The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'The German Vice' -- (Chapter IX, Part 6)

Like history, for instance.

Sooner or later, while slogging through your umpteenth tome on the erotic past, you realize that practically all modern sex histories share one unquestionable underlying assumption: namely, that Sex Is a Very Good Thing Indeed.

Tossing off any pretences of objectivity, even the driest academic works tend to portray 'sexual progress' as being synonymous with 'more sex,' while the only 'good' kind of sexual control is birth control.

As an outsider, it's probably no coincidence that I first noticed this bias while trawling through the literature on homosexuality: I think the book that finally clinched it for me was a university hardback entitled Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600.

By one Helmut Puff.

It was then that I realized: if history is written by the victors, you can practically hear Freddie Mercury caterwauling 'We Are the Champions' when you open your average 'queer studies' text. 

Oddly, though, the genre often overlooks one believe-it-or-not fact: contrary to what I would have guessed, the gay-rights movement didn't begin in New York or London—or even Paris or Amsterdam—but in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century.

As a matter of fact, it was a German émigré (Henry Gerber) who later founded America's first gay organization, naming the Society for Human Rights after the groups he'd been involved with in Berlin.

Some also credit Germany's gay-rights movement with pioneering the term 'activist'—amid a slew of other world firsts.

And not for nothing.

If spanking was le vice anglais, the French called homosexuality le vice allemand.

Homophobia and chauvinism aside, there were many reasons why the Continent's Germanic core became the home of gay emancipation in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps most importantly, Germany's activists had something concrete to kick against.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE 'WOMAN OF THE MILLENNIUM'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'BREEDING RUBBISH'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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