The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'I Don't Even Know What That Is' -- (Chapter IX, Part 14)

Likewise, whereas the modern view of homosexuality tends to focus on anal sex and penetration—one expert on 'Greek Love' dates this 'sodomania' from the Seventies—Beck's memoir is a reminder that gay relationships haven't always been about buggery.

Though we're conditioned to think of pederasty as a rite of passage, so to speak—even for heteros these days—many of Krafft-Ebing's homosexual correspondents claimed they preferred everything but anal.

That's not to say that sodomy wasn't part of the gay repertoire—Isherwood was an avid butt man, while Auden had to be treated for a 'rectal fissure'—but anal sex was far riskier before the discovery of penicillin (indeed, that's one theory why Judeo-Christians banned sodomy: to keep their 'chosen peoples' clean and infection-free).

OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT

Recalling his first love, a fellow Zionist named Manfred, Gad says:

'Whatever we did, it was not much like gay sex as one thinks of it today, but then again, Manfred was not homosexual anyway. With him, as with many of the lovers my age, it was more about joy and fun and sharing hugs and caresses—to feel that the other person was just as aroused as you were… His parents and siblings noticed our relationship, but it didn't have to be talked about. Anyway, there really were other things to worry about.'

Like getting caught.

When Gad was finally captured near the end of the war with another lover, they were both interrogated by the Gestapo.

The officer torturing his friend Zwi taunted them: 'Did you fuck each other in the ass?'

Gad denied it and told him to also confirm it with his partner.

'And the man really did go back in to ask. The door was still ajar, and I could hear Zwi answer, surprised but truthfully, "No, I don't even know what that is."'

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.

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

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

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

LastKissInc.com

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

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

Freud himself remained convinced to the end.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Freud's Scientific Fairy Tale -- (Chapter VIII, Part 27)

Nevertheless, when Freud confidently unveiled his 'seduction theory' to his peers just a few days before his fortieth birthday, he was expecting adulation for having discovered 'the source of the Nile' in neuropathology:

'The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth,' he recalled.

Instead, he was publicly humiliated.

by Doug Savage

The meeting was chaired by none other than Krafft-Ebing, who had documented cases of actual child abuse—and even come up with the name for the perversion: pedophilia.

The best he could say about the junior lecturer's thesis was: 'It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.'

Unable to accept his own failure, Freud told himself that he was a prophet ahead of his time and set about transforming his 'fairy tale' into a seductive fantasy.

Instead of claiming that his patients had suffered abuse as kids, he decided that all children fantasized about having sex with their parents.

He based this highly dubious 'universal truth' not on any truly empirical scientific research but on his pseudo-mystical ability to interpret dreams.

And it's his exploration of the Unconscious that Freud's apologists like to emphasize nowadays.

However, leaving aside the current doubts in neuroscience about whether such a thing even exists, Freud certainly wasn't the first to realize that people often acted without really understanding why.

As a (Christian) philosopher, Blaise Pascal, had put it two centuries earlier: 'The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Freud's 'Magical Drug' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 21)

No sex history would be complete without Vienna, so inevitably our trip involves shlepping to the capital, where Krafft-Ebing was promoted to head the psychiatric department at its university.

The country doctor arrived during Carnival season in 1889, just after the Crown Prince's suicide-murder.

One of his first outings was an asylum gala that featured lunatics dressed as cannibals, Bluebeards… and Jack the Rippers.

By that time, Krafft-Ebing's work had become required reading for anyone interested in sex, particularly a struggling, fame-hungry neurologist named Sigmund Freud.

A BLACK COMEDY

It's a shame to have to waste much space on the Father of Everything's Phallic, but Freud's impact on the present day is so pervasive it's unavoidable.

Amid all the hagiography masquerading as fact, the best book I've read on 'Uncle Siggie' is Richard Webster's devastatingly methodical critique, Why Freud Was Wrong, which demolishes the Freudian myth mainly because the author is so generous in trying to explain Freud's mistakes.

Not only is it a wise book in its own right, but it's also a thorough review of the evidence for and against Freud. I've also made cross-checks based on Freud's own writings and at least one title approved for sale in Vienna's Freud Museum.

The black comedy of Freud's career began with spectacular failure.

In fact, to this day, his followers don't like to talk much about the father of psychoanalysis being the godfather of the cocaine industry. Instead, they refer po-facedly to his ill-fated fling with the white stuff as 'the Cocaine Episode.'

At the age of twenty-eight, Freud had very little to show for all his years of studying, let alone his parents' belief that their 'Golden Siggie' would someday be a great man: a medical Moses, if not the Messiah himself.

Stuck in a lowly job as an intern in Vienna's general hospital, he couldn't scrape together enough money to marry his fiancée.

But then he claimed 'a lucky strike:' he found a paper by an army surgeon who noted that Andean marching powder seemed to pep up German soldiers.

Freud then dug up some obscure research published in Detroit claiming that cocaine could be used to wean morphine addicts from the arms of Morpheus.

Unbeknownst to him, this 'research' was sponsored by a (Detroit-based) drug company aiming to create a market for its star product—cocaine.

Judging from Freud's behavior throughout his career, though, it's doubtful that this knowledge would have deterred him.

Convinced of cocaine's potential as a panacea, the young doctor forked out for a sample of the pharmaceutical industry's finest in May 1884 and concluded that it was a 'magical drug:'

'I take very small doses regularly against depression and indigestion, and with the most brilliant success,' he raved to his beloved.

I think we can assume it was the coke talking.

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 -- The S&M Youth -- (Chapter VIII, Part 17)

For the record, Grazy says he mainly likes girls, but he's also been with men, and he doesn't always camp it up, especially not as his day-job alter-ego: Michael the Computer Guy.

He and his girlfriend have a tempestuous romance, he says.

Apropos of which, the Sturm to his Drag interrupts us to have a smoke, and Grazy gallantly follows her outside. 'I don't like her to stand outside alone,' he says.

Though it's hard to see how his presence would help her. What's she gonna say: 'Don't bother me, or my cross-dressing boyfriend will beat you up with his handbag'?

On my right is Angelika, a university student euphemized as a BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) in online parlance.

'This is my first time here,' she says. 'I usually go to another group—the SM Youth.'

I splutter into my beer. 'The what?' 

'The SM Youth: for people aged sixteen to twenty-six.'

Ah, sweet sixteen and never been whipped. 

Well, this is awkward:
a teen fashion label has the same name

'Gosh,' I wonder. 'If you start with S&M at sixteen, where do you go from there?'

'I dunno. I guess they'll find out as they get older.'

For the most part, she tells me, the monthly SM Youth meetings deal with issues like exams… moving house… how to make a bondage chair that converts into a coffee table… and how to build a torture cage from wood to keep the cost down—y'know, questions we all grapple with at one point or another. 

Angelika's writing her thesis on intergender studies at the University of Graz, where both Sacher-Masoch and Krafft-Ebing taught.

'Did you have to read Psychopathia Sexualis for your paper?'

'No—the university didn't have it in the library. At least, I don't think they did. I think I looked it up. I can't remember. I know one thing, though: if I wrote something on SM, it would definitely get published. SM's huge now. When I was growing up, you hardly saw it. But shows like CSI, Law and Order and NCIS often have SM characters—usually the baddies—but you never saw that on Colombo.'

'Or Hawaii Five-O,' I add. 'Spank 'em, Danno!'

She smiles politely; clearly, I'm too old for the SM Youth.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Masochists' Paradox -- (Chapter VIII, Part 15)

One manifestation of this trickle-down theory of deviance is the plethora of women now willing to abuse men for money.

Whereas many of Krafft-Ebing's masochists lamented the dearth of real-life Wandas, there's now no shortage of women advertising as dominatrixes.

To my mind, it's no real mystery why a working girl would opt for this particular career path: 'You wanna pay me to humiliate you—and I don't even have to shag your sorry butt? Heck, yeah, I'll do it, suck—I mean, "slave"!'

What mystifies me is that they're able to charge anything at all; given the number of women with 'male issues,' you'd think prices for a good spanking would have hit rock bottom, so to speak.

But the reason they don't is the masochists' paradox.

Just as the supposedly 'weaker sex' often rations intercourse in vanilla couplings, in S&M 'play,' the submissives hold the whip hand.

'The masochists are the real masters because they decide what's going to happen,' Oosterhuis explained, echoing Krafft-Ebing's correspondents.

'And that's also their difficulty because they have to instruct the mistress. And as soon as she does not behave as they want her to, they are disappointed. So masochism is a frustration for these men because they cannot realize their fantasies.'

Taken to its logical extreme, this all gets very angsty, with masochists ending up like their namesake, forever searching for ever-harsher mistresses and 'stimulants.'

Personally, I've never seen the appeal of being abused by a surly woman, much less paying for the privilege; not only does it seem deeply silly, I could get abused in any bar or club for free.

And after Paris, I've seen more than my share of sadomasochism (my eyes! my eyes!).

The point of this Teutonic jaunt is to explore the cerebral aspect of sex, without getting sucked into the seedy side.

Well, not literally, anyway.

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

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

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

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

And rrrrrrrrriipppp!

Off went another layer of innocence from my psyche.

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

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

Ah, the innocence...

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

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

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

SEX AND CONSUMERISM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leopold and Hulda

* * *

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- From High Drama to Low Farce -- (Chapter VIII, Part 10)

Although the conventional view nowadays is that Krafft-Ebing ruined the writer's reputation, in truth, if anyone ruined Sacher-Masoch's career, it was the Chevalier himself.

Forever striving for high drama, his sexcapades usually collapsed into low farce.

While Wanda was still recovering from the birth of their third child, for instance, her husband excitedly showed her a personal ad from a Viennese newspaper:

'Handsome, rich, energetic young man would like to meet pretty, elegant young woman; admirer of the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch preferred.'

The writer himself quickly drafted a reply for his wife, enclosing a photo of Wanda.

The man returned the favor, including a picture of himself in Eastern garb.

'A Turk, Wanda!' Leopold exclaimed. 'Now at last we've got hold of someone who understands how to make love!'

Sacher-Masoch then hastily dispatched his ailing wife to a health spa to have sex with the stranger.

However, Wanda returned the very next afternoon, informing her far from gallant Chevalier that the 'Turk' was actually 'a very nice boy' from Vienna—real name: Nikolas Teitelbaum—whose mother was a friend of the family.

'We talked half the night, but nothing happened,' Wanda told him. 'I felt ill, anyhow.'

LUDWIG THE MAD

In another intrigue, a mystery correspondent tried to sound out whether The Love of Plato might reflect Sacher-Masoch's true tendencies.

Wanda quickly worked out that the fan was a man, not least because of his nom de plume: Anatol.

But Sacher-Masoch fantasized that he was a frustrated 'she-devil,' a manly woman who would beat him like an evil Queen Mother of Constantinople.

The famous author then embarked on a bizarre charade that at one point involved him sitting blindfolded alone in a hotel room at midnight (to meet a man he couldn't see) and at another him and his wife trying to arrange a ménage-a-trois, sitting in the dining room of a hotel in Graz so that Wanda could be seduced by Anatol.

When she was finally summoned upstairs, instead of the deep-voiced man Sacher-Masoch had met, she found a crippled pipsqueak with red hair.

After a tiresome cat-and-mouse game (even Sacher-Masoch got bored), the couple found out years later that they'd been outwitted by two royal friends: Holland's invalid Alexander of Orange and Bavaria's 'Mad' King Ludwig II, who wound up drowning himself and his doctor in a lake (Krafft-Ebing had warned his colleague to keep an eye on Ludwig).

Mad? Me?

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- How Masochism Got Its Name -- (Chapter VIII, Part 9)

In reality, the end of Sacher-Masoch's affair with Fanny was far less melodramatic: 'Gregor' and his Mistress simply split up when their six-month contract expired, apparently because they got bored.

After a couple more flings—one of which produced a daughter—Sacher-Masoch returned to Graz.

Then one day a letter landed on his desk signed 'Wanda von Dunajew.'

Ever a sucker for female fans, Sacher-Masoch took the bait: not only did he sign an S&M contract with this real-life 'Wanda,' he also proposed to her.

THOROUGHLY WHIPPED

After their marriage, she confessed to him that she wasn't actually a lady at all: her real name was Aurora Rümelin, the daughter of a deadbeat train-stationmaster and a woman who ran a tobacco shop.

What's more, Aurora hadn't even written the letters she'd sent to Sacher-Masoch; they'd been penned by a Jewish friend who knew he liked fan mail.

By then, though, Sacher-Masoch was so thoroughly whipped he didn't care.

He and his wife settled down in a millhouse outside Graz, where she gave birth to a second son (the first had died shortly after birth) and he focused on writing—while demanding that 'Wanda' whip and cuckold him.

Despite these extracurricular passions, Sacher-Masoch somehow found the time to churn out more than eighty books during his career, including a novella called The Love of Plato featuring homosexuality.

His works were translated throughout Europe, and in 1883, the French celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as a writer by inducting him into the Legion of Honor, with salutations from Zola, Dumas, Ibsen and Hugo.

By the time Krafft-Ebing coined 'masochism,' though, Sacher-Masoch's best years were behind him.

In naming the kink after a contemporary, Krafft-Ebing argued that even straight sex involved a degree of sadomasochism, with men inflicting pain on the women they deflowered.

What seemed to be new about Sacher-Masoch and his followers was that they reversed the 'natural' sex roles.

Krafft-Ebing rejected a rival term, algolagnia—or a love of pain—because his correspondents told him they didn't necessarily want to be hurt (or have sex, for that matter); they relished the feeling of being dominated and humiliated, usually with heavy lashings of fantasy and role-playing.

Sacher-Masoch complained that the psychiatrist had tarnished his mother's good name.

However, calling the kink 'Sacherism' might have hurt Austria's already delicate imperial pride: another family called Sacher ran the landmark Hotel Sacher in Vienna, home of the famous Sacher Torte.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pop Psychopathy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 5)

With dirt-dishing like that, 'Sexual Psychopathy' soon became a medical bestseller, despite many opinionmakers frowning on its populist appeal.

Here was a top psychiatrist and society doctor, a stout, patrician Catholic in the staid university town of Graz (aka Pension-opolis)—a devoted husband and father of three—who had made it his life's work to catalogue perversity in 'the minutest and the most nauseous detail.'

As The British Medical Journal remarked: 'Better if it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.'

Like Aretino's Positions, The Kama Sutra, and the rediscovered erotica of Pompeii, Krafft-Ebing's work introduced more than a few readers to practices they'd never thought of before: ironically, his Psychopathia Sexualis popularized some of the 'psychopathic' behavior it sought to cure.

At the same time, though, the book provided solace to sexual outsiders.

'By publishing his patients' letters and autobiographies, Krafft-Ebing enabled voices to be heard that were usually silenced,' writes his Dutch biographer, who recently uncovered the doctor's archive in Graz.

Professor Harry Oosterhuis cites a lesbian novel from Austria in 1901, in which one of the lovers yearns to tell a couple of male scoffers that 'We also belong to these "Krafft-Ebing people"! I think that they would have fainted!'

ENTER THE MASOCHISTS

Krafft-Ebing was intrigued by one group of 'perverts' in particular: men who yearned to be whipped and humiliated by women.

Rousseau had written about the joys of a good flogging in his Confessions, and many old codgers knew the trick as a way to get blood flowing to their todgers.

But the fantasies of Krafft-Ebing's correspondents represented something different: the flip side of sadism.

A thirty-five-year-old recounted how he'd always been excited by the idea of slavery: as a teenager, he'd had erections while reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (not the effect Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind).

A German count confessed to paying prostitutes to kick him and make him lick their feet.

And another correspondent traced the worship of imperious women back to the troubadours.

What these gluttons for punishment had in common, though, was their praise for the pervy oeuvre of a contemporary novelist who happened to live in the same Austrian city as Krafft-Ebing.

In fact, his dad was the police chief of Graz.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Bona Fide Freaks -- (Chapter VIII, Part 4)

And on and on—and on—it goes, case after Germanically detailed case of characters who would make headlines today but also make you wonder whether sex as we know it (or not) has changed at all since the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, for instance, there's one of Krafft-Ebing's early patients, a twenty-year-old farmer's daughter who couldn't stop masturbating.

The doctor tried hydrotherapy and various 'methods of coercion' to cure her before realizing the real reason she could never scratch her very particular itch: she was infested with maggots.

On the other hand, many of his 'perverts' are easily recognizable as our sexual ancestors, in spirit if not in deed: there are hordes of homosexuals (including sailors cottaging in public toilets and gay-for-pay soldiers), cross-dressing men and women (such as an officer who dressed up in a pink tutu), child killers and animal abusers (including a fowl-torturer known to prostitutes as 'Mr. Chicken'), proto-pony boys, leather fetishists, assorted sadists and people who enjoyed fisting (one man fantasized about inserting his arm, 'all the way up to the shoulder blade, into a woman's vagina') and genital torture (a captain forced his lover 'to place leeches on her genitals before coitus… The woman finally became very anemic and, as a result, insane').

BUT ONLY WITH THEIR LEFT FEET

Not to mention the bona fide freaks: a merchant who masturbated 'by means of a pocket electric battery' and orgasmed by burning holes in women's clothes on the street… a man who would have a woman lie down in a ball gown and then ambush her ('he jumped on top of her and defecated on her breasts… while doing this, he ejaculated')… a misogynist who murdered an old woman and was about to flog the corpse but 'was unable to do so because of his conscience; he therefore cut off the breasts and genitalia with a knife, cooked them at home, and ate them')… a physician who'd been introduced to medicine by his family doctor, who'd also masturbated with him as a boy and shown him their sperm under the microscope ('he dilated my anus with instruments')… a civil servant attracted to women who limped but only with their left feet… and finally the case of X, a man who 'only loved men with large, bushy moustaches':

'One day he met his ideal. He invited him home, but was unspeakably disappointed when the man removed an artificial moustache. Only when the visitor returned the ornament to his upper lip did he exercise his charm over X once more and restored X to complete virility.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- An Encyclopedia of Perversion -- (Chapter VIII, Part 3)

Though by no means immune to the crackpottery of his day, the truth is that Krafft-Ebing strove to understand sexual deviance in keeping with a motto recited to him by a masochist: 'to understand all is to cure all.'

His compassion helped persuade courts to take a more lenient approach toward many acts that aren't even classed as perversions anymore, let alone sex crimes.

In his mid-forties, the esteemed psychiatrist published a book that repulsed much of the medical establishment—and is still quite shocking now.

Psychopathia Sexualis was a bewildering compendium of case studies gleaned from Krafft-Ebing's own experience as well as medical texts, compiled in one easy-to-read encyclopedia of perversion.

The first edition, published in 1886, covered fifty-one case studies in just over 100 pages. By the time Krafft-Ebing died in 1902, the twelfth edition had swollen to more than 300 cases—a fraction of the 20,000 he'd accumulated.

Krafft-Ebing countered accusations of porn-mongering by arguing that his work would help doctors and lawyers assess sex crimes in court.

To prove it, he fig-leafed the dirty bits in Latin.

In contrast, the editor of my modern edition has not only helpfully translated the Latin into English, but also set them in boldface type, supposedly 'to illustrate Krafft-Ebing's editorial choices of what he found to be "particularly revolting".'

Not out of prurience, of course.

THE CASE OF Z

Case 81, profiling a Russian masochist called Z, gives an idea of the material:

'What oppressed him was the unnatural desire, recurring every four weeks, for mictio mulieris in os suum—' 

Or in my genital-warts-and-all version—'a woman to urinate in his mouth.'

'Puerum decem annos agens serva educatrix libidine mota ad corpus suum appressit et digitum ei in vaginam introduxit.' 

'When he was ten years old, his nurse, on a libidinous impulse, clutched him against her body and put his finger into her vagina.' 

'Quum postea fortuitu digito nasum tetigit, odore ejus valde delectatus fuit.' 

'When he happened to touch his nose with his finger later, the smell was intensely pleasurable to him.' 

'This immoral act developed into a lustful fantasy that made him believe he was lying bound inter femora mulieris cumbere—'

'—between a woman's thighs—'

'—coactus ut dormiat sub ejus podice et ut bibat ejus urinam.'

'—and forced to sleep under her buttocks and drink her urine.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Of Pinceurs and Zopfabschneiders -- (Chapter VIII, Part 2)

Before Freud began seducing the West, though, Europe produced a boom in sex research that belies the buttoned-up stereotypes of the nineteenth century.

The Industrial Revolution forced millions of people to migrate to the cities, freeing individuals to make like-minded acquaintances outside their families.

Rather than having to suffer as 'the only pervert in the village,' a person with unconventional kinks could find entire clandestine villages of 'perverts' in the big city.

And faced with this perceived increase in 'perversions'—and their attendant diseases—doctors endeavored to work out whether deviance was inborn or induced: was it breeding or city living that drove people crazy? 

Inevitably, these medicine men framed their diagnoses in the technological (and sexist) metaphors of their time.

In fact, like the old nature-versus-nurture argument, you can still hear people repeating them today.

Doctors concluded that the human body was a complex machine, and sex a uniquely powerful form of energy. To keep the machine from overheating or breaking down, regular releases of energy were necessary.

Conversely, if a body had too much sex—or the wrong sort (viz: masturbation)—the whole thing could blow.

And if that happened to enough people, well, civilization itself could bump and grind to a halt.

The most famous sex expert was a German-Austrian aristocrat who's barely remembered now.

If mentioned at all, Richard von Krafft-Ebing is often vilified as an obsessive cataloguer of 'perversions,' a doctor who created the sexual categories we still live with today.

At a time when the world seemed to be going sex-mad, it was a roly-poly Catholic with kind eyes who crafted the straitjackets.

To be sure, Krafft-Ebing and his fellow sexperts had a tendency to get carried away: besides inventing terms that we still use ('heterosexuality,' 'homosexuality,' 'exhibitionism' and 'pedophilia'), they came up with plenty more that we don't, such as pinceur (a perv who pinched women) and the presumably extinct Zopfabschneider (a perv who chopped off women's hairbuns).

With their Germanic knack for nomenclature, it's a wonder they never minted a term for 'Doctors Who Get Their Kicks Conducting Dodgy Sex Studies in the Name of Research,' such as the gynecologist in Berlin who beavered away, examining 1,000 women—it's hard work, but somebody's got…—to conclude what most of us would have guessed already: that a woman's hair color often matches her pubic follicles.

(The world's still awaiting a follow-up study on men).

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- And Venus Laughed: How Siggie & Co Got Us All Jiggy -- (Chap. VIII, Pt. 1)

Chapter Eight 

AND VENUS LAUGHED 

How Siggie & Co Got Us All Jiggy 

in Fin-de-Siècle Graz and Vienna 

'Things have become livelier. The sexual business attracts people who are all stunned and then go away won over after having exclaimed, "No one has ever asked me about that before!"'

--Sigmund Freud, in a letter to his mentor, Wilhelm Fliess, 1893 

While the French elevated decadence to an art form, their Teutonic counterparts turned it into a science.

A German pioneer in 'sexology' championed the Marquis de Sade's work, and a certain Austrian shrink popularized the term 'sadism' and its pain-loving partner in 1890—naming 'masochism' after a fellow academic (much to his colleague's chagrin).

Even now, the West is struggling with the fallout from fin-de-siècle Austria and its role in inspiring not one but two 'Sexual Revolutions.'

Like Istanbul and Venice before it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a nexus of East and West, controlled by a sclerotic ruler and legions of bureaucrats.

Economically powerful but politically impotent, the moneyed classes focused on pleasuring themselves during the 'Gay Apocalypse,' an era combining Klimt's erotica and the timeless waltzes of Strauss, initially described as 'African and hot-blooded, crazy with life.'

And when the whirl of life ended, the elite insisted on leaving eine schöne Leich: a 'beautiful corpse.'

A modern take on the theme
by Martin Schmid

At the top of society, the young heir to the Empire killed himself and a mistress (conspiracy theorists maintained they were murdered), and the death of the Crown Prince—and the succession of a cripple to the German throne—seemed to prove that Western civilization was breeding itself into extinction.

Nietzsche had declared God dead, and in the midst of this nihilistic, eroticized milieu—where the demimonde was 'everywhere but unseen like the sewers'—a fame-seeking Viennese neurologist with a messiah complex began obsessing about the sex lives of children.