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

Chapter Nine

DEUTSCHLAND, DEUTSCHLAND,

ÜBER PHALLUS

Queer as Volk since 1897

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Concocting the Oedipal Complex -- (Chapter VIII, Part 28)

What was novel about Freud's take on the Unconscious was his contention that people were ruled from infancy by their libidos.

Around the time that he was exculpating himself for having helped one friend to kill himself with cocaine and another to disfigure a patient, he claimed to remember that his own libido had been awakened towards his mother when he was roughly two years old.

Freud reckoned he'd made a journey with his mother to Vienna 'during which we must have spent the night together and there must have been an opportunity of seeing her nudam,' he told Fliess.

As if that weren't speculative enough, Freud then admitted that the inspiration for this was Fliess himself and his remark about his own young son supposedly having an erection after seeing his mother naked.

So Freud cobbled together a pseudo-memory of his own and a disparate anecdote from a colleague to concoct a grand unified theory of child sexuality.

Incredibly, Freud then congratulated himself for his candor.

'Being totally honest with oneself is a good exercise,' he wrote, claiming that he realized he'd been in love with his mother and jealous of his father. 'I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.'

Eh?

To this day, there's no proof to support Freud's very specific claim that all boys aged two to three literally want to have sex with their mothers (or vice-versa little girls and their fathers).

Ironically, though, one reason that the Oedipus Complex has been accepted into popular mythology is because it ties in neatly with the old Christian view of sex and Original Sin: it's probably no coincidence that Freudianism took off in traditionally—or perhaps formerly—puritanical countries like England and America.

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 -- But Did She Stop Masturbating? -- (Chapter VIII, Part 25)

Now, having already made a charlie of himself a decade earlier, you'd think Freud would have learned his lesson about cocaine.

On the contrary, he had a lingering fascination with the drug, compounded by his lifelong inability to admit mistakes, ruining at least one more life in the process.

In 1895, he diagnosed a female patient as suffering from Fliess' made-up disease, supposedly caused by masturbation.

A myth with legs:
reminiscent of Fliess' theory that the nose contains 'genital spots',
this 'nasal delivery technology' was supposed to boost your sex life --
before the UK authorities banned the ads for being 'crass'
Getty Images

The two doctors decided that Fliess had to come to Vienna to remove a bone in the thirty-year-old's nasal cavity.

The problem was, Fliess didn't have much surgical experience.

So if you're squeamish, look away now…

Considering that Emma Eckstein underwent completely unnecessary, life-threatening surgery at the hands of an inexperienced quack, it's not all that surprising that the patient developed problems soon after Fliess had left Vienna.

She was in severe pain, hemorrhaging repeatedly and secreting a noxious fluid.

Oh—and her head started to emit a 'fetid odor,' as Freud recounted later in a letter to Fliess.

Partners in crime: Freud and Fliess in the 1890s

After she'd already been suffering for two weeks, Freud finally called in another surgeon friend who cleaned the wound, 'removed some sticky blood clots, and suddenly pulled at something like a thread, (and) kept on pulling. Before either of us had time to think, at least half a meter of gauze had been removed from the cavity. The next moment came a flood of blood. The patient turned white, her eyes bulged, and she had no pulse.'

'I felt sick,' Freud continued—no doubt at the sight of his career dying before his eyes—and admitted that he had to leave the room.

While the surgeon battled to stop the hemorrhaging, Freud had a cognac to recover to his default position and blame somebody else: not his dear friend Fliess, who had carelessly left nearly two feet of gauze up the patient's nose, but the subsequent surgeon who'd actually saved the woman's life.

'He should immediately have thought, There is something inside; I shall not pull it out lest there be a hemorrhage,' Freud claimed.

Remarkably, the poor patient had remained conscious during the ordeal.

'When I returned to the room somewhat shaky,' the doctor reported with typical self-regard, 'she greeted me with the condescending remark, "So this is the strong sex."'

The redoubtable woman underwent further surgery and wound up permanently disfigured.

Despite all this, Freud continued to swear by his friend—and claim that in actuality it was the woman's hysteria that caused her to hemorrhage to 'entice' Freud to pay attention to her.

For his part, Fliess went on to publish a monograph on The Relations Between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect.

One reviewer, noting Fliess' claim that diseased tonsils made children cross-eyed, condemned the book as 'disgusting gobbledygook:'

'In not a few places the reader has the impression that the author is making fun of him.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- 'Repeated Doses of a Normal Penis' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 24)

Likewise, most nineteenth-century 'hysterics' were probably suffering from ailments we now know as epilepsy, closed-head injuries, Tourette's syndrome, multiple sclerosis and even syphilis.

In treating his own father for the latter, Charcot suspended him by the neck to 'lengthen' his nerves.

Unfortunately, being hanged also hastened the old man's demise.

Presumably, Charcot's cure for a young woman was far more pleasurable: Freud confessed himself dumbfounded when he heard his mentor declare that the woman's nervousness was due to her husband's poor sexual prowess.

'In cases like this, it's always the genital thing,' he exclaimed. 'Always, always, always.'

In other words: All she needs is a good seeing to.

Likewise, another colleague of Freud's prescribed the following for high-strung women—

'Penis normalis dosim repetatur'

or 

'Repeated doses of a normal penis.' 

Back in Vienna, Freud struck up a long-distance friendship with a younger colleague in Berlin named Wilhelm Fliess.

The two had the sort of intense, platonic bond that men had enjoyed for centuries; ironically, though, it's largely because of the sexed-up theories Freud formulated in his correspondence with Fliess that society now tends to view close male friendships with suspicion.

Freud would tell Fliess how he 'panted' for their next 'congress,' and Wilhelm soon became a sounding board and mentor, with Sigmund waiting on his pronouncements 'as on the Messiah.'

Sadly for the rest of us, Fliess was even more deluded than Freud.

Eager to make his mark, he invented a new disease—the 'nasal reflex neurosis'—as well as its cure: regular applications of cocaine to the nostrils.

What's more, Fliess claimed the inside of the nose contained 'genital spots' that were hardwired to people's privates—especially women's—creating scope for sexual positions that even The Kama Sutra didn't envisage.

Sure enough, like Freud, Fliess found that coke could cure pretty much whatever ailed you—or at least make you feel like it did—especially if you stuffed it up your nose.

Imagine what Fliess would've made of this:
Thomas Wedders, an 18th century Yorkshireman,
had the longest nose in history: 7 inches (19 cm),
according to Ripley's Believe It Or Not in London
(The Daily Telegraph)

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Hysteria Mysteria -- (Chapter VIII, Part 23)

Having struck out with drugs, Sigmund then tried to make it big with sex (as rock and roll had yet to be invented).

Freud went to study in Paris with a famous neurologist who was now well into his quack years.

Jean-Martin Charcot specialized in a very voguish malady that eventually served as the ersatz foundation of Freud's entire career.

'Hysteria' was a catch-all affliction attributed to women (and a few men) who suffered from complaints ranging from anything as minor as a nervous cough to convulsions, partial paralysis, wild gesticulations known as 'clownism,' and, in female patients, the sensation of being suffocated by their wombs rising into their throats.

One of Charcot's 'hysterical' women

In fact, the definition was so broad that a skeptical American dubbed it 'mysteria.'

Charcot, in contrast, touted hysteria as 'the great neurosis' and argued that its main cause was emotional rather than physical trauma, claiming, in effect, that symptoms like paralysis were all in the mind.

So if a barrowboy was run over and subsequently suffered seizures and nosebleeds, Charcot would attribute his afflictions to the emotional impact of the accident rather than the obvious fact that the poor 'hysteric' probably had brain damage from being knocked stone cold by a carriage.

In fairness, neurologists at the time didn't have the technology to detect minor cerebral lesions.

But the truth is that hysteria was all but impossible to treat because it probably never existed in the first place—certainly not on the scale that Freud and his 'great teacher' diagnosed it.

In all likelihood, most of the unfortunate souls branded as 'hysterics' by Charcot and Freud were actually physically—rather than psychologically—ill.

Indeed, years later, Freud blamed a fourteen-year-old girl's 'noisy manifestations of hysteria' for causing him to overlook her genuine complaint: abdominal pains.

Having been 'cured' by Freud of hysteria, the girl later died of what had really been ailing her: stomach cancer.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Freud and the First Speedball -- (Chapter VIII, Part 22)

One of Freud's best friends (and rivals) in Vienna had become addicted to morphine and its cousin, heroin, after having a finger amputated, so Sigmund recommended that his colleague try to cure himself by… switching to cocaine.

For his part, Freud noticed that it helped him work, and sure enough, within weeks, the coked-up doctor had cranked out the first of a series of papers heralding cocaine as a wonder drug, not only as an aphrodisiac but as a cure for morphine and alcohol addiction.

Without having done any proper scientific research himself—a hallmark of Freud's entire career—he claimed that one of his patients had been able to kick the morphine habit after just ten days—and stop taking cocaine, too.

In reality, the 'patient' was his nine-fingered friend, Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, and he was far from cured.

By April 1885, the man had a full-blown coke habit, and he eventually started mixing it with morphine and heroin.

Fully aware of this, Freud started warning his fiancée in private against getting too fond of the drug.

Nevertheless, in public, he continued to recommend injecting cocaine, refuting claims that it was addictive.

In fact, the American drug company started using his endorsements to trumpet its gear over its German rival's, claiming that its coke was the real thing.

Thanks to Freud's hype, physicians on both sides of the Atlantic started dishing out pharmaceutical-grade cocaine for morphine addicts.

Within months, they reported cases of morphine junkies suffering from cocaine psychosis.

A German psychiatrist denounced Freud for creating a 'scourge of humanity,' and indeed, it was his dodgy research—and a genuine discovery by one of his colleagues (Karl Koller realized it could be used as an anesthetic)—that created the first global market for cocaine.

As the backlash against his own spurious claims grew, Freud did what came naturally: he lied, claiming, for instance, that he'd never advocated injecting cocaine.

As for his former 'patient' and colleague who he'd convinced to swap one addiction for another, well, he died at 45 hooked on coke and morphine, making him possibly the first victim of a 'speedball.'

Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow

Young Sigmund felt really bad about this, though he managed to turn this posthumous remorse to his benefit.

The inspiration for his landmark Interpretation of Dreams was a dream about a syringe that reminded him of his erstwhile rival.

Ironically—demonstrating a remarkable lack of psychological insight—Freud denied his role in his colleague's death and effectively blamed his dead friend for having 'poisoned himself with cocaine.'

Freud: young and old

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 -- 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 -- It All Comes Together in the Sacher-Masoch Suite -- (Chapter VIII, Part 13)

So far, that seems premature.

Sacher-Masoch's house in Graz is now a place where people go to treat their ills; apparently, the pharmacy even has a plaque commemorating the author of Venus in Furs, but I'm too distracted by the billboard across the way advertising Der Venus Club, a girlie bar that takes its symbol from another Renaissance masterpiece—Botticelli's Birth of Venus (gold and silver plated)—and charges €75 for half an hour with a 'Top Girl' in themed rooms spanning Hollywood, Africa, Harlem… and, um, Britain. 

If only I'd known…

Instead, I've booked the 'Wanda Sacher-Masoch Suite' at a hotel in the center.

Leopold and Aurora used to dine at the Erzherzog Johann after the opera, so as part of the 2003 festival, the hotel's owners concocted a cake fit for masochists—the Sacher-Masoch Torte, natürlich (with layers of fruit and marzipan)—and dedicated a suite to the unhappy couple.

Its designer is the same Austrian woman who bullied the Pole for performance art, and the centerpiece is a large portrait of her posing as Wanda in the middle of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, right in front of Titian's Venus in Furs as well as his Ecce Homo/Christ Before Pilate.

Irene Andessner as Wanda

Now, this is all very exciting for me because the photo ties together Titian, his pornographer mate Aretino (as Pilate)...

...and the same saucy model from the Venus of Urbino...

...posing as Venus in Furs (aka The Woman in the Fur Coat)...

—plus an Austrian artist playing Sacher-Masoch's muse.

Irene Andessner's Wanda wears thigh-high boots, a corona and a satin-lined cloak with a massive train: the fake fur in the portrait is actually the bedspread of the four-poster in the Sacher-Masoch Suite.

Though the room's color scheme is predictable—black and white with red velvet features—it's the details that take the room gloriously over the top: the (somewhat disturbing) cameo of the artist as Wanda inside the bed's canopy—gloating over you while you sleep (or not)…

...the quote from Venus in Furs on the glass panels in the bathroom… the life-sized projection of Venus on the shower wall when the lights are dimmed… and the pièce de résistance: a Gideon's Bible next to the telephone.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- 'The Century of Sacher-Masoch' -- (Chapter VIII, Part 12)

You may have blinked and missed it, but Graz was Europe's Capital of Culture in 2003, the same year its most famous son did his bit for world culture in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.

Nowadays, though, Schwarzenegger is a former Governator non grata, after Graz's assembly denounced him for sending a convicted killer to his death in California.

(The city hasn't always been so conscientious, however, having produced more than its fair share of Nazis—including Arnie's own police chief father.)

The star of Kindergarten Cop promptly returned a 'ring of honor' to Graz and demanded that it remove his name from the local sports stadium.

MASOMANIA

As for its other infamous son of a local police chief, Graz has also had a tortuous relationship.

The story goes that Sacher-Masoch's widow tried to have his ashes interred in Graz, but the city fathers refused to let his cinders besmirch their soil.

In the sexed-up twenty-first century, however, the dead writer has become an underground celebrity, with at least one French philosophe bemoaning the fact that masochism 'has suffered from unfair neglect' versus sadism, and Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals bickering over which country is the true home of the perversion: Sacher-Masoch's hometown was actually the city of Lviv in Ukraine, which now boasts a Masochist Café and a life-size bronze statue of him, while some Russians argue that he got his taste for a good whipping from their native sect of khlysty, or flagellants.

According to this fascinating Russian blog post on monuments people rub and kiss, the statue "hides a few 'surprises': in chest was mounted magnifying glass through which erotic pictures can be seen, and by putting a hand into the left pocket you can touch its 'man-dignity' for good luck." 

To justify Graz's EU sop in 2003, a local art gallery hosted a full-blown Sacher-Masoch Festival, including a film festival, a conference featuring a domina friend of the Fanny I met in Paris, lectures with titles like 'The Headaches and Rewards of the Dominatrix in the Relationship with a Submissive/Masochist' and a program of 'Masomania' performances, as well as an installation piece featuring a weedy little Pole being bullied by an Austrian (alas, some things never change).

'The 20th century was the century of de Sade,' the festival declared. 'The 21st century will be the century of Sacher-Masoch.'

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 -- Pleasure-Seeking Pagans -- (Chapter VIII, Part 8)

Venus in Furs is a remarkably modern tale about a Galician nobleman who falls in love with a rich, young Russian and turns her into a sadist.

Severin and Wanda von Dunajew initially bond over their belief that the Christian world is corrupt; it's more honest to live as pleasure-seeking pagans.

Unlike many modern hedonists, though, they're realistic about 'the world of the ancients:'

'Pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand. People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish ponds, and gladiators who do battle while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters them.' 

As in his real-life fling with Fanny, Sacher-Masoch's alter ego in Venus in Furs adopts the common servant's name of Gregor and follows his Mistress to Italy, where she seduces a Greek.

Besides their contract, Wanda goes the extra mile by having Severin write a suicide note in case she opts to kill him.

Sure enough, the crueler she treats him, the more he worships her, especially when she's wearing fur.

'Furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures,' Severin explains. 'Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth… This is why cats exercise such a magic influence...'

'A woman wearing furs, then, is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?' 

'Certainly.'

You'll have guessed that the ending isn't warm and fuzzy: Severin is 'cured' by being whipped within an inch of his life; he then turns into a sadist himself.

Years later, the Galician tells a friend what he's learned: in love, a man 'has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman.'

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The Original Mistress-Slave Relationship -- (Chapter VIII, Part 7)

Being slapped around entertained him for a bit, but Sacher-Masoch eventually tired of the doctor's wife, deeming her too common to be a despotic sultana or tsarina.

So he started trying to offload her onto some other sod, thinking the jealousy might spice up their adultery.

Sacher-Masoch had shown Anna a draft of what would be his most famous work—Venus in Furs—but she never really got what he wanted.

What she did get, though, was syphilis from a 'Polish Count' who'd been encouraged by Sacher-Masoch to seduce her.

Even worse, the 'Count' turned out to be an impostor, and when Anna tearfully confessed her infidelity—and contagious disease—to Sacher-Masoch, he pretended to be offended… and neatly cut her dead in the process.

THE FANNY OF HIS DREAMS

Leopold then flirted with a manly Baroness from Munich who turned out to be a lesbian before he finally found the Fanny of his dreams.

Or, to be precise, Fanny found him.

In 1869, Sacher-Masoch received a fan letter from a would-be authoress who signed herself as 'Baroness Bogdanoff' but in reality was just plain ol' Fanny Pistor.

Nevertheless, they soon embarked on the original Mistress-Slave relationship, complete with a six-month written contract giving her the right to punish 'Gregor' at will.

In return, she promised to wear furs as often as possible: 'especially when she is in a cruel mood.'

Sacher-Masoch and Fanny: Mistress and Slave

Mistress and Slave immediately left boring old Graz to live out their fantasies in Venice, where Sacher-Masoch encouraged Fanny to have an affair with an Italian actor he insisted on calling 'the Greek' (because it sounded more exotic).

That year, the writer also published Venus in Furs, basing the title on his nickname for a painting by Titian (which is actually called Venus with a Mirror).

As with the Venus of Urbino, Sacher-Masoch's fixation features a hefty goddess in the buff, but Titian painted her dripping in jewels and fur.

The saucy detail is in the trim: her fur cloak cunningly overlays her mons veneris.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- The First Masochist -- (Chapter VIII, Part 6)

The 'first masochist' had come into the world around the same time that sadism made its way into the dictionaries.

Like the Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was an aristo with theatrical tastes who became a bestselling author and wound up dying in an asylum.

As with sadism's namesake, he was probably a bit odd to begin with.

Born in 1836, he came from Austrian Galicia, a culturally rich but cruelly poor region on the frontiers of Russia and Poland.

When Leopold was barely ten, his father helped crush a master-versus-servant revolt in Galicia that featured all the usual Slavic bloodlust: massacres, rapes, lynchings and people being buried alive.

A contemporary noted that Galician women had two choices: 'Either they fully dominate the husband and make him their slave, which is their most usual behavior, or else they themselves sink to the most pitiable level of abject existence.'

As a boy, Sacher-Masoch idealized his mother as one of Raphael's Madonnas, but the woman he idolized was his father's sister.

Tall and domineering, his aunt had a comically theatrical name: the Countess Zenobia.

Sacher-Masoch would later recall impulsively kissing her foot while helping her put on her shoes.

Like a good aunt, the Countess laughed at her nephew; then, like a bad aunt, she kicked him in the face.

LET THE SLAPPING BEGIN...

Some time later, the little Chevalier was secretly playing in her bedroom—sniffing her furs, natch—when she rushed in with a lover.

While Leopold hid in the wardrobe, her husband happened to interrupt the adulterers, but instead of begging his forgiveness, the Countess leapt up and slapped the Count in the face.

After he and the lover fled the room (via different exits, naturally), the frustrated Countess discovered her nephew's hiding place and gave him a hiding.

Whereas most people might try to forget such a trauma, Sacher-Masoch spent his life trying to recreate it.

Having qualified as a doctor of law at just nineteen, he published his first book two years later as a professor at the University of Graz.

Around the same time, he met the first of his would-be dominatrixes.

Anna was the sexy wife of a doctor (with whom she also had two children), and her young admirer was attractive in a tortured artist-mad hatter kind of way, with tousled hair and intense eyes that diverted attention from his irregular features.

What's more, Sacher-Masoch had a way with words—not to mention a steady income from his family.

The pair flaunted their affair until the writer began to realize that Anna was a gold-digger.

When Leopold finally challenged her about spending his money, she slapped him.

She immediately apologized, but to her surprise, he replied, 'No, Anna. I like it—do it again.'

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.