The History of Sex: Prague -- I Blame Gauguin -- (Chapter X, Part 27)

Noting my discomfort, John reckons we should double back to a place called Sweet Paradise, yet another oasis of kitsch in a concrete desert, a pseudo-tropical bar burrowed into a wintry grey street.

Not for the first time on my journey, I can't help but wonder: why do sex clubs have to be so tacky? Why do plastic palm trees and Pavlovian neon signal SEX to the male psyche?

Personally, I blame Gauguin, the artsy stockbroker who ditched his day job in Paris for a life of getting laid in paradise.

Unfortunately, he took his syphilis with him, sharing it with the fourteen-year-olds he purchased with sweets and alcohol until his running sores made him so repulsive even the poorest Tahitians wouldn't touch him.

Paul Gauguin's portrait of Tehura, his 14-year-old 'wife'
in Spirit of the Dead Watching

His paintings, now in every major gallery on the planet, are like The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse: immortalizing an innocent sexual Eden, whereas the reality was sordid and syphilis-ridden, thanks to colonialist cretins like him.

Since Gauguin, the tiki-plasticky look has been the décor de rigueur of dodgy clubs and cocktail bars around the world.

In its own way, Sweet Paradise, promising 'luxurious ambience and almost family atmosphere,' is more surreal—and depressing—than anything Kafka ever dreamt up.

Outside, it's Christmas in the Old Country; inside, it's the Land of the Yuletide Luau, with a full-scale beach hut in the corner adorned with a snowman and accompanying conifer.

A dozen prostitutes sit drinking and smoking on the ledge lining the lounge, facing the few men on hand with expressions ranging from bored apprehension to fabricated lust.

John reckons he's getting the evil eye from the Queen of the Brothel, a pretty enough twenty-year-old, though her hair's so bleached you wonder if it's fallen out in clumps and been superglued back onto her head.

'She's one of the most popular girls here. Clients end up feeling sorry for her,' he laughs. 'She doesn't want to be here. She's got a kid.'

John knows this because he and Martina used to be an item.

'To have someone who you liked as a boyfriend, and who kind of liked you as a girlfriend, pimping you—well, it's not very nice.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Sexpionage, Soviet-Style -- (Chapter X, Part 5)

For Beria, this institutionalized sadism took the form of kidnapping and raping young girls.

Professionally, he also turned sex into one of the KGB's most advanced weapons against the West.

'By using specially trained prostitute spies and combining their skills with the latest technological advances, the Soviet secret service has achieved the most refined form of sexpionage possible,' declared the author of what is in turn one of the most fascinating books from the Cold War era.

In Sexpionage: The Exploitation of Sex by Soviet Intelligence, David Lewis claimed to expose how the KGB trained its agents for work that was literally undercover—revealing, for instance, that the Russians called male sex spies 'ravens' and females… 'swallows.'

Though Lewis was billed as 'one of Britain's leading investigative reporters' in 1976, there's no way his book could have been completely accurate, simply because of its timing and the top-secrecy of its subject.

What's more, the photo on the jacket—a Caucasian jezebel beneath a Soviet flag bedcover—makes you wonder if it should carry a 'Warning: Parts of this book may have been sexed up.'

So more than thirty years afterwards, I tracked down the author to find out. Having documented Commie-v-Capitalist spy gadgets during the Cold War—my fave is the American 'breast transmitter' that fit under a fake nipple—Lewis is now a neuropsychologist who uses brain sensors to advise multinationals on how consumers think as they shop.

Back when he was researching Sexpionage, he tells me, it was hard to assess the information he dug up.

'I think a lot of it was exaggerated—not through my desire—but simply by what I was being told,' he says candidly.

'You just didn't know who to trust. Everybody could've been spinning you a yarn.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'Such Nice, Pretty Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 15)

However, sex was so much a part of Gad's survival that you wonder whether a straight man in his position would have lasted as long as he did.

One of Gad's saving graces, for lack of a better term, was that he had few qualms about having sex with his male protectors.

He got an office job thanks to some help from his Uncle Paul—'which didn't limit itself to the typewriter:' 'we exchanged intimacy deliberately, intentionally, for the first time… It's amazing when you think that at the time he was pushing sixty.'

SOMETHING TO OFFER

And on his twentieth birthday, Gad's German boss took him for ice cream and offered him a place to hide illegals.

'Of course he wanted something in return. He wanted me. I wasn't totally uninterested… I had already noticed he had something to offer in his pants. He was wearing light gabardine slacks that brought out his anatomy nicely.'

One day Gad was told to get in touch with an engineering official named Paul Dreyer who'd helped one of his Jewish lovers escape to Switzerland (another of Gad's unlikely helpers was a middle-aged prostitute who claimed to be an aristocrat).

Ultimately, though, it was a turncoat for the other side who snared him: Stella Kubler, a Jewish femme fatale who hunted Jews in hiding.

The Nazis called Jewish traitor
Stella Kubler 'Blonde Poison'

One of her fellow 'catchers' snared Dreyer in March 1945.

This book was written by one of
Kubler's former classmates at a Jewish school

'He tried to improve his situation during the questioning by claiming he didn't know we were Jews,' Gad wrote.

Instead, Dreyer told his interrogators he'd helped them "because they were such nice, pretty boys."

A few months after the war, Gad saw Dreyer.

'He looked absolutely terrible. They had set two trained dogs on him—specialists in testicles and ears. There wasn't the slightest trace of outer ear to be seen, and he was virtually deaf. With regards to the other body part, he said all that was left was a hole for peeing.'

In the Seventies, Gad bumped into him again.

'He told me—he was around seventy to my fifty-five—that he had by no means given up on sex; there was another spot that had a lot of sensation. I got chills thinking about it.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'A Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin' -- (Chapter IX, Part 13)

Amazingly, some gays managed to survive in the heart of the Reich.

One of the most extraordinary examples is Gad Beck, whose autobiography has an irresistible subtitle (Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin) and highlights just how much sexual attitudes have changed.

For example, he blithely recounts his first sexual encounter when he was nine or so—with his uncle, who was in his fifties:

'He put me on his lap and kissed me on both cheeks. And suddenly I felt that I was sitting on something! It was warm and firm and felt… well… nice. Nothing else happened. He smiled at me in a special way, mischievous and at the same time loving, which is why I tried to provoke these situations. For the first time, I had erotic feelings in that bottom of mine.'

After messing around with his schoolmates, Gad then had a one-off encounter with his PE teacher at the age of twelve.

'I embraced him and noticed that he was aroused as well. We caressed and rubbed against each other, not even all that much, and then we came, both of us.'

Later, when his mother asked how his day had been, he told her excitedly, 'Really nice. I hugged my gym teacher in the locker room. It was really fun.'

At this point, most modern parents would be on the phone to the police.

But Gad claims his mother 'was not at all upset: "Aha, I thought so," she answered dryly.'

Beck explains her response: 'Relationships between boys and girls were treated much more seriously.'

Mainly because of fears of pregnancy, but also Nazi laws on racial mixing.

'If something had happened with a girl in my class, I probably would have been afraid to say anything. But being affectionate with a male teacher? What could happen?... I came out, as you say nowadays, in a totally nonchalant fashion.'

It seems ironic that even the most liberal parents now, having grown up after both Sexual Revolutions, would act more conservatively than a bourgeois German mother in 1934.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'We Knew Too Much' -- (Chapter IX, Part 10)

But the sniping from his own side must have been even more hurtful.

While young foreigners like Isherwood admired Hirschfeld as a 'heroic leader of his tribe,' many of the doctor's one-time allies had begun to view him as a liability.

From the safety of his own closet, the writer Thomas Mann dismissed 'Hirschfeld and his ghastly Committee,' and the leader of Germany's largest organization for gay groups—the so-called League for Human Rights—even started quoting Nazi propaganda against him:

'It is clear that The People's Observer newspaper'—a Nazi mouthpiece—'does not aim to damn homosexuals universally, but instead by and large is striking out only at Jews (especially Magnus Hirschfeld).'

Which made it okay, then.

AND SO IT BEGINS...

However, soon after Hitler took over as Chancellor in January 1933, his 'Campaign for a Clean Reich' shuttered gay clubs and newspapers.

In May, the Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexology, carting away and torching most of its collection and ceremoniously throwing a bust of Hirschfeld onto the bonfire.

Fortunately, the institute's founder was out of the country lecturing at the time: he had the surreal experience of seeing himself burnt in effigy on a newsreel in a Paris cinema (to this day, the stock footage of the infamous Nazi book burnings is usually from the ransacking of the institute). 

Who knew?
This Nazi was probably throwing sex books on the fire

Hirschfeld died two years later in exile.

The Nazis had branded his research center 'an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth.'

However, one official at the institute had a much more intriguing theory: 'We knew too much.'

As the only place for counseling about sexual disorders, the center had treated people from many walks of life, including goose-stepping Nazis.

'Not 10% of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands were sexually normal,' the assistant director said.

'Many of these personages were known to us directly… and of others we saw the tragic results: a young girl whose abdomen was covered with pin scratchings through the sadism of an eminent Nuremberg Nazi; I refer also to a thirteen-year-old boy who suffered from a serious lesion of the anal muscle brought about by a senior party official and to a youth from Berlin with severe rectal gonorrhea…'

'Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material—we possessed about 40,000 confessions and biographical letters—was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.'

Larry Flynt Was My Fleece (or How a Book about Sex Turned Me Into a Christian)

by JR Daeschner

In the end, it was the lies that got to me.

I was in Pompeii, you see, researching what I hoped would be my next big book, a History of Sex that would venture between the past and present, revealing the origins of our notions about love and romance.

Besides the obvious reasons, I'd picked Pompeii because of one little-known fact: the Roman ghost town is the site of the first known reference to the word 'Christian,' dating from around the time that the Apostle Paul visited nearby.

Even more intriguingly, the house that contained the 'CHRISTIANOS' graffiti stands across from Pompeii's brothel (and may have been a whorehouse itself).

But what struck me most was an offhand remark by Pompeii's chief archeologist as he tried to explain the exponential growth of an obscure Semitic sect just a few decades after Rome had crucified its leader like a criminal:

"No religion had ever spread so rapidly in such a capillary manner before."

And that got me wondering why.

Having been raised a Christian, I'd turned my back on the faith partly because I believed the lie that Christianity was anathema to knowledge--I thought that the more you learned about the "real world," the less faith you inevitably had.

As I began to discover, though, that wasn't necessarily true.

If anything, I came to realize that Christians have nothing to fear from learning--while the secular world has a lot to lose from an unbiased look at our past.

I soon learned, for instance, that it was Christ and his followers who gifted the concept of redemption to Western culture--the revolutionary promise that even a prostitute could be redeemed (as opposed to the once-a-whore, always-a-whore ethos of the ancient world).

And it was the early Christians who fought to stop Roman infanticide (making the modern Church's stance on abortion remarkably consistent), while it was Christ's gender-neutral character that enabled women to identify with Him and call themselves Christians--or 'little Christs.'

Contrast Jesus with Mohammed--a celibate pacifist versus a warmonger with a harem--and you can see why feminism took root in traditionally Christian societies.

Whereas polygamy inherently devalues women, it was Paul--the supposed source of Christian "misogyny"--who officially broke with Jewish custom and made marriage one-to-one, mandating that each Christian leader have only one wife and (contrary to Roman practice) actually be faithful to her.

In other words, it's very likely that the only reason Western women dare to demand monogamy from men now is because of centuries of Christianization.

Yet somehow the world continues to slander Christianity as "sex-negative"--and misogynistic to boot.

FREUD'S FRAUD

The cognoscenti will tell you that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, is largely disregarded now, while blithely overlooking his pervasive impact on pop culture and the wreckage it's caused.

For instance, thanks to Freud's declaration that all children want to have sex with their parents (the Oedipus complex), many of his followers dismissed actual cases of sex abuse as wishful fantasies.

And it was one of Freud's disciples, Wilhelm Reich, who helped inspire the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, a period that most documentaries depict as an eminently groovy time to be alive.

But have you ever heard them mention its seedy side?

At a time when erstwhile "perversions"--homosexuality, sadomasochism, etcetera--were being declared perfectly normal, many "revolutionaries" argued that pedophilia was just another avenue for sexploration.

After all, who was to say that consensual sex with children was wrong? Or, as a Dutch magazine for gays put it in 1969, "Why Not Go To Bed With Your Son?"

Modern "pedophile activists" still regard those as the good old days. In the Netherlands, I interviewed the co-founder of an ultra-fringe political party trying to legalize pedophilia.

Who did he blame for putting an end to the child-sex movement? An alliance between an all-but-extinct branch of feminism (they wouldn't have called pole dancing "empowering") and--you guessed it--devout Christians.

That was a truth I heard repeatedly, be it from a dodgy Russian biznesman in Venice or an American pimp in Prague: Christianity acts as a check on decadence.

And time and again, I came across Westerners who were having to relearn history's lessons the hard way.

In Amsterdam, I met a former prostitute turned politician who led a crackdown that shut much of the Red-Light District.

"If you're a Christian organization, people don't want to hear (your views on prostitution) because you're Christian," she told me. "But it's new when a politician from the leftwing says it's not good!'

As for pornography, I interviewed one of the makers of the "Max Hardcore" franchise in LA, a man who's filmed some of the worst violence against women outside of warzones.

"With the sex business, you gotta keep ratcheting up," he said. "It's kinda like violence in movies. You gotta keep ratcheting up. People get inured at a certain point—it's gotta be more, greater, nastier. Filthier."

Funnily enough, that's just what porn's (Christian) opponents say.

JUST ANOTHER CASUALTY

Meanwhile, the media routinely hail Hustler founder Larry Flynt as a hero of the First Amendment, a martyr to free speech.

But did you know he once claimed to be a born-again Christian--and that during his conversion, he had a premonition of himself in a wheelchair?

I asked him about it at his headquarters in Beverly Hills. He admitted that if he had closed Hustler after his conversion--rather than continue defending it in court--he might never have been shot, and he wouldn't be paralyzed today.

Up close and in person, rather than a hero, Flynt looks like just another casualty of porn, a man who's made millions but lost everything that counts, including his "soulmate" and much of his family.

All of this eventually resonated with me.

Lie after lie, I kept coming back to the faith whose truths had been proven over centuries: rules and values that built Western civilization, not because God is a god of arbitrary demands, but because "God so loved the world."

Sure, I also experienced some personal and professional disasters (it's surprising how low some of us have to go before finally surrendering).

But ultimately once I realized the truth, the inevitable question became--what do you do with it? Or "who do you say that I am?"

Some may question my decision to publish The History of Sex.

Well, all I can say is I prayed about it. A lot. And Larry Flynt was my fleece (but that's another story…)

For those of you who struggle to reconcile faith with the "real world" (particularly sex), take it from someone who's had to learn the hard way: the Truth really will set you free.

* * *

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 -- 'Habemus Papam!' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 26)

The reason Fliess was able to lead Freud around by the nose, so to speak, was because his friend thought that he, too, was 'on the scent' of a world-changing discovery.

Building on Charcot's cockeyed theories about sex and hysteria, Freud tackled another ambiguous 'disease' that was all the rage at the time.

A doctor in the US had coined the term 'neurasthenia' to describe a general state of nervousness in modern society caused by factors ranging from rapid urbanization to, um, religious freedom.

But Freud declared to Fliess that the one and only cause of this neurosis (nicknamed 'Americanitis') was an abnormal sex life, specifically masturbation and coitus interruptus (predictably, Fliess thought that wanking also caused inflammation of the nose). 

Of course, onanism had long had a bad rap in Judeo-Christian culture—there was even a theory of 'masturbational insanity' at the time—but Freud managed to convince himself he was onto something new.

He began routinely interrogating his patients about their sexual habits and soon jumped to a truly shocking conclusion: all neurotics had been molested as children by their parents.

'Sending a a woman to a Freudian therapist
is not so far distant from sending a Jew to a Nazi.'
--Gloria Steinem

The myth created by Freud—and perpetuated to this day in books and museums—is that he deduced this from what his patients were telling him.

The reality, though, is that he prodded and bullied them into telling him what he wanted to hear, forcing them (in his own words) to focus on 'repressed sexual ideas in spite of all their protestations.'

A case in point involved a woman who supposedly had symptoms of hysteria: namely, a speech impediment, with cracks and eczema around her mouth.

BUSINESS RULE #1: NEVER PEEVE THE BILL-PAYER

Freud outlined his tortuous thinking, noting that both the patient and her father spoke as if their mouths were full.

'Habemus papam!' he exclaimed.

In what must be an early example of a Freudian slip, the doctor said he 'thrust the explanation at her.'

Much to the patient's surprise, and without any evidence whatsoever, Freud informed her that her dad had forced her to give him fellatio as a girl—and that was why she now had cracked lips and talked funny. 

Unfortunately, he noted, the woman then 'committed the folly of questioning the old man himself,' and her father swore he was innocent.

Most likely he swore a good deal at Freud, too.

The doctor quickly realized that although sex talk with women was good for business (and more pleasurable than he ever admitted), accusing the men who paid their bills of molesting them wasn't.

More importantly, Freud noted that his own siblings were also high-strung, raising inevitable questions about his own papam.

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.

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.’

***

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

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

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

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

But the cover-up didn't end there.

AN ABUSIVE FAMILY TREE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Marquis de Sade and 'The Little Girls' Episode' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 9)

Once he finally started writing porn in prison (having failed as a playwright), the Marquis' work was as extreme as it was prolific.

To this day, Sade's writings are unsurpassed in their configurations of cruelty.

Here's a sample passage from Justine, an underground bestseller that Sade publicly disowned in his craving for respectability:

'The Count sits down again, and, turning his attention to (two young boys), he now obliges them to suck each other, and now he arranges them in such a way that while he sucks one, the other sucks him, and now again the one he sucked first brings round his mouth to render the same service to him by whom he was sucked.'

The only thing that might be more outrageous today would be pedo-fiction written by a convicted child molester.

As it happens, Finn assures me, the Marquis loved children.

He guides me along the terrace and points to some stone buildings knotted around a farmhouse down in the valley.

'That was the old stables of the Marquis de Sade. There's a little headstone down there, and the rumor was that the Marquis killed somebody,' Finn says.

'But the true story is that the Marquis had an affair with one of his chambermaids, and she got pregnant. So the Marquis' wife shipped her down there, and the baby was stillborn and buried. So it's very easy to twist something.'

 That story rings a bell.

'Is that part of the "Little Girls' Episode"?' I ask.

'It could've been.' He eyes me warily, as if to say, You know about that?

Unfortunately, I do.

By now you'll have gathered that I'm not the Marquis' biggest fan, mainly because of the twisted incident his apologists refer to as 'The Little Girls' Episode.'

In the interlude before he was captured, the Marquis hid out at Lacoste while his wife procured a houseful of teenaged servants for his amusement.

With the help of their chambermaid, the Sades hired one boy and five girls, all around fifteen years old and from far enough away to prevent them running back to their parents.

No one knows exactly what happened during those six weeks starting in December 1774, but based on Sade's previous abuses, it's not hard to imagine.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- From Le Marquis to Le Drilldo -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 1)

Chapter Seven
FROM LE MARQUIS TO LE DRILLDO
Porn and Perversion in Paris and Provence

'How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!'

--The Marquis de Sade, on deflowering a fifteen-year-old, 

in Philosophy in the Bedroom, 1795

The prima ballerina has her breasts out, a topless girl's writhing in a cage, a gimp is crawling around on all fours, and a man in a skirt is marching back and forth with a bucket on his head—while another dancer lies naked in a tin bathtub and fake blood drips down the back wall of the stage.

Bienvenue to the world premiere of Sade: The Theatre of Fools or, as I like to think of it, Everybody Spank Now!—billed as the first attempt to tell the story of the infamous marquis through the medium of dance.

But what makes this twist on the myth unique is its setting.

Rather than the jaded confines of a Parisian theatre, we're in a state-of-the-art amphitheatre out in the clear country air of Provence, on the very grounds of the castle where the ignobleman staged his own theatrical extravaganzas—and committed his most unpardonable crimes.

Poster for Sade
with the Marquis' castle in the background

As if that weren't remarkable enough, our host for this evening is Pierre Cardin, the flesh-and-blood brand name who bought the Marquis de Sade's chateau and now owns much of the surrounding hilltop village of Lacoste.

Bizarrely, the rest of the hamlet is roughly divided between natives—some families date back to Sade's time—and New Worlders.

Of all the places in Europe, America's biggest art college (the Savannah College of Art and Design), based in good-ole-boy Georgia, sends its students here for, um, inspiration.

According to one SCAD professor, not all of them know what they're getting into.

'Some of the students don't even know who the Marquis de Sade is when they come here.'

The History of Sex: Seville -- The Bible's Saucy Bits -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 7)

To their credit, Torquemada and Co. also cracked down on the clergy.

According to one expert on the Inquisition, of the 1,735 cases tried by the Tribunal of Barcelona between 1578 and 1635, nineteen percent were for crimes by the clergy.

In Seville, a priest was prosecuted in 1603 for claiming that sodomy wasn't a sin so long as you paid your partner—something he often did while alone with boys in confession.

In fact, complaints about predatory priests were a major reason for the invention of the confessional as we know it: a box that physically separated priests from penitents.

One noteworthy case involved a monk and the most erotic book in the Bible (which, not coincidentally, is also one of its shortest).

In 1572, an Augustinian was hauled up in Valladolid for having translated The Song of Solomon into Spanish.

An auto da fe in front of the Cathedral of Valladolid
in the Covent Garden Opera's production of Don Carlo

Of course, the Church frowned on allowing commoners to interpret the Word of God for themselves, but Fray Luis de León had actually translated the raciest bits into language that any fornicator could understand.

Even some of the translation-happy 'heretics' of Geneva had taken issue with The Song of Solomon and declarations of love such as:

'Your breasts (are) like clusters of fruit… I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.'

Curiously, De León told the Inquisition that he'd translated these fruity passages as a favor for a nun.

However, his cleaner—a fellow monk—found the work in his room and copied it in secret.

The Spanish Song of Solomon soon began circulating as religious samizdat, spreading to Portugal and as far away as Peru.

De León eventually got off with a warning—after five years in jail.

* * *

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.'