The History of Sex: Prague -- Sex with Crocodiles in the USSR -- (Chapter X, Part 4)

Just as the West was settling into the conservativism of the Fifties, Stalin's regime also tried to recast the bourgeois family unit in the Soviet mold, instituting what Stern mockingly refers to as 'the reign of virtue.'

'Young Pioneers' vowed to stay 'pure in thought, word and deed,' while novelists and filmmakers cranked out heroic tales of Soviet supermen and women who saved their energies for the Party, resisting sex—and the temptation of marrying someone from a dubious (bourgeois) background.

'If you want to be like me--just train!'
A Soviet poster from 1951

A university tract on Youth and the Revolution declared that 'to be sexually attracted to a being who belongs to a different class which is hostile and morally alien is just as much a perversion as it would be to feel sexual attraction for a crocodile or an orangutang.'

Personally, I'd go with the orangutang.

In private, however, the new Party elite were far from abstemious.

Beria, the chief of Stalin's secret police, had cut his teeth in the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB.

The 'Chekists' were loathed by ordinary Soviets, and Stern gives a good idea why.

The poster for Chekist,
a Russian movie from 1992

The mother of one of his patients was a peasant who left the countryside during the great famine of the early 1920s, a time when people in the Volga region had supposedly resorted to eating children to survive.

While she was at the train station, an armed Chekist bullied her into accompanying him home, and she consented, thinking he would at least give her a crust of bread if she had sex with him.

Instead, 'he ordered her to strip—and gave her to his dog.'

After his pet had his way with her, the Chekist kicked her onto the street, without any food or money.

The History of Sex: Prague -- The USSR's Bureau of Free Love -- (Chapter X, Part 3)

For his part, the 'Father of the Russian Revolution' appears to have been appalled by the other revolution he'd unwittingly conceived.

Lenin confided to a comrade that the 'the so-called new sexuality of our young people and adults alike often seems to be merely petty bourgeois, like a version of the fine old bourgeois institution of the brothel.'

Lenin himself ended his days chaste and childless—Stern reckons 'the Communist titan was in fact a sexual pygmy'—and his successor eventually forced the USSR to do a U-turn on its disastrous (and often contradictory) sex laws.

By encouraging copulation, the Bolsheviks had hoped to boost the population.

One of the letters in the Erotic Alphabet designed by
Soviet artist Sergey Merkurov in 1931,
supposedly to combat illiteracy

An early Communist decree in Vladimir had ruled that 'from the age of eighteen all young women are hereby declared to be the property of the state,' requiring them 'to register, on pain of the strictest prosecution, with the Bureau of Free Love.'

When it came to choosing a spouse, frisky Vladimirians were allowed to pick a new one each month, with any offspring deemed 'property of the state.'

Paradoxically, in 1920, the Soviet Union had also become the first major country since antiquity to legalize abortion, effectively making it the birth control of choice.

By 1934, the ratio of abortions to live births was three to two in the countryside—and three to one in Moscow.

With Stalin purging Soviets almost as fast as the proletariat could pump them out, however, the USSR soon outlawed abortion (and homosexuality) and scrapped 'divorce postcards' in favor of red tape and taxes.

By the end of World War Two, the government had started lauding heavy breeders as 'Heroine Mothers,' and a survivor of the gulag recalled that male and female prisoners in his camp were suddenly allowed to commingle; the resultant bastards were spirited away—to be trained as policemen.

The History of Sex: Prague -- Hammer-and-Sickling Out a Solution -- (Chapter X, Part 2)

In theory—particularly the Marxist-Leninist variety—it was never meant to turn out that way.

In trying to build their secular paradise on earth, the founding fathers of Communism were downright puritanical.

Marx, for instance, seems to have been too busy fathering children and a misbegotten economic theory to dabble in infidelity.

Likewise, his money man, Engels, contended that 'marriage founded on sexual love is of its nature monogamous,' arguing that more men would be faithful if women were truly equal.

Decades later, Lenin also supported women's liberation, mainly because he needed all the lumpenproles he could get to prop up his revolution-wrecked economy.

Even so, when it came to the ancient problem of sex, the first Communists had some trouble hammer-and-sickling out a solution.

Sex in the USSR:
a fascinating book from the 1970s
by Dr. Mikhail Stern

Traditional Russian society had been religiously patriarchal, so one of Lenin's first acts—barely a month after the Revolution—was to outlaw church marriage and replace it with civil registration.

A series of truly revolutionary laws put cohabitation on a par with marriage and made it so easy to divorce that a husband could dump his wife without even consulting her: his ex would be informed via an official 'divorce postcard.'

A dissident Soviet sexologist, Dr. Mikhail Stern, later described the social chaos as a 'total collapse of moral values;' by comparison, America's Roaring Twenties were a feeble meow.

'DOWN WITH VIRGINITY!'

While a few bohemians in the West fooled around with 'free love,' Russia's Young Communists went for the full shag, hailing it as the perfect anti-bourgeois model for society.

In one of the more bizarre episodes, crowds marched naked through the streets of Moscow and other cities in 1922 shouting 'Love! Love! Down with Shame! Down with Guilt!'

In the countryside, wily peasants capitalized on the Communists' sex laws by getting hitched to starving 'seasonal wives' in the spring, using them to help plant and harvest, and then throwing them out during the winter.

In the cities, too, the new economic approach to love tended to be freer for men than women.

'Male students despise the girls who refuse to sleep with them,' a female comrade complained to Pravda. 'They consider them to be politically backward petty bourgeois who haven't been able to free themselves from the prejudices of the old society.'

To liberate their classmates, students at Odessa School Number 49 set up a porn group, while a secret society at another school published a magazine called 'Down With Virginity!'

Meanwhile, their elders held public meetings to discuss whether they should build special booths next to public toilets for the sexually incontinent.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'Berlin Meant Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 9)

Among the countless foreigners attracted to this milieu was Christopher Isherwood, who'd heard about Berlin from his friend, Wystan (WH Auden to the rest of us).

Writing in the third person, Isherwood made it clear why he moved to Germany in 1929: 'To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.'

Auden had introduced him to his favorite rent-boy bar, where another regular recalled that the blond Aryans wore 'extremely short lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs to delectable advantage'—with the pockets cut out for ease of access.

Soon after his arrival, Isherwood visited the world's first Institute of Sexology, founded by Hirschfeld a decade earlier in a grandiose building in the Tiergarten.

The doctor's much younger lover—and later Hirschfeld himself—took him on a tour of the center, where Isherwood giggled with embarrassment at the menagerie of 'sex in every manifestation.'

Photos of hermaphrodites decorated the walls, and live specimens were on hand for inspection—including a young man with 'two perfectly formed female breasts.'

Hirschfeld dubbed cross-dressers 'transvestites' and ended up counseling the first sex-change patient, a Danish painter (Einar Mogens Wegener / Lili Elbe) who died after his final operation—a failed attempt to transplant a woman's ovaries into his body so that he could become a mother.

The same year that Hirschfeld opened the institute, he'd also produced and starred in the world's first gay film, shot in the Schöneberg district.

Different From the Others (or Anders als die Andern) was released in 1919 and told the highly didactic tale of a gay man driven to suicide by a blackmailer exploiting Paragraph 175, with a star turn by Hirschfeld as a sexpert.

Classic dowager line at 29:29 -- 'If that boy's completely normal, then I'm a virgin.' Hirschfeld himself appears at 30:50 in this hour-long clip.

The silent film had been banned in the Nazi stronghold of Munich, as well as Vienna, where a gunman fired into the audience.

Hirschfeld himself had been attacked by anti-Semites in Munich in 1920.

'He was so beaten that his eloquent mouth could never again be kissed by one of his "disciples",' a Nazi noted.

Nevertheless, the fifty-two-year-old doctor had bravely returned the following year—and received such a hiding that some papers ran his obituary.

Hirschfeld survived, however—only to be shot at during a lecture in Vienna.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Splitting the Third Sex Into Two Camps -- (Chapter IX, Part 8)

The first gay-rights activist died in self-imposed exile in Italy before he could see the culmination of his life's work.

On May 15, 1897, a nucleus of friends in Berlin founded the world's first gay-rights group to lobby for the abolition of Paragraph 175, the Prussian statute outlawing 'unnatural acts' between men.

Over the next decade, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee's petition collected 6,000 signatures, including those of Krafft-Ebing and many other heterosexuals.

However, infighting soon split the movement into two camps, so to speak—a divide that's still detectable today.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee headed up the main group, led by a young doctor who advocated the third-sex theory.

Although noticeably effeminate—his friends called him Auntie Magnesia—Magnus Hirschfeld never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality for fear it would make his (already dubious) research look biased.

The fact that he was also Jewish was not lost on his enemies.

Magnus Hirschfeld,
the 'Hero of the Day'
campaigning to do 'Away with Paragraph 175!'

A widely read work on Sex and Character (written by Otto Weininger, a suicidal Jew in Vienna) equated Jewishness with femininity and blamed Semitism for the decay of Aryan culture.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile ally of Hirschfeld's launched the world's first successful gay magazine, Der Eigene—a word meaning 'self,' 'same' and/or 'different.'

Adolf Brand was what we'd now call 'straight-acting,' the ringleader of a radical minority of gay supremacists, many of whom were anti-Semites to boot.

Adolf Brand
is the one in the upper righthand corner

Styling themselves the Community of the Special, Brand and his followers resented being portrayed as 'stepchildren of nature' by eggheaded pansies.

On the contrary, they argued that pederasty was a lifestyle choice that separated truly macho men from the boys.

Romanticizing both the ancient Greeks and Germans, they painted homosexuality as a higher form of love, contending that they should be free to bugger their fellow men while using straight women to further the Aryan race.

In the blank-slate euphoria after World War One, Hirschfeld hoped that Germany's fledgling democracy would follow the lead of the new Soviet Union and legalize homosexuality.

Instead, the ensuing turmoil fueled a degree of hedonism rarely seen since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.

For the next fifteen years, Germany became a magnet for sexual 'perverts,' with homosexual magazines sold openly on newsstands, thousands of people around the country joining same-sex associations and more than a hundred gay bars operating in the capital (many of them owned by German Jews, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf).

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

Like history, for instance.

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

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

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

By one Helmut Puff.

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

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

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

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

And not for nothing.

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Why We're All Freudians Now -- (Chapter VIII, Part 32)

But perhaps the main reason 'we're all Freudians now' is because of the insidious way his doctrines conquered America—and consequently, the rest of the world.

A must-see BBC series called The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis starts off by profiling the man who founded PR. Edward Bernays also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Born in Vienna in 1891, his family emigrated to New York, where Bernays made his name drumming up public support for the US to enter World War One.

When postwar inflation wiped out much of Uncle Sigmund's savings, Freud wrote to his nephew for help, and Bernays arranged for his works to be published in America.

A SUBSTITUTE PENIS?

While hyping his uncle and making him palatable to the public, Bernays also capitalized on his theories, advising corporations on how to convince people to buy things they didn't need.

Aptly enough, one of his first big commercial breaks used Freud's misogynistic notion of penis envy to harm women: he convinced them to smoke.

'Today, legally, politically and socially, 
womanhood stands in her true light. 
AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE has cast aside the ancient prejudice that held her to be inferior.
Gone is that ancient prejudice against cigarettes...'

Up until then, smoking was still taboo for American women.

So Bernays consulted one of his uncle's acolytes, who told him—you guessed it—that cigarettes were phallic symbols.

To get women to smoke, Bernays needed to get them to viewing cigarettes as symbols of power—et voila! they would have their very own penis substitutes.

Of course, a cigarette is no more phallic than an ice-cream cone: in fact, it probably has more dis-similarities than similarities to a penis. I, for one, wouldn't want a woman to try and light mine with a match.

Nevertheless, Bernays engineered a maiden 'media event' in 1929: he tipped off the press that some women's rights activists were planning to light up during a New York parade; in reality, the photogenic young flappers were debutantes hired by Bernays.

The scam worked, and the media parroted his line that the 'suffragettes'' smokes were actually 'Torches of Freedom.'

'...Progress has been made.
We removed the prejudice against cigarettes
when we removed from the tobacco harmful corrosive ACRIDS.
Thus "TOASTING" has destroyed that ancient prejudice
against cigarette smoking by men and by women.'

Somewhat ironically—female cancer victims might even say deservedly—it was Uncle Sigmund's own nicotine habit that ultimately killed him.

Freud relied on the steady buzz of at least twenty cigars a day for literary inspiration, eventually contracting cancer of the jaw.

After the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, Freud's high-placed friends and fortune enabled him to escape to London, where he fulfilled his wish to 'die in freedom' at the age of eighty-three.

Or have we?
A cigarette ad, c1971

Victorian Shocker: Ladies Liked Sex!

From the archive: 2010

Here's another knock for the myth that the Victorians were a bunch of prudes: a little-known survey that shows ladies of the era actually enjoyed sex.

In fact, one woman said she chose to sleep apart from her husband 'to avoid temptation of too frequent intercourse.'

Dr. Clelia Mosher began interviewing American women about their sex lives starting in 1892.

By 1920, she'd compiled 45 profiles.

Her results—which predated Kinsey's studies by a half century—showed that although most women entered marriage ignorant of sex (some admitted that they'd learned by 'watching farm animals'), most of them came to love it.

'Of the 45 women, 35 said they desired sex; 34 said they had experienced orgasms; (and) 24 felt that pleasure for both sexes was a reason for intercourse,' according to an excellent article in the Stanford Alumni magazine.

As one respondent, born in 1860, put it: 'My husband and I… believe in intercourse for its own sake—we wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness.'

MY KINDA GAL 

In The History of Sex (But Not As We Know It), I note one of the ironies of the Sexual Revolution: we may very well be having less sex than our ancestors.

I also argue that we should learn from the early campaigners for gender equality and ignore the sex-obsessed celebrity feminists of the Sixties.

Compared to them, Mosher looks like an unsung heroine who spent her career trying to prove that women weren't inferior to men.

Dr. Mosher in her Red Cross uniform

In her day, people thought that women breathed from their chests rather than their diaphragms, but Mosher showed that this supposed biological difference was probably the result of tight corsets.

She also developed abdominal exercises—'moshers'—to counter menstrual pain, arguing that debilitating periods were partly due to a lack of exercise and the common practice of confining women to their beds during 'that time of the month.'

'Equal pay for women means equal work; unnecessary menstrual absences mean less than full work,' she wrote.

Mosher apparently lived quite a lonely life – again, the Stanford article is well worth reading – but she envisaged a day when life would be different for intelligent women like her.

'Born into a world of unlimited opportunity, the woman of the rising generation will answer the question of what woman's real capacities are,' she wrote in 1923. 'She will have physical, economic, racial and civic freedom. What will she do with it?'

Fortunately, Dr. Mosher didn't live to see 'Girls Gone Wild.'