The History of Sex: Prague -- 'The State is Pimp' -- (Chapter X, Part 16)

For the most part, the protests against the invasion were fatality-free.

A unique eyewitness account comes from a sex writer who toured Czechoslovakia before, during and after the Prague Spring.

Mankoff's Lusty Europe is a vintage sex guide, one of those books you can't believe was ever published, let alone in 1972—and by a reputable publisher.

Having already ventured behind the Iron Curtain into East Berlin, author 'Allan Mankoff' (rhymes with…) also trawled the streets of Prague.

'There are no apparent pimps,' he concluded. 'The State is pimp.'

Dolled-up 'Tuzex girls' would sleep with foreigners for hard currency to buy Western luxuries in state-run 'Tuzex' stores.

One 'beautiful young coed' was selling herself for thirty dollars a night. 'The Soviet Union will never let us go… and so, I shall sleep with a hundred men and then I shall have enough money to go to England.'

Mankoff also described the tense scene as a schoolgirl mooned Russian troops in the Old Town.

'For a frightening instant, one young guard who looks no more than seventeen teases the nipple of her heaving breast with his bayonet. Then he lowers it, grins, says something dirty in Russian, and the girl runs off in the direction of the macabre, death-mask likeness of Kafka which marks his former residence.'

One of the main goals of the Prague Spring had been to force the Party to punish those responsible for the purges and show trials of twenty years earlier.

The media had taken advantage of its freedom to try to rehabilitate a little-known martyr of democracy and genuine heroine of postwar Europe.

Milada Horakova had fought against the Nazis and spent nearly five years in concentration camps.

Horakova defending herself at her trial

After the War, she resigned from parliament to protest against the Communist coup.

Accused of conspiring against the regime, she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death in 1950.

Her last words under the gallows were: 'I have lost. I die like a soldier—with honor. I love my country and its people… I wish for you… I wish…'

And then the hangman cut her dead.

'The Communists did what the Nazis never dared to do. On June 27th, 1950, Milada Horakova was hanged.'
You can read this Cold War 'comic book' about her life here.

* * *

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 -- No Famine of Phalluses -- (Chapter IX, Part 25)

In truth, that image summed up my initial impressions of Berlin's gay scene.

Given Germany's pioneering role in the gay rights movement and the sacrifices made by its homosexuals over the decades, it seemed overwhelmingly tragic that modern Berlin should be just another gay party capital renowned for shopping and shagging.

But then I went to see Karl-Heinz Steinle, the curator of the world's first Schwules Museum: the only 'Gay Museum' in the global village.

One of the museum's exhibits

'I would say that Berlin is actually more balanced than other cities,' he explains. 'Berlin has these dark-sex-triple-gangbang-fuck-rooms—'

—a word I would love to see written in German— 

'—with all the drugs and stuff. And it has, let's say, new ideas, experimental gender-crisscrossed rooms and programs and quite a few historical groups.'

The Schwules Museum began in a flat before the fall of the Wall and now occupies an old industrial workshop; its neighbours are a gay café and a shop called 'Faster, Pussycat!'

'There is one part of gays' thinking that isn't so interested in history, but there is another part which is enormously interested to be able to say "I'm not the first one,"' Karl-Heinz says.

'The museum's development from a little special interest group to the institution that we are now also establishes gay history as a scientific study. It's not done by gays who want to say, "I will collect 2,000 photographs of cocks."'

That said, there's no famine of phalluses in the museum's exhibit on two centuries of gay history.

Inevitably, as with Freud's house in Vienna, Berlin's Gay Museum takes the we-are-the-champions approach to history.

But amid the usual namechecks—nods to the Greeks and Romans, plus Dietrich, Wilde, Auden and Isherwood—it also displays plenty of curiosities: an anal diagram from a French medical text in 1878 showing 'Desordres que produit la pederastie' (it ain't pretty)… Gestapo photos of known homosexuals, taken in three poses (including with and without hats)… and kitsch Seventies copies of him: das magazine mit dem mann featuring weedy sex symbols with bush cuts and sideburns before the American gym-bunny aesthetic conquered the world.

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 -- 'I Don't Even Know What That Is' -- (Chapter IX, Part 14)

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

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

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

OTHER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT

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

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

Like getting caught.

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: 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

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 -- 'I Don't Want to Sound Racist, But...' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 29)

I'd rather not.

With all that and more under his belt, it's not surprising that Milukman views classic erotica like Emmanuelle as risibly tame.

'I'm from the new generation of producers. There's a gap between Emmanuelle and what I do,' he tells me, by which I think he means that old-school filmmakers tried to hide behind a fig leaf of artistic pretension, whereas his naked ambition is all about money shots.

But that's not what he's getting at.

'People of the old school did it because they loved it,' he explains.

'They were perverts—cochons—pigs. The new generation does it only because it's business. When we get together at meetings, we talk about links and partnerships, not about fucking.'

'You see webmasters who look like choirboys. There are a lot of men like me who didn't think they would work in sex, but sex came to them via the Internet.'

One glorious day I turned on the computer, and lo and behold, sex had come to me via the Internet! 

Likewise, Milukman rejects any notion that he enjoys degrading women, much less that he's a sadist.

'My job is as a businessman. This is just a business opportunity.'

'So if you could make the same money selling potatoes—'

'—then we would do that!' he smiles triumphantly. 'I want to show that you can do porn on the Internet without being a pervert.'

Which sounds perversely puritanical.

And while your mind's reeling from that, I should point out that I have no idea whether the makers of Emmanuelle were cochons.

When I mention another elder veteran of the French hardcore scene, though, Milukman is scathing: 'He's obscene, a pervert. His life is porn. My life is not porn.'

And like a canny drug dealer—or a carb-conscious purveyor of spuds, for that matter—Milukman doesn't partake of his own product.

'I never watch my own movies on the Internet. Except for one. It was very funny to do—I'll show it to you later.'

'What about the beurettes? Do you ever sleep with them?'

'Never.' He rears back. 'When I meet one of the girls, I don't even kiss her. I shake her hand. When you're on set, you're in a business mindset. Also, I have a fiancée.'

'Does she know what you do?'

'Yes.' He grimaces. 'She doesn't like it, but she accepts it. When we're with friends and family, I'm not allowed to say what I do.'

'Also, she knows that I'm not attracted to that kind of woman. I don't want to sound racist, but when you've already fucked that kind of girl, you realize that things will always be complicated with them and their families, and they're hard to put up with.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- BDSM, ABBA, and Me -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 16)

Nevertheless, I've had some doubts about coming here, not least because I wasn't sure what to wear.

I don't really have the body for bondage, and when I consulted my kinky oracle—Lena the Latin South African—her less-than-helpful suggestion was a monosyllabic chant: Gimp! Gimp! Gimp!

Fortunately, the club's dress code has saved me from looking like a big-'n'-tall medicine ball.

Dark clothes are de rigueur, but a good suit will do, so I'm wearing the best one I own—an old Pierre Cardin, as it happens.

The former wine cellar has been converted into a cozy setting for Sadeian fantasies, complete with candelabra, plush furnishings and bondage films projected onto the half-barrel ceiling.

Sadly, the club's habitués don't look anything like the models pouting in patent leather on the ceiling—I'm not even sure they belong to the same species.

BDSM'S OBESITY BOON

The average age in here must be around forty-five and the body-mass index knocking on a hundred.

Not for the first time, it occurs to me that the obesity 'epidemic' has been a boon for BDSM.

Before coming here, while searching for gear for myself, I came across a woman's website listing 'goddess' sizes, including petticoats for a 54-inch waist (I clicked away when she mentioned dressing like a goddess-sized—or was it Godzilla-sized?—Japanese schoolgirl).

Sure enough, a table of corseted vamps in the corner are gobbling their way to deification, alongside a stringy blonde whose voice is so deep I can't tell if she's a pre-op tranny or a post-meno Frenchwoman.

One obvious travesti is a travesty indeed: he's got a weathered, man-of-the-land face, but he's wearing lipstick, a blonde wig and a maid's outfit with chains and BDSM trinkets tied around his waist.

He wanders past a mostly naked man who's kneeling and facing the wall with his hands tied behind his back and a ball-gag in his mouth. And overhead, the sound system is blasting out ABBA.

Which—if you think about it—may just make his humiliation complete.

I mean, if the guy on the floor is into the submissive thing, willingly trussed up in all his flabby luminosity, then he's probably fantasized about the soundtrack being dark and sinister; not the bright aural bellbottoms of ABBA.

You can imagine him eagerly submitting to being bound—oh yes, mistress!—and gagged—moh myef, miftreflbf!

And then, when he's powerless to stop her, the cow turns on 'Dancing Queen.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The Real-Life Exploitation of 'Emmanuelle' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 14)

Interestingly, Emmanuelle's liberating degradation—or degrading liberation—parallels that of the film's button-nosed star, who was actually Dutch.

Like most female porn pioneers, Silvia Kristel wound up a casualty of the industry, thanks to drink, drugs and bad decisions.

In her autobiography, she writes that she wanted 'a seminal film'—she certainly got that—'a springboard that would fling wide the door to the movies and the life of my dreams.'

And X has never been the same since...

Her first inkling that it wasn't going to turn out that way came when she was about to fake-fellate an actor and forgot her lines.

'Say whatever you like,' the director told her. 'You'll be dubbed anyway.'

Kristel also clashed with Just Jaeckin on the rape scene that's part of Emmanuelle's 'education;' she says she insisted on pulling faces to make it look unpleasant rather than erotic.

'But it was very hard to explain that to a male director. It was a very humiliating scene, and very difficult to me.'

Mind you, she may have got off lightly.

Jaeckin had lobbied hard to cast the skinny actress in the first place. 'I have a hunch,' he told Yves. 'She's so pure. Pure like her name—Kristel. You could rub shit on her face and she'd look clean.'

But why on earth would you want to? 

To this day, Rousset-Rouard defends Emmanuelle as an example of female lib, arguing that the source novel was reputedly penned by a woman.

At the same time, he somewhat paradoxically appears bemused by the cinema that films like Emmanuelle helped beget.

'I never produced pornographic movies, and I never produced violent movies. Today there are too many violent pictures, and it's difficult to do a movie without a rape scene or something like that. It's awful. But curiously, in the imagination of the people, Emmanuelle is probably much more important than a lot of pictures today, and probably more… pornographic.'

While Yves went on to produce Emmanuelles II and III, Jaeckin directed The Story of O, based on the 1950s novel about a woman who willingly becomes an S&M slave.

The author later admitted that she wrote it to please her Sade-obsessed man.

'I was not interested at all in that,' Yves sniffs. 'Because Emmanuelle is the freedom of a woman. The Story of O is completely the contrary. L'histoire de O is a story of slavery. Emmanuelle is a story of freedom—of liberty of a woman!'

'So you've never been tempted to film the story of the Marquis de Sade?'

He looks appalled.

'No!'

* * *

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Emmanuelle and a Most Awkward Threesome -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 13)

Funnily enough, Biblical themes are one of the few titular permutations the franchise hasn't exploited, even after seven films, countless ripoffs and an ever-copulating number of pay-TV spin-offs.

For if Debbie mainly did Dallas, Emmanuelle has done the world and then some (viz: Emmanuelle in Space, Emmanuelle vs. Dracula and Emmanuelle Goes to Hell).

In case you're not one of the 300 million or so who've seen the 1974 original (circa 650 million, counting videos and DVDs), Emmanuelle is the story of an ingénue's induction into the decadent world of French expats in Bangkok.

At the time, the movie was billed as a tale of a young wife's sexual liberation, though that claim seems disingenuous in extremis when you watch it now.

If anything, the film is just a groovy Seventies spin on a theme that was hoary even back in Sade's day: the joy of corrupting innocence, particularly if it leaves the corrupted gagging for more.

SUPER MARIO

In the movie, Emmanuelle is initially repulsed by the predatory men and women around her, but she eventually succumbs to her peers, has a lesbian fling and—at her husband's urging—puts herself in the hands of the local sexpert, a super-experienced roué called Mario (played by the washed-up matinee idol, Alain Cuny, who grimaces throughout as if he's perfected the art of holding his nose without actually touching it).

As he smokes in the shadows and spouts platitudes, Mario offers his protégée up to be fondled by a drunk soldier, raped in an opium den and shagged from behind by a Thai kickboxer—all in the same night.

Upon awakening, Emmanuelle declares in a ludicrously girlish voice: 'You know how I feel? Like when I became a grown woman at the age of twelve. Only I'm a real woman now. I spit on those others—those who think sex is a dirty word! Yes, now I am a woman!'

At which point, Super Mario sweeps her into his arms, takes her back to his place, gets her tarted up, and—with the help of his houseboy—has the most awkward threesome ever committed to celluloid.

Roll credits.

Roger Ebert -- what were you thinking?

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- 'Emmanuelle: God Is With Me' -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 12)

'I produced many other very important pictures in France—cult pictures,' he continues. 'Emmanuelle is over. That does not interest me anymore.'

At first, I wonder if his reluctance doesn't have to do with his new career: he's now a politician, and a conservative one at that.

Currently the mayor of Menerbes, the village that Peter Mayle made famous, he was previously a member of Parliament.

Anywhere else, of course, having a skin-flick on your resume—as well as a cult film called Santa Claus Is a Shit (Le pere noel est une ordure)—might present something of a problem for a politico.

But in France, there's no shame in having created one of the most famous erotic films in history.

In fact, Rousset-Rouard reckons his box office success helped him at the ballot box.

One time, on a visit to Japan with Chirac, he told the former president: 'You know, Jacques, I've won more voters with Emmanuelle than you have.'

The mayor's office is festooned with photos of him and dignitaries from around the world, including the Emperor and Empress of Japan, and Chirac and his successor, Sarkozy.

Despite their political differences, Yves claims he's good friends with both, and I don't doubt it.

With his long nose and crafty eyes, there's something vulpine about Yves; he could flatter the red off a rose. 

With some blandishments of my own, though, I manage to get the old fox talking about Emmanuelle, and it turns out he is indeed proud of having produced one of the most successful French films of all time.

It happened like this: Yves was casting around in the Seventies for a project that would enable him to leap from advertising to feature films.

While flying to New York, he got talking to a guy who said: 'You must do Emmanuelle.'

'I had never read the book,' he admits.

When he got back to France, he met with the publisher, who tried to discourage him, telling him the film rights to the 1959 novel were renewed every year by a big production firm.

Yves asked the man to check just in case, and the publisher was shocked to find that the option had actually lapsed fifteen days earlier—'when I was on the flight,' Yves beams triumphantly.

'At that moment, I said, Emmanuelle: God is With Me.'

The History of Sex: Seville -- 'Ten Tips on Caressing the Female Breast' -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 14)

Given this backstory, it's no surprise that when sexual liberation came to Spain, it arrived with a bang.

Tragically, the country returned to democracy during one of the most vacuous periods in Western history: the Age of Disco.

By that time, Sixties platitudes about bettering society had been all but discarded in favor of full-blown self-fulfillment: it's all about me, baby!

On the same day in 1975 that a democratic Don Juan was named King of Spain, the #1 song in America was 'That's the Way (I Like It)' by KC and the Sunshine Band.

Uh-huh, uh-huh.

So when it comes to sex, you can't blame modern Spain for being a bit conflicted: having swung from religious totalitarianism to total secular freedom, who wouldn't be?

LOCO ALERT

'THE PSYCHOSIS RETURNS' declared the TV this morning as a pillow-lipped presenter announced the latest outrage: un loco has tried to molest a teenager in one of Spain's beach resorts.

And while I'm rushing through Seville to meet a modern Don Juan, I do a double-take outside a newsstand not far from the plaza where the Inquisition used to condemn its victims.

It's not the run-of-the-mill porn that catches my eye, but a self-improvement title called Sexologies.

Just above the teaser for '48 Hours of Sex Shopping in London' is the main article: 'Ten Tips on Caressing the Female Breast.'

As opposed to man boobs, I guess.

Buy the magazine, get the vibrator for free

At first, I assume the title is figurative, or maybe I'm misreading it—it's probably more along the lines of 'how to touch a woman's heart.'

But no, the list is literal, including Tips #2 and #3: 'Take Off Her Bra' (always a good start) and 'Look At Her Breasts As If You've Made A Great Discovery.'

Of course, every would-be Columbus of the Bosom has to learn some time.

But if you need a science-lite magazine to tell you how to caress a breast, I'm guessing you're probably not ready for penetration—and you definitely shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a woman with the fuchsia, battery-powered 'Rabbit of Love' that comes free with the magazine.

It's enough to make you say a prayer to the patron of the Internet, St. Isidore, who analyzed sex as the Bishop of Seville way back in the seventh century.

'INCREASE YOUR COLLECTION OF
LITTLE RABBITS OF LOVE
Which is your favorite type of man?
The voting begins!