

An entire queer infrastructure caters to this affluent minority, concentrated in two main districts on both the western and eastern sides of the city.

Berlin's central tourist office offers advice for gay visitors, but the city also has two designated information centers—one for men, the other for lesbians.

Listings advertise bars, shops and dance clubs for cocktails or 'beer-fueled male raunch,' with monikers like 'Le Moustache,' 'ABBA, hallo?!,' 'Boyz 'R' Us' and Ficken3000—Fucking3000—as well as a gimp-mask establishment flogging videos called Cum Hungry and Fist Pigs alongside tins of Crisco, an American-as-apple-pie product that apparently has a whole range of lubricious applications outside the kitchen.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Phallus: Queer as Volk since 1897 -- (Chap. IX, Pt. 1)

Chapter Nine

DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND,

ÜBER PHALLUS

Queer as Volk since 1897

'Oh, if only you had never gone to Berlin!' 

--the sister of gay-rights pioneer Karl Ulrichs, 
when he publicly 'came out' around 1862

It's one a.m. on a sticky summer night in Berlin, and the annual Gay and Lesbian Street Festival is still going strong, marking the first night of Pride Week in the gay capital of Europe.

Over in the postcard part of town, between the Victory Column and Brandenburg Gate, the mainstream 'Love Parade' has long since come and gone, a techno-bacchanalia full of whistle-tweeting kids.

The Prussians erected the Victory Column, or Siegessaule,
to celebrate their military conquests;
it's now an adopted symbol of Berlin's triumphant gay community

But here in the leafy bits of Schöneberg, or 'Beauty Hill,' the party vibe is much more relaxed—grown-up, even.

Men, women and those in between are cavorting under the streetlights to salsa, disco and allsorts.

And if you venture into one of the many bars radiating off Nollendorfplatz, the atmosphere suddenly becomes very adult indeed.

In one hardcore hole-in-the-wall, the de facto dress code is rubber and leatherwear.

Guys with shaved heads and facial hair slug beer and eye each other up, surrounded by black bondage gear strung across the walls.

Handcuffs adorn the wood-beamed bar, along with a plastic statue of a man wearing a dog collar and an erection.

And if you tire of admiring that, a screen above the liquor is showing a cartoon of a clean-cut blonde playing with himself on a sofa while a couple of hard-bodied uniforms deliver a new PC.

The blonde guy climaxes just as they're walking by, and a splodge of ejaculate happens to hit one of the deliverymen in the face.

Rather than beat their customer to a pulp, he and his black co-worker start beating each other off.

The blonde begins taking it in turns to fellate the black guy and the brunette, and the trio end up humping in a daisy chain, with cartoon cum rocketing across the screen.

And if you turn your head—or, in my case, avert your eyes—another TV shows a live-action film of a woman slicing off a man's ear.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Freud's Science Fiction -- (Chapter VIII, Part 31)

Unlike Freud, who said most humans are 'trash,' I think the majority of people strive—consciously and subconsciously—to make sense of the world around them.

So there are good reasons why his theories have saturated the modern psyche.

Freud on the cover of Time, 1924

The most convincing lies contain an element of truth, and Freud was a genius at making the obvious look new and the specious sound true.

Yes, a toddler may be jealous of his father's time with his mother, but that doesn't mean the kid wants to off him and get off with her.

In fact, his 'jealousy' may not be sexual at all.

Anyone with any practical experience of children will tell you that a toddler can be 'jealous' of anything that gets between him and his feeding machine: a sister, a cat—even a book or chores.

In fact, anyone with a puppy will notice similar behavior when you introduce a rival animal into the house—but this canine 'jealousy' doesn't mean the dog wants to commit an unnatural act with its owner.

Not everything's about sex.

A SECULAR RELIGION

Although Freud insisted that what he'd 'discovered' was unassailable fact, much of it was nothing but science fiction.

In the absence of any proof, his followers had to have faith, and psychoanalysis developed all the hallmarks of a secular religion, creating the template for virtually every personality cult and self-help movement to this day.

With Freud's blessing, apostates like Jung were excommunicated and their characters publicly assassinated.

by Phil Selby

Psychoanalysis also coincided with the birth of cinema, embedding 'Freudian symbols' in the minds of the masses while always appealing to people's sense of their own self-importance, giving even the most innocuous dream or slip of the tongue a Deeper Hidden Meaning.

In their defense, many of Freud's followers were fooled because they didn't know better: he tried to destroy incriminating paperwork—ironically, the woman who saved him from the Nazis unwittingly wrecked his posthumous reputation by salvaging his letters to Fliess.

What's more, his associates cynically drip-fed his most damning papers into the public domain over decades—in fact, some archives won't be released until 2057.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Raggedy Ann in Chains -- (Chapter VIII, Part 18)

'There's even an SM Style now,' she continues, citing the pop star Rihanna (SM boyfriend optional).

Our tablemates are a tousle-haired artist and his wife, whose orange pageboy, bright lipstick and striped tights remind me of a Raggedy Ann doll.

Sure enough,
if you Google 'bondage Raggedy Ann,'
this is what you get

Very much to the contrary, she's the model for Axel's new series on Sex and Aggression, which makes me even more appreciative of Max's paintings in the S&M B&B in Venice.

Like most modern artists, Axel can't resist the post-Freudian urge to tell you what his images are trying to say—when of course the truth is, if he could actually paint, the work would speak for itself.

His canvases feature snatches of Krafft-Ebing and Sacher-Masoch plastered above paintings of his wife, who's naked except for bondage straps and pictured in various degrading poses: bending over naked, eating out of a dog bowl and so on.

As in life, her wide eyes are startlingly blank, though in art, she also has a corresponding lack of genitalia: the belt crisscrossing her groin forms a kind of labia.

Flipping through the samples, and sitting next to his apparently mingeless muse, I'm finding it surprisingly hard to make conversation.

WANNA RIDE?

The question I really want to ask—is that really what your bits look like?—probably isn't socially acceptable, even in this crowd.

So I opt for the boringly conventional: 'Sooooooo… how did you two meet?'

Judith tells me a tale reminiscent of Schnitzler's Dream Story, the Viennese source of the film, Eyes Wide Shut.

At twenty-five, Judith found herself married with two children when she realized that—Grosser Gott!—she'd never had an orgasm.

So she took up with Axel, who constructs real-life fantasies for her involving his acquaintances.

'Axel might arrange for me to go to a restaurant, and I'll say, "Is there a taxi driver here?" And a stranger will stand up, and I then go with him.'

Presumably they avoid cabbie hangouts.

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.'

Polanski gets off -- and this time, not by raping a little girl

From the archive: 2010

So they almost got 'im.

The Swiss have decided against extraditing Roman Polanski to the US, where the director might have been imprisoned for being a pedophile.

Or not, as the case may be

Unfortunately, this is one of those stories where media squeamishness actually makes it easy for sex offenders. 

For instance, all the mainstream media are reporting, very primly and properly, that Polanski pleaded guilty to ‘unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.’

But you really have to dig to find out that his 13-year-old victim claimed he subjected her to oral, vaginal and anal sex—after doping her and photographing her topless (usually glossed over as simply a ‘photo shoot’).

I also didn’t know that his assault was allegedly interrupted by a knock at the door by Anjelica Huston.

Or that the 1977 crime occurred in an LA mansion owned by Jack Nicholson, the star of Polanski's Chinatown.

In a case of life imitating art, one of the key plot twists in that 1974 movie involves the molestation of a minor.

STILL ON THE FENCE?

If you find yourself swayed by Polanski’s defenders, here’s an excellent article by Sady Doyle on why he should be held accountable.

While writing The History of Sex, I was surprised to discover the seedy, pedo side of the Sexual Revolution, dominated by men who tried to normalize having sex with children.

A European 'sexpaper' called Suck published articles from parents who slept with their children: 'Friendly Families Fuck Together Free-quently (Parts 1, 2 and 3).'

Perversely, its founder, Jim Haynes, is now the face of After Eight mints.

The main forces that stopped the child-sex movement of the Sixties and Seventies were anti-porn feminists (as opposed to pro-pornistas like Germaine Greer, who co-founded Suck)… and Christian activists.

With few modern feminists willing to take a stand against porn, though, there’s every chance that laws against child sex will be eroded by the likes of Polanski and his defenders.

To cite a quote often used in reference to the Holocaust: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.’

***

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.

***

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Sadeian Dream Made Reality -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 31)

Grinning, Milukman shifts the small desk where the tax inspector has been doing her dirty work to open a cabinet and show me les fucking machines, including 'Le Pump'—an oxygen mask that clamps onto a woman's privates—and the electric bread knife that's been converted into a double-headed dildo.

He also produces the black headdress that the women wear, and agrees to let me photograph him in it—if he can get it on, that is.

'I don't know how to do this,' he says, fumbling with the strings.

After camping it up on the futon where the beurettes take their pleasure, he takes a seat at his laptop next to a poster of Scarface to show me the one Internet flick he's actually proud of.

'It was very funny to do.'

The sadistic premise of No Fixed Address centers on a not overly attractive woman who arrives in a business suit saying she's willing to do anything to work in porn. 

'Anything?' the director asks off camera.

'Anything.'

So the filmmakers decide to test her by luring a homeless man off the streets—the skinheaded actor from Beurettes Rebelles in a dodgy wig and makeup—and hauling him into the studio, where the woman is waiting blindfolded.

'She can't see!' Milukman chuckles.

The filmmakers remove the blindfold, and the woman's so disgusted, she starts to walk out, but the men talk her into having sex with the tramp.

She kneels in front of him only to find that his penis has gunk on it.

'We put cheese on his dick to make it look dirty!' Milukman laughs.

Cut to the homeless man hurriedly washing his penis in the sink.

'Reality,' the director turns to me to make a Very Important Point, 'That's something the Internet can provide: reality.'

In reality, I don't know what he's talking about.

The clip progresses from oral sex to fisting and screwing, climaxing with a 'facial,' to use the trade term.

And throughout all this, the porn impresario is laughing and cackling: if you couldn't see the screen, you'd think he was watching Chaplin's Little Tramp being hit with a cream pie rather than a tramp coming on a woman's face.

Maybe that's the Sadeian dream made reality. In the new age of porn, people don't know when they're being sadistic; cruelty just comes naturally.

* * *

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Muslim Porn: Behind the Scenes -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 30)

Likewise, I don't want to sound libelous, but it would be a scandal—and more than a little ironic—if the secretive entrepreneur behind Beurettes Rebelles were actually a racist enriching himself by exploiting French-Arab women.

And the more time I spend with him, I get the impression that Milukman doesn't hold France's North African population in the highest esteem: maybe it's because he's a Parisian from the upper crust or because his father had to flee Algeria in 1962 and remake his life after the revolution—Milukman still calls De Gaulle a 'traitor' for surrendering Algeria to the Algerians.

None of that makes him inherently racist, of course; in certain circles, it would just prove he's a good Frenchman.

But imagine the outrage if Milukman turned out to be a good Frenchman whose work just happened to rot the minds and reproductive relationships of immigrants to keep both them and their numbers down.

As Milukman says, though, he doesn't see it that way; it's a 'social service.'

Le Drilldo: one of Milukman's tools

'So are you planning to work in porn for the rest of your career?'

'No, no.' He shakes his head vigorously. 'If I want to have children, and they knew I was working in porn, that would be impossible for me. Maybe it's my Italian roots, but when I'm older, I can't look back at my life and say I did sex and porn.'

With that, Milukman offers to show me his studio nearby.

Instead of a professional film set—or even a photographer's studio—the woodbeamed atelier looks like a student's bedsit or, more romantically, an artist's garret, with a small skylight, a futon and a disheveled mattress, as well as DVDs of The Saint and The Da Vinci Code scattered around the TV and stereo.

The walls are decorated with postcards of tasteful nudes—there's nary a nipple in sight—in contrast to the hardcore scenes that are filmed right here.

On one of the Beurettes Rebelles DVDs you can glimpse the postcard nudes in the background—as a veiled woman with a C-section scar sodomizes herself with a massive black dildo.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'I Don't Want to Sound Racist, But...' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 29)

I'd rather not.

With all that and more under his belt, it's not surprising that Milukman views classic erotica like Emmanuelle as risibly tame.

'I'm from the new generation of producers. There's a gap between Emmanuelle and what I do,' he tells me, by which I think he means that old-school filmmakers tried to hide behind a fig leaf of artistic pretension, whereas his naked ambition is all about money shots.

But that's not what he's getting at.

'People of the old school did it because they loved it,' he explains.

'They were perverts—cochons—pigs. The new generation does it only because it's business. When we get together at meetings, we talk about links and partnerships, not about fucking.'

'You see webmasters who look like choirboys. There are a lot of men like me who didn't think they would work in sex, but sex came to them via the Internet.'

One glorious day I turned on the computer, and lo and behold, sex had come to me via the Internet! 

Likewise, Milukman rejects any notion that he enjoys degrading women, much less that he's a sadist.

'My job is as a businessman. This is just a business opportunity.'

'So if you could make the same money selling potatoes—'

'—then we would do that!' he smiles triumphantly. 'I want to show that you can do porn on the Internet without being a pervert.'

Which sounds perversely puritanical.

And while your mind's reeling from that, I should point out that I have no idea whether the makers of Emmanuelle were cochons.

When I mention another elder veteran of the French hardcore scene, though, Milukman is scathing: 'He's obscene, a pervert. His life is porn. My life is not porn.'

And like a canny drug dealer—or a carb-conscious purveyor of spuds, for that matter—Milukman doesn't partake of his own product.

'I never watch my own movies on the Internet. Except for one. It was very funny to do—I'll show it to you later.'

'What about the beurettes? Do you ever sleep with them?'

'Never.' He rears back. 'When I meet one of the girls, I don't even kiss her. I shake her hand. When you're on set, you're in a business mindset. Also, I have a fiancée.'

'Does she know what you do?'

'Yes.' He grimaces. 'She doesn't like it, but she accepts it. When we're with friends and family, I'm not allowed to say what I do.'

'Also, she knows that I'm not attracted to that kind of woman. I don't want to sound racist, but when you've already fucked that kind of girl, you realize that things will always be complicated with them and their families, and they're hard to put up with.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Muslim Porn: 'A Social Service'? -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 28)

And just as Sade disowned most of his work and was ostracized by polite society, Milukman says he's been shunned by some old schoolmates because of his career in porn.

'Do you ever worry about the impact it has on society?'

'We often give the excuse'—I think he means 'justification'—'that we give pleasure to people,' he says, before echoing the ancient sex-as-safety-valve point of view.

'It's better to have boys jacking off in front of a computer than to have them raping girls in a gang-bang in a banlieue. It's a public interest thing.'

He laughs, but he's serious. 'It's true. I really believe that.'

'What about the women? Don't you think it's degrading to them?'

'Yes, it's degrading, but the girls who do it have a choice to do it. This sort of thing has to exist,' he adds. 'It's like prostitution. It's a social service.'

A true public service:
A poster in the Paris Metro for Ni Putes Ni Soumises
(Neither Whores Nor Submissives):
a French feminist movement that fights violence against women
in the banlieues and ghettos where many of France's Muslims live 

Again, he's smiling—but he's not joking.

The closest he comes to showing regret is when he mentions a girl who suddenly asked him to remove all her films from the Internet.

'A lot of Arabian girls say "I want to keep my face hidden. Because if my brother or father sees me, I'm dead." And it's true—they would be dead.'

Unfortunately for the girl in question, her boyfriend was a subscriber to the site.

'And he recognized her body, even though her face was hidden.' Milukman rolls his eyes.

'Is she okay?'

'I don't know,' he laughs. 'I can't really call her to find out.'

'How do you feel about that?'

'I removed the movies. It was her choice.'

'And?'

He finally musters up some token remorse. 'I feel bad because the girl needed the money, and for me, it wasn't so bad because it was just a funny film.' He shrugs. 'She did something very hard—that may be why her boyfriend didn't like it.'

May be.

'Hard' involves household appliances fitted with sex toys: 'fucking machines' with names like 'Le Drilldo' and 'Le Breadbang.'

'We put two dildos on an electric thing you use to cut bread—'

'You mean an electric knife?'

'Yeah. Bzzzzhh!' he's laughing now. 'And she took it in the pussy and the ass at the same time. Can you imagine?'

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

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

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

'All that is about hypocrisy.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Dome of the Rock, Muslim Porn, and Mohammed's Child Bride -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 26)

I ask him about a Web report I've seen that claims one of his sites featured a 'photo of an Arab woman fingering her anus in front of the Dome of the Rock.'

He sighs.

'Yes, it was a mistake.'

That montage was mounted on a US version of the site by his designer, who wanted to use images that were evocative of the Middle East.

So apparently a woman diddling her rectum next to Islam's holiest of holies sprang to mind.

'And immediately people emailed me to tell me it was dangerous.'

The Dome of the Rock was quickly excised, but the beurette and her butthole are still there (or at least they were when I spoke with him), alongside a couple of veiled but otherwise topless women, some palm trees and… a scattering of decorative oil derricks.

Mistake or not, Muslim fundamentalists have harassed and killed people for less.

As we speak, rioters in the banlieues are fighting the police.

And not so long ago, protesters around the world were demanding death for a Danish cartoonist.

Not surprisingly, Milukman is keen to distance himself from those examples.

'I never speak about Allah, and I never speak about Mohammed,' he says. 

Well, except for that one time.

'My designer once put some Arabic writing on the body of a nude girl, and immediately people emailed us that some of the writing contained the name of Allah. It was an honest mistake.' He shrugs. 'How were we to know?'

Possibly by doing some basic research in the first place.

But one of the most surprising aspects about Milukman's potentially life-or-death pastime is just how little he (and his designer) know about Islamic culture.

At one point, I ask him if Aïcha, the half-Moroccan billed as a 'superb brunette' on his site, deliberately based her porn name on the Prophet's beloved child bride.

He looks genuinely shocked—and not a little worried. 

'Aisha was the name of Mohammed's wife?'

I nod.

'There are lots of Aishas in the banlieues,' he mumbles pensively. 'Maybe we'll have to change that on the site.'

Salman Rushdie was ayatollahed for less.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Provoking Muslims -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 25)

Now, I'm no expert on Islamic headgear, but this seems disingenuous at best, not least because the veil on Milukman's site isn't of the colorful, bellydancing variety but a somber black headdress that covers a woman's hair with a cap and most of her face with a long rectangular piece of cloth, leaving only her eyes exposed.

It looks to me like a close cousin of the hijab known as a niqab.

And given that France is the only major Western country where girls are banned from wearing headscarves in school, wrapping naked Muslim girls in black veils for porn shoots seems deliberately provocative, not least because their usual partner is a young white Frenchman with a shaved head.

Milukman gives me a cagey grin. 'It's not a religion-provoking site—officially.'

Nevertheless, for photos, he insists on hiding behind a veil of his own: sunglasses and a handkerchief.

He hit on the idea of using the veil as the unique selling point for a website in 2003.

'I wanted to do something that had never been done—and something to shock,' he says, emphasizing the last word by fisting the air.

I ask if 9/11 and the Iraq War had anything to do with it.

'I can't officially say Beurettes Rebelles had something to do with terrorism or politics.'

He uses his hands to show the divide between his website and those issues.

'But for me, it is a provocation,' he admits. 'In order to keep the site running, though, I have to say it's about Scheherazade and The Thousand and One Nights.'

The disclaimer on Milukman's site
(courtesy of Google's auto-translator)

Remarkably, Milukman claims he's never had any death threats.

'I've never received even one hate mail,' he says, dead-eyed and earnest. 'I think Arabian people are clever enough to understand the difference between my site and religion.'

In fact, he estimates that 80% of his subscribers are Muslims.

'Chiefly Arabian boys from the banlieues. In France, it's sexual misery for these men. The only way for them to see girls is the Internet, and it's not that expensive for them to pay one to two euros to see a full sex scene online.'

So long as it doesn't offend their religious sensitivities, naturally.

And Milukman—a self-styled 'Web subversive'—has had some close scrapes...

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Milukman and Muslim Porn -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 24)

In analyzing the adventures of the 'new Tintin,' an arch-conservative journalist (and Flemish separatist) noted that the case was the latest in a series of sleaze scandals.

'Morality has gone berserk all over Europe, but nowhere to the same degree as in Belgium,' he claimed. 'If Europe ever "belgianizes", i.e. becomes a state without a real nation, it will end up as the same moral cesspit that Belgium is today.'

As entertaining as Belgium-bashing may be, I'm sure there are plenty of Belguel types in other countries: I've even arranged a rendezvous with one in Paris.

ENTER MILUKMAN

'I think that Belguel guy was mad,' my contact says, though many people would say he's not so sane himself. 

The mystery man across from me is known to hordes of adoring wankers only as 'Milukman,' the founder of websites specializing in what some Westerners refer to as 'Muslim porn'—a deeply offensive term in its own right, especially when pornographers make puns on the word 'submissive' in the S&M sense and the literal meaning of Muslim as 'one who submits.'

Milukman's flagship site is Beurettes Rebelles, a beurette being any French-speaking girl of Arabic or North African extraction, particularly if she hails from one of the immigrant sink estates, or banlieues, on the outskirts of Paris.

For around €350 (less than $500), Milukman's French-Arab 'rebels' willingly subject themselves to varying degrees of humiliation: some masturbate in close-up—with or without the aid of 'fucking machines'—while others limit themselves to oral and anal sex (saving their vaginas for their loved ones), and a hardcore group of wannabe porn stars put their every orifice at the director's disposal.

But all the 'rebel beurettes' have one thing in common: they start off wearing nothing but their birthday suits… and a black veil.

'The veil is my brand—it's my marketing,' Milukman explains.

However, it's not a hijab, he adds.

Although it may look like sacrilege, Beurettes Rebelles features a disclaimer declaring that its inspiration is the (misogynistic) classic, A Thousand and One Nights, in which a courtesan tells a king a cliffhanger each night to avoid execution in the morning:

'Thus no religious character should be attributed to these veils,' the site states.

In fact, Milukman claims the beurettes' black headdress came from a costume store.

'It's a veil like Scheherazade wore.'