The History of Sex: Geneva -- How Not to Pick Up a Booth Babe -- (Chap. V, Pt. 18)

Rather than force me to walk round and round to talk to them, the Skoda girls suggest I hop in the backseat, with Nikolina 'driving' and Jessica riding shotgun.

'You must get lots of guys hitting on you,' I venture.

'With guys hitting on us, it's easy, because we have security here, so they ask them kindly to go. But you get these—weird people.' Jessica wrinkles her nose.

'We had an experience with a man who was French, and he had some food left on the side of his mouth. And he was with his son and his friend. And he was talking to me so nicely. And his friend was trying to take a picture, and his boy was getting into the picture, and he was yelling at his son—'"Francois, get out of the picture!!!"'—she switches back into nice-guy mode, nodding attentively—"Yeah, yeah, I work in Bern, it's really nice"—"Francois, get out!!!" And when he turned his face to me—he was so—so friendly!'

She giggles.

'And he was also spitting.'

'A lot of guys say, "Where are you going tonight?"' Nikolina adds. 'And I always give answers like, "Somewhere you're not." Or "I don't speak French," "I don't speak English"—Whatever. I don't want to be rude. We smile, but it's not so easy all the time.'

'Do you ever get any corny pick-up lines?' I ask.

Jessica groans. 'The one everyone says is "Are you included with the car or do we have to pay extra?"'

'We usually say we'd be too expensive. You couldn't afford it.'

As the convention crowds continue to revolve around us, I mention that I've been surprised the atmosphere isn't more, um, glamorous. Without putting too fine a point on it, where have all the babes gone?

'You should've come the first two days, the press days, which aren't open to the public,' Jessica explains. 'Every car label has its models, it's only press here, and then there's really a bit of glamour. Then, when it starts to open to the public…' she shakes her head and smiles '…it stops.'

Tomorrow is the last day of the Motor Show, when thousands will forego church to spend their Sunday lusting after earthly goods in the erstwhile Protestant Rome.

As I step out of the revolving Skoda, I can't help but recall an oft-repeated phrase in Geneva: poor old Calvin must be spinning in his grave.

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- The Skoda Girls of the Geneva Motor Show -- (Chap. V, Pt. 17)

In fact, keeping the West-Country Mechanic in mind (I don't think I'll ever be able forget him), you can't help but suspect a lot of guys here would try to get off with a car, too, given half the chance.

Maybe that's the real reason why the lights are so bright at motor shows: any lapse in illumination, and the car nerds would drop their elastobands and start buggering the Bugattis, fellating the Ferraris and rimming the Alfa Romeos.

After barely an hour of soaking up this 'atmosphere,' even Lena's depressed.

'This is ruining the dream,' she grumbles. 'Cars for me have gone from sexy to sad.'

She points over the barrier at a gentleman who's carefully ratcheting his hips into the racing seat of a Ferrari.

'See—that's the problem with that kind of car. The kind of people who can buy them aren't the kind of people you can enjoy them with.'

ONE IN YOUR EYE

As we head dejectedly to the bar, I finally find what I've been looking for: two fabled 'booth babes' frolicking in the back of a car.

'It's a Skoda,' Lena notes, rather uncharitably.

That may be, but Skoda's never looked so good.

Being an oft-ridiculed East European carmaker, the company seems to have realized it needs to go that extra mile to get people's attention.

Not only is the new Fabia supermini mounted on a slowly spinning dais, but it also has two leggy brunettes doing their best to look comfortable while sitting crammed in the rear of the hatchback, gamely smiling and laughing for photos.

As I make my approach, Nikolina and Jessica have just fended off the amorous enquiries of a drooling Claude.

Nikolina kept flinching every time he spoke.

'He was spitting on my arm!' she laughs. 'It was disgusting!'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Does My Penis Look Big in This? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 16)

But Lena's knowledge of cars borders on the carnal.

Spotting the new Pagani, her eyes gleam as she starts stroking her hair, as if the inanimate object itself is going to flirt back at her.

While she's bouncing from exhibit to exhibit, clearly excited by seeing the world's top cars in the flesh, I have to admit I'm more interested in seeing the flesh than the cars.

I'm a car-show virgin, and I'm geared up for the full-on, testosterone-charged, cars-as-sex experience.

Even the display mounted by Ford (that ol' stiff-necked Protestant) is blasting the bump-and-grind bars of 'Freak Like Me' across the showroom floor.

Mais quelle deception!

LIVING MANNEQUINS

For starters, the flash cars sit in artificial pits created by low walls, so you have to wait your turn to step up and pay homage to all their manufactured glory.

If you actually want to sample one of the luxury cars (or more truthfully the sponsor's champagne), c'est impossible! without a VIP pass.

So most people end up peering over a wall, oohing, aahing and occasionally even ooh-lah-lah-ing at the unattainable objects of their desire.

Worse still, unlike the official website—and pretty much every car-show photo you've ever seen in your life (even if you don't subscribe to Auto-Wank Weekly)—there's an appalling lack of 'booth babes.'

Sure, the Ferrari, Maserati and Lamborghini showcases have some female accessories on display, but they're mostly doe-eyed and diaphanously-robed, as if they've just stepped out of a dodgy chocolate ad from the Seventies.

They're living mannequins who waft it rather than work it; nice girls in too much makeup doing their best to approximate sexy without really getting it.

Lena reckons they're just the type of doll a man who buys a Flamberati goes for. I suppose they make a change from the blow-up variety.

Instead of wall-to-wall models, the motor show is one big traffic jam of pedestrians.

For the most part, the crowd's made up of overgrown boys with cameras who've somehow managed to convince their long-suffering wives and girlfriends to accompany them to a car show—the slippery end of a slope that culminates with 'Honey, why don't we visit a swingers' club so I can film you getting gangbanged?'

The guys happily pose for fantasy photos of themselves pretend-driving cars as they banter manfully about how the new Longhodongo's 4.0-litre V8 engine can bash out 453.6bhp and blow off a whopping great 351.2lb ft of torque.

Which is all code for: 'Does my penis look big in this?'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Why Car Nerds Aren't Cool -- (Chap. V, Pt. 15)

So in the same spirit as Chris the West-Country Mechanic, if not exactly Jean & Jean-Jacques, I feel compelled to make a confession of my own: I don't 'get' cars.

At least not in the way most men do.

Don't get me wrong: I appreciate a well-designed car as much as a well-designed egg beater, but I'd never lust after one, let alone be tempted to stick my bits in it.

Not exactly an egg-beater: a handle-powered vibrator from Germany
(from the Prague Sex Machines Museum)

To me, an excessive love of things that go vroom is symptomatic of the same quasi-autistic streak that drives other men to spend their free time logging the comings and goings of choo-choo trains.

And whereas it's commonly accepted that trainspotters are to be pelted with stones and driven from their homes with burning torches, I've never understood how a 'motorhead' who can bore the chrome off a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz is celebrated as 'a man's man'—muy macho.

If anything, it seems to me that train anoraks are more endearing than car nerds because

a) they're self-aware enough to realize they're crazy and even a bit sad; and
b) there are fewer of them so there's less threat of them breeding. 

Indeed, what's frightening about the Geneva Motor Show is just how many car-nerds there are—the official tally this year is 730,736 (minus one) over ten days!

I'm clearly missing a kink in my chromosomes.

Which is why Lena the Latin South African is here.

With her curls and curves, she's got enough kinks for both of us.

For starters, she lets me in on the secret psychology of auto-nerds: 'It's not what you know about your car; it's what you know other people know about your car.'

Frankly, I wouldn't know.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- The Man Who Has Sex With Cars -- (Chap. V, Pt. 14)

Nowhere is modern Geneva's mix of luxury and lust, of mammon and mammaries, more apparent than its annual Motor Show, another unlikely byproduct of Calvin's internationalism—and a development that no doubt would have horrified Rousseau, whose last book was Reveries of a Solitary Walker.

For the best part of a century, Switzerland has provided neutral turf for rival automakers from around the world to seduce the public with their latest models, usually posing in front of a new car.

To tempt you into attending, the Motor Show's official website has a photo gallery entitled 'Atmosphere:' snapshots of young things come-hithering while the suits around them stand a-dithering.

If the businessmen were actually sitting in the cars, it could be a convention for working girls and the suits who use them.

'HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO A CAR'

Of course, ever since the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, you can bet that one of Henry Ford's newly empowered workers was plotting how and with whom to exploit the semi-privacy of its upholstered backseat.

But it's taken our era, empowered by the invention of the World Wide Web, to create entire global communities devoted to actual auto-erotica like 'dogging' or the logical culmination of the much-vaunted 'love affair with the auto:' people who have sex with their cars.

In what seems like April Fool's come early, Britain's Sun tabloid has alerted the world to the case of thirty-eight-year-old Chris Donald, a mechanic from England's West Country who boasts that he's had sex with more than thirty different (car) models, as well as two motorboats and a jetski.

Of the BMW 520i V6 he says gallantly: 'It wasn't all sex. She was a great drive, too.'

Chris has his very own website, including a manual on 'How to Make Love to a Car or Other Vehicle.'

Tip No. 3: 'Leather interiors on luxury vehicles work rather well for humping. I've seen vanilla folks enjoy this as an alternative to lady palm and her five fingers. Cleans easy, too!' 

Shudder.

As with so many of the world's ills, Chris reckons his fetish is David-Hasselhoff-related; apparently, he spent too much time watching the Hoff's talking car in Knight Rider.

Sure enough, The Sun has a photo of the corpulent mechanic with his kit off, 'humper to bumper' with a recent conquest.

'Some men prefer boobs and bums, but I prefer curvy bodywork.'
Chris the West Country Mechanic putting the moves on his latest conquest
(The Sun)

Chris claims he's in a long-term relationship with a girlfriend (see 'lady palm' above) and says he knows more than 500 like-minded souls.

Most of them masturbate while they video Chris 'exhausting himself.'

'Some even like to taste mechanical fluids, but that's going too far,' he clarifies.

Likewise, he cautions against inserting one's privates in an exhaust pipe while the engine is running: 'Never fuck a car hot!'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Weeding Out the Weirdos -- (Chap. V, Pt. 13)

As for Rousseau, his love-hate relationship with his hometown is reciprocated to this day.

A little island in the middle of the Rhone is named after him, but the even tinier Espace Rousseau museum is chronically underfunded, consisting of just two small rooms.

And as scientists increasingly question whether we have souls ('Is the Genome the Secular Equivalent of the Soul?,' asks a boffin at the University of Geneva), the notion of the soulmate still haunts the popular psyche like a ghost in the machine, summoned up in countless personal ads—even if some modern lonely hearts, like this twenty-nine-year-old in Geneva, come across as anti-soulmates: 

'Just a man searching for attachments-free good sex. Why? Well, i don't believe in love anymore, so i am looking to enjoy life until the end, and that's all.' 

Notably, this guy's online photo, obviously snapped in an internet dive, reveals him to be bug-eyed, eggheaded and bushy-browed.

Online, though, he's 'OrigPussyLicker:' aka 'Don Juan de Marco.'

'More like Don Juan de Weirdo,' Lena observes.

To help weed out the weirdos, a Dutchwoman in Geneva has launched an upscale dating agency that marries atavistic Calvinism with modern materialism.

Trea Tijmens is a former corporate headhunter who charges 4,000 francs—around £2,000 (upwards of $4,000)—to introduce professionals to potential merger candidates, or 'life partners,' as she tells me in a local café: 'I think everyone hopes that their life partner will be their soulmate.'

The full-service SuccessMatch membership fee lasts for eighteen months, with each arranged date costing a further 250 francs.

It includes professional headshots, an in-depth interview and a Myers-Briggs personality test, with clients signing a contract and non-disclosure agreement swearing that they've told the truth.

'THE ONLY THING I DON'T TALK ABOUT'

So having NDAed them and Myers-Briggsed them, I ask, 'What about sex? Do you ask them what they're looking for in a relationship?'

Trea starts to laugh nervously, as if I've mentioned something unmentionable.

'Sex?'

Well, yeah, I shrug. I'm shocked that she's so shocked. She's even blushing.

'You're Dutch for God's sake!' I tease her.

'That's the only thing I don't talk about. We speak about money. We speak about religion. We speak about past relationships. We speak about their whole childhood—what type of family they had and where they grew up. I know them better than their own friends and relatives. The only thing I don't speak about is'— She can't even bring herself to say the word again.

'Why is that?'

'Well, probably because I wouldn't be comfortable speaking about it. Because I'm very Calvinist. That's how I was raised. Very prudish. So I probably wouldn't be comfortable speaking about that.'

A cultural Calvinist to the core, Trea also urges her clientele to be pragmatic about love.

'Some clients have this idea that once they meet the right person, they'll sweep them off their feet and live happily ever after,' she laughs. 'I don't want to scare them off, but it isn't easy to make a relationship work. It's a lot of hard work.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and 'The Woman With Beautiful Breasts' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 12)

The latest attempt to breathe life into the Old Reformer is the $3.4 million International Museum of the Reformation that opened in 2005 in a neoclassical mansion right next to the cathedral.

Built on the spot where Geneva's leaders officially adopted Protestantism, the maison itself actually dates from the city's age of decadence—in fact, the merchant who built it was accused of flouting laws against extravagance.

Even more gallingly for Calvinists, the museum's first director is a Lutheran, though she's also the moderator of Geneva's Company of Pastors, the first woman in the post since Calvin himself created it nearly five centuries ago.

As if the 21st-century mandate of making history 'fun' weren't daunting enough, the Reformation Museum also has to overcome the modern ignorance of religion.

A PROTESTANT JUKEBOX

What's more, the early Protestants weren't big on the visual arts; their focus was always on the Word.

So the museum has done its best to make religious history comprehensible to the TV-minded: Calvin and Luther pop up in mirrors as talking heads, an imaginary dinner party ropes in the competing opinions of Jean and Jean-Jacques, and a jukebox cranks out Protestant hymns.

In trying to make Calvin's brand of Protestantism palatable, though, they've watered it down so that he comes across as being mainly about respect for the individual, a fundamental love of democracy and other smiley-faced concepts.

The museum shop peddles Calvin's grave image on everything from busts to umbrellas.

They even sell Calvin-branded beer, Reformation ashtrays and bonbons stamped with the ascetic's face, which is akin to putting Gandhi's mug on shotgun shells.

As of this writing, there are no Calvinator sex toys on sale, but I wouldn't rule it out.

The new musee won the Council of Europe's Museum Prize in 2007, causing some embarrassment: the statuette is an abstract by Miro with a terribly specific title: La femme aux beaux seins, or The Woman with Beautiful Breasts.

While drinking a Calvinus with a museum board-member and an official Friend of Calvin, I mention that their founder condoned death for adultery.

They look bewildered.

'I don't think they killed people who committed adultery,' the museum official blusters. 'Witches were burned, but that was everywhere at the time.'

So even modern Calvinists are a bit sketchy on Calvinism.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Kicking Apostate Posterior -- (Chap. V, Pt. 11)

Not even the secluded Old Town is spared the sensual onslaught.

A dive called Le Petit Palais offers mixed strip shows 'for him and her,' and behind St. Peter's Cathedral, a neon girlie bar competes for business with the Lutheran church just a couple of doors up; at the top of the same street stands the Palace of Justice and a police station—but who are they to judge?

The big story this week is a police sex scandal, including allegations that Geneva's cops have been, well, copping off at headquarters.

On the very street where the Reformer lived, the Rue de Calvin, an art shop displays nudes alongside prints from Pompeii.

O Calvin, where art thou?
Geovanne Preite, a Colombian contender
for the title of 'Miss Fetes de Geneve'

And throughout the elevated heart of the city, amid the winding stone streets, sculpted parks and tiered dwellings are stores tempting you with everything from antiques to scented candles, beautifully aged meat to chocolate that's as intoxicating as any drug.

A standard joke about Geneva's old Protestants is that they invite you home for tea and ask if you want 'une sucre ou pois?'—'one sugar or none?'—but you can hardly blame them for keeping a tight lid on largesse.

After a few days in this environment, you realize that you most definitely could get used to a life of Genevese luxury.

SAVED BY SHALT-NOTS

Before you know it, you, too, would be coveting that 140-franc (£60 or $90) rhinestone collar for your dog with matching bling-tastic togs for yourself.

In fact, with all the money in the world, and no Calvinist self-restraint, you wouldn't make it out of Geneva alive.

You'd end up ODing on fondue and chocolate on a yacht on Lake Geneva, with a stripper on each limb and a bouquet up your backside (or you might end up like this guy).

Ironically, it's partly old-fashioned Protestant values—all those shalt-nots about idols, wasting money and showing off—that have made Calvin virtually unknown in the city once created in his image.

Back in the nineteenth century, Genevans considered building a giant statue of him out on the lake as an anti-libertine Statue of Liberty, but that was deemed, well, a bit much, so eventually his supporters had to make due with a hundred-meter Reformation Wall below the Old Town.

Geneva's godly Gang of Four stand front and center, led by Calvin with his sleeves rolled up like he's raring to come down and kick some apostate posterior, starting with the skateboarders and students snogging shamelessly in front of him on the very university campus he founded.

And as much as Jean praised music's ability to inflame men's hearts, you wonder what he'd think about the rock concerts inflaming their loins during the annual Fetes de Genève in front of the Reformation Wall.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- A Decadent Playground -- (Chap. V, Pt. 10)

Strolling through Geneva today, you'd need the eyes of a Protestant sin-spotter to glimpse its puritanical past—or its Rousseau connection, for that matter.

Every December, the city celebrates the defeat of a Vatican-backed attack on its walls in 1602, but the Pope eventually had the last laugh as the city continued to welcome refugees and immigrants.

By 1863, Geneva was majority Catholic.

That year, one of the city's Protestant elite founded the International Committee of the Red Cross, inspiring the first Geneva Convention on the tercentenary of Calvin's death—and the formation of its Muslim counterpart, the Red Crescent, some sixty years later.

Geneva is now home to the largest United Nations' office outside New York, the World Council of Churches, the headquarters of more than fifty multinationals and countless NGOs, as well as CERN—the research center where the World Wide Web was invented and physicists have conducted experiments in search of the 'God particle.'

These are all the legacies of Calvinism, even if the tourist bumf is reluctant to link them to the dour, foreign God-botherer who believed in self-sacrifice, torture and the eternal hereafter.

SIN CITY?

And as hard as it is to make Geneva sound sexy, that doesn't mean the city's boring.

On the contrary, my advice is: Don't go there at all! Save your eternal soul!

For Geneva's stately grey architecture and restrained elegance hide all the makings of a decadent playground, depending on your bank account and sense of self-control.

Every creature comfort can be catered to, with countless vices to stave off boredom.

Modern Geneva really is a 'Petit Paris,' without the poor to nag your conscience.

In fact, if it weren't for the atavistic Calvinism, Geneva would probably be Sin City.

Prostitution and gambling have been legal for years, and strip bars and casinos brazenly advertise on billboards and bus stops, including posters for a joint called Moulin Rouge showing a woman's naked legs and backside, accentuated with red stilettos and a bloom clutched somewhere that doesn't naturally smell of roses.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Rousseau and the Soulmate -- (Chap. V, Pt. 9)

Two centuries later, all these conflicting elements crystallized into one contradictory philosopher, a proud 'Citizen of Geneva' who applied Calvin's doctrines about fate and destiny to sex and romance and also invented the celebrity kiss-and-tell.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau didn't actually coin the term 'soulmate'—Plato famously claimed that Zeus had bisected humans so that we would spend our lives searching for our 'other half'—but he did give it legs.

Born in 1712 to a Genevese watchmaker, Rousseau claimed his parents had such 'a natural sympathy of soul' that they were destined for one another.

In his bestseller, Julie, or The New Heloise, Rousseau updated a true story of castrated love from the age of the troubadours to tell of two lovers on Lake Geneva who are kept apart by civilization's conventions.

In modern talk-show parlance, It's like, society's hang-ups mean they can't be true to themselves, y'know? 

Tragically, Rousseau had more than a few hang-ups of his own.

Rousseau, aged about 54

Toward the end of his life, he bared his soul in an autobiography far more introspective than the saucy anecdotes recorded by contemporaries like Casanova.

In his Confessions, Rousseau admitted to indulging in masturbation, exhibitionism, masochism and homosexuality, as well as borderline incest with his surrogate maman.

He also forced his lover to abandon all five of their children to an orphanage.

Nevertheless, he still found time to tell his beloved Genevans where they were going wrong, preaching against the corrosive effects of vice and luxury.

When Geneva banned his writings on religion, Rousseau mocked the city's pastors for having gone soft: 'One knows not what they believe, nor what they do not believe, not even what they pretend to believe.'

James Boswell, who met Rousseau during his Grand Tour, had a similar reaction when he visited Geneva in 1764 and saw men playing cards on a Sunday—with a minister among them:

'O, Calvin,' he wrote, 'where art thou now?'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Calvin and the Age of Consent -- (Chap. V, Pt. 8)

What really made Reformation Geneva different, though, was that it had begun to punish men and women equally for sexual transgressions.

As the charge of incest against Cossonex shows, Protestant Geneva also cracked down on sex crimes against children.

Calvin opposed arranged marriages and believed that the marrying age for individuals should be decided on a case-by-case basis, depending on their maturity.

When this proved impractical, the Genevan authorities set the age of consent at eighteen for boys and fourteen for girls.

Adults who crossed this boundary were sentenced to death.

Although the defendants would often try to bribe and threaten their victims, one researcher into Deviance in Geneva (1535-1650) has noted that kids living under Calvin's laws apparently didn't feel intimidated in telling their parents that they'd been abused—or in testifying face-to-face against their abusers.

At their core, all of Calvin's laws stemmed from his harsh (and thoroughly depressing) conviction that if God was all powerful, He must have decided everyone's fate before the world was created: in other words, a Chosen Few were predestined to be saved, while most were born to die in the eternal fires of hell.

The catch was that you could never know in this life whether you were one of the Elect, so the best you could do was examine your soul constantly, confess your sins regularly—not to intermediaries but directly to God and your peers—and hope that you found yourself in Jehovah's Good Book on Judgement Day.

Until then, you could look forward to a lifetime of Protestant guilt (arguably worse than Catholic guilt because there's no penance).

Alternatively, if you felt instinctively that you weren't one of the Elect, you were effectively damned if you did and damned if you didn't—so you might as well do everything (and everyone) you could in this life.

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Torture in the Protestant Rome -- (Chap. V, Pt. 7)

However, several other cases ended in death, including that of another Frenchwoman named Anne and her manservant.

Anne Le Moine must have been middle-aged when she took up with Antoine Cossonex, who was a particularly nasty piece of work: not only was he arrested for adultery, but also incest, for he'd allegedly molested her daughter at the same time.

With the teenager testifying against Antoine, and the alleged lovers stonewalling the court, the authorities resorted to torture to extract a confession, sanctioning the estrapade.

L'estrapade (aka strappado) is more commonly associated
with the Inquisitions of Rome than with the "Protestant Rome"

After tying his hands and feet behind his back, Antoine's interrogators would have winched him into the air with a rope and pulley, then let him drop just short of the floor, the successive jolts wrenching his joints and dislocating his shoulders.

Antoine quickly cracked and confessed that he'd been fornicating with Anne for eight months, sometimes twice in one day and 'even in the bed of the master.'

He also admitted far more than they needed to know: it turned out Anne had given him a love token—a gift-wrapped tuft of pubic hair.

Antoine repaid her devotion by trying to rape her daughter, admitting to his torturers that he'd groped the teen's breasts and genitals and rubbed his penis against her.

DAMNED WITH ALL THE DEVILS

Anne made matters even worse under torture.

Instead of simply confessing and pleading for mercy, she adopted the (plainly insane) tack of wild defiance, cursing her husband, the court and no doubt Calvin himself, while also adding blasphemy to her rap sheet.

One account says she screamed that 'she wanted to be damned with all the devils to the deepest depths of hell (and) that she hoped to spend eternity with them at the bottom of the abysmal lake.'

Alas, she didn't get her wish with Lake Geneva, but she did end up in the River Rhone.

The court was so appalled by both lovers that they were put to death the next day: Anne was drowned and Antoine beheaded, a gender distinction that seems to have been common in Europe, possibly because drowning was somehow thought to be a more humane form of execution for 'the weaker sex.'

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 -- 'Fornicating Renegade Priests' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 5)

By 1541, Calvin's allies had come to power in Geneva and begged him to return, effectively granting him carte blanche to turn the republic into a Protestant theocracy.

By the time of his death in 1564, Calvin had vanquished the old guard of Geneva who resented 'that Frenchman,' his fellow foreigners, and his 'fornicating renegade priests.'

These free-spirited natives styled themselves the Children of Geneva, but Calvin denounced them as Libertines—giving us the modern meaning of the term—and ran their leaders out of town on pain of torture or execution.

Ironically, Catholic propagandists had invented a story that Calvin
had been branded as a sodomite before fleeing to Geneva

At the same time, he made Geneva an international safe haven for religious refugees.

These immigrants turned the 'Protestant Rome' into a center of artisanry and banking, with no fewer than forty printers cranking out Master Calvin's works as well as one of the first English translations of the Bible, compiled in part by the Scottish refugee John Knox.

The 'Geneva Bible' became the version read by Shakespeare and the one the Pilgrim Fathers took to America on the Mayflower, along with the founding principles of Calvinism.

Like its Catholic counterpart, though, the Protestant Rome had its excesses.

Calvin effectively ran Geneva as a religious dictatorship. As in much of Europe, torture was commonplace, though in Geneva's case it's ironic given the city's modern association with human rights.

It also doesn't seem much of a defense to argue that the self-styled City of God was as bad as everywhere else.

Geneva had already started cracking down before Calvin arrived, but the Reformer took the crusade against sin to Biblical extremes, outlawing prostitution (natch), but also premarital sex, dancing, immodesty, swearing, make-up and drinking in taverns.

In keeping with the rest of the Continent, heresy was a capital offence, but in Geneva that could take the form of simply disagreeing with Calvin.

The guy who complained about the Frenchman's 'fornicating renegade priests'—and was stupid enough to hang a placard on the pulpit where he preached—was tortured for a month and finally beheaded.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- John Calvin's Old-Fashioned Remedy For Lust -- (Chap. V, Pt. 4)

Born the year before Luther's pilgrimage to Rome, Calvin is usually depicted as thin and sickly, with a long, drawn face, a needle nose and a pointy beard, as if he's half dead already but sticking it out just to make life miserable for the rest of us.

Notably, the first book in his extremely prolific career was a commentary on that old Stoic, Seneca (the one who warned against rushing 'headlong into copulation').

Having been run out of Paris because of his Protestant ties, Calvin found himself kicking around the Continent in 1536 when he made a fateful detour to Geneva, then an independent city-state divided by political and religious squabbling.

The city council had officially plumped for Protestantism, but it initially resisted Calvin's radicalism and soon expelled him. 

Calvin then migrated to Strasbourg, where he surprised some of his friends by falling in love—or as close to it as he could.

Having been schooled in Renaissance humanism, Calvin preached that beauty was a gift from God; consequently, it wasn't inherently 'wrong for men to regard beauty in their choice of wives;' equally, it wasn't 'wrong for women to look at men.'

But he also added a common-sense caveat: 'Those who excel in beauty are exposed to many dangers, for it is very difficult for others to restrain themselves from lustful desires.'

Calvin promoted marriage among his followers as a 'remedy' for lust—'Satan dazzles us… to imagine that we are polluted by intercourse'—while also telling husbands and wives that they should not 'withhold sex from each other.'

Personally, though, Calvin seems to have been inclined toward celibacy, having married mainly to practice what he preached.

'The only beauty that seduces me is of one who is chaste, not too fastidious, modest, thrifty, patient, and hopefully she will be attentive to my health,' Jean wrote to a friend.

After a few false starts (including a young woman with a large dowry—Calvin thought it would be 'crazy' to marry her just because of her wealth; she didn't even speak French), he settled on a widow who had two children of her own.

Not only did Idelette tick all the Calvinist boxes (pious, frugal, etc.), Jean's friends were surprised to find that she was 'actually pretty.'

Idelette de Bure, Calvin's wife,
on a Belgian stamp

The plague cut short their honeymoon, and all their children were stillborn or died young, but they seem to have genuinely loved each other.

When Idelette passed away, Calvin never remarried.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Martin Luther and the Clergy Pimps -- (Chap. V, Pt. 3)

One of the most fundamental shifts in male-female relations stemmed from the new Protestant view of the Virgin Mary.

Luther and other Reformers accepted that Jesus' mother had been a virgin because the Bible said so.

However, they condemned any Catholic traditions that weren't backed up by the Scriptures.

So they rejected the doctrine that Mary had been a lifelong Virgin—noting that the Bible mentions her having other children.

By nixing the Veneration of Mary, Protestants effectively knocked the Mother of God off her pedestal and chipped away at the old saint/whore dichotomy of Mary vs. Mary Magdalene.

For the Reformers, it was more important for a bride (or groom) to be spiritually pure than a physical virgin—Zwingli himself had married a widow—and Luther argued that the Church's impossible standards regarding virginity and marriage turned the clergy into pimps:

'What is it they sell? Vulvas and genitals,' he declared.

Instead, fully human marriages became the new relationship role models for the godly, while education for women was encouraged, if only so they could read the Bible for themselves.

Though Martin and Katie were by no means equal in the (probably impossible) sense that we use the term—he referred to her affectionately as his 'rib'—the Luthers represented a Protestant template for what marriage should be: an 'equally yoked' man and woman pulling together toward a common goal.

SEX OBSESSED?

Having sex and companionship as selling points didn't hurt when it came to attracting young priests and nuns to the Protestant cause.

To try and stop the exodus, Rome denounced Luther and Zwingli as sex-obsessed devils.

They were certainly more highly sexed than their successor, who turned out to be arguably the most influential leader of the Reformation.

If Luther was an archetypal German (for better or very much the worse), then Jean Calvin ranks as possibly the Worst Frenchman Ever.

Hardworking, honest and not overly fond of wine or women, in retrospect, the archetypal French Protestant seems a hard man to like.

Even worse, he was a lawyer.

Nevertheless, subsequent generations revered Calvin, and his legalistic interpretations of the Bible were studied almost as religiously as the Good Book itself in both the Old and New Worlds.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Marriage: The Healthy Alternative? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 2)

Luther and his fellow Reformers railed against Rome's corruption and preached marriage as a healthy alternative to celibacy.

Within five years, Luther's Swiss counterpart, Zwingli, openly committed heresy by marrying, breaking five centuries of tradition within the Catholic Church.

And in 1525, Luther himself went one better by tying the knot with a former nun he'd helped smuggle out of a convent.

The excommunicated Augustinian broke with the teachings of St. Augustine when it came to marrying his twenty-six-year-old bride.

By all accounts, Luther was still a virgin at the age of forty-two and, rather than 'descending with a certain sadness' into their matrimonial bed, he and Katharina seem to have gladly hopped to it.

They had six children, raised four orphans and had a very happy marriage—even though Luther could be a bit of a boor.

Martin and Katharina Luther, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder
(Martin liked to call her 'My lord, Katie')

A student recalled him teasing 'Katie' at the table, announcing: 'The time will come when a man will take more than one wife. A woman can bear a child only once a year while a husband can beget many.'

'Let the devil believe that!' she replied, quoting the Bible to him: 'Paul said that each man should have his own wife.' 

But the theologian kept on kidding her, noting that Paul had written 'his own wife;' not his 'only wife.'

'Before I put up with that,' Katie shot back, 'I'd rather go back to the convent.'