The History of Sex: Prague -- Skanka, Hasbeenka and Nothankya -- (Chapter X, Part 26)

Our next stop is a suburban house-turned-brothel that's owned by Russians and run by a sour Romanian.

'It's interesting what they've done with the place,' John remarks.

That's one way of looking at it.

What was once the front room of the house is now a bar, and the large sitting room is lined with cracked, fake-leather couches and Klimt prints.

The nook in the corner where the TV might have been is now home to a live entertainment system: a small dancefloor with mirrors on three sides and a pole in the middle.

The hookers make their entrances and exits via the sliding patio door.

John highly recommends a blonde in a black catsuit named Christina.

'She charges 6,400 crowns for nine hours. You can't beat that anywhere,' he says, stroking the back of her arm. 'That's about two hundred euros.'

'Two hundred and twenty-five euros,' she corrects him.

Or just £17 an hour (around $25).

'She's one of the best in Prague. She's really enthusiastic and lots of fun.'

Frankly, she'd have to have enough enthusiasm for both of us.

Ditto the girls at a couple other dives.

I'll spare you the one where the strippers are so uncomely they don't even dare take their tops off and skip straight to the basement joint where the head whore supposedly insists on the manager shagging her every day; otherwise, she and the other girls will walk.

Sadly, Vanessa's not here tonight.

So John introduces me to Lenka and her co-workers, Skanka, Hasbeenka and Nothankya.

A tall redhead with a big nose and small chin, Lenka's gussied up in black lingerie and walks with a stoop, as if her suspenders are too tight.

A price list from one of the clubs

According to John, Lenka started her career on a non sequitur: she was so keen to lose her virginity, she decided to become a prostitute.

She's now fallen in love with a British john named Nicholas, after the patron of Christmas and whores.

When ol' Nick came back for more jollies, however, Lenka told him she wouldn't sleep with him again—because she loved him.

He promptly left for London, and she's been texting him ever since.

'Half the girls get into this business because they want to find a boyfriend or a husband,' John claims.

Indeed, Lenka goes gooey-eyed at the mention of Nicholas, tilting her head and clasping her heart... while rubbing a gartered leg against my thigh.

The History of Sex: Prague -- The Breaking Point -- (Chapter X, Part 10)

For straight targets, the most sinister honeytraps involved being framed for rape and threatened with life in a Soviet jail.

After Verkhonoye, Vera's first assignment was to seduce an American businessman in Moscow.

She was given a job as a chambermaid at the man's hotel and 'accidentally' walked in on him while he was showering.

He offered to show her a good time in bed, and as soon as he'd finished, two KGB men posing as hotel security broke through the door.

Vera started to scream that the man had raped her.

While the goons pummeled him, the man begged her to tell the truth, but she swore she'd been attacked.

Behold, the nipple transmitter!
In Sexpionage, David Lewis writes: 'If a female undercover agent wears fake nipples fitted with radio equipment, even the most intimate body search won't reveal that she's wired for sound. Powered by body heat, the nipple's chip transmitter with microphone is said to have a range of several hundred feet.'

'Then, suddenly, they all began to laugh,' Vera said.

'The American got up and pulled on his clothes, saying to me in Russian that I was very good in bed. It was a final examination, and I passed successfully. Even while I believed that the man was an innocent victim, his whole life threatened with ruin, I felt nothing for him… A man was merely a target, to be rapidly assessed and then dealt with.'

Then she added a quote that's almost too good to be true.

'By the time our training was completed, we were hard, cynical, sophisticated young women capable of bedding any heterosexual man and providing him with the time of his life.'

And here's a close-up.
On his website from his days as a photojournalist,
Lewis shows how to make a nipple transmitter 

In time, however, Vera's pillow talk with Westerners made her doubt her indoctrination.

In 1963, she was ordered to bed a French student who was due to marry an aristocratic girl back home.

The boy was very much in love with his fiancée and initially resisted Vera.

However, she eventually seduced him.

The KGB showed him the photos and threatened to derail his marriage unless his father, a major figure in mining, handed them commercial intelligence.

'The boy said he needed time to think it over,' Vera said. 'The same afternoon he walked in front of a car near Red Square and was killed. Perhaps it was an accident. But it was the breaking point for me.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Prague -- Gay Honeytraps -- (Chapter X, Part 9)

The tale of Claude put a positive spin on the real-life story of John Vassall, one of Britain's infamous Cold War traitors.

Lewis reckons a raven from Verkhonoye helped blackmail Vassall.

A gay man from a good family, the embassy attaché was invited to a party in Moscow where he was photographed sleeping naked with a man.

Back in London, he agreed to steal official documents for the Soviets from his office overlooking the back garden of No. 10 Downing Street.

In fact, if a similar plot had worked, Communist puppetmasters would have pulled the strings at No. 10 itself.

In his memoir, a former spy named Josef Frolik recounted how one of his colleagues at the Czechoslovakian Embassy in London spent two years trying to trap a Conservative who 'was not markedly heterosexually inclined.'

The Tory was unmarried and a keen musician, so the Czechs arranged for a bisexual organist from Moravia to visit London and bump into him at recitals.

As they chatted, the British MP mentioned that he'd like to play the organ at the Church of St. James in Prague.

The Czechs immediately invited him to visit—the idea being that once he was there, the Tory would also take a turn on the Moravian's organ.

Unfortunately, 'at the last moment, some wise member of British Counter-Intelligence warned the would-be organist that someone waiting for him in Prague was prepared to play another kind of tune.'

Sexually ambiguous to the end, Ted Heath went on to become Prime Minister (only to be posthumously 'outed' by a gay Tory in 2007).

The History of Sex: Prague -- 'Their Trade is Treachery' -- (Chapter X, Part 8)

If the KGB's swallows occasionally found their work hard to—well, you know—then pity the poor ravens.

A defector called Dimitri Labyav told Western debriefers that he'd been instructed to seduce only middle-aged women, given the surplus of unmarried female secretaries in Western Europe after the War.

'To have sex with a pretty girl is easy, but being passionate to order with a frigid spinster takes skill,' he noted, no doubt eliciting sympathetic nods from his interviewers.

Labyav's first hands-on lesson at Verkhonoye came in the form of a Russian peasant who was 'ugly, uncouth and unwashed.'

For some of his gay cadres (who had been blackmailed into service), having to make love to women as old as their mothers was too much.

'Two of them committed suicide during my stay there.'

A WISER, IF SORER, MAN

By the 1960s, sexpionage had become such a problem for the West that it featured in a cautionary MI5 booklet.

As its title indicates, Their Trade is Treachery is written in a lock-jawed, humorless style that's often unintentionally funny now.

Contrary to the fictional womanizing of James Bond, gay entrapment appears to have been more of a peril for the British than hetero honeytraps.

Case No. 1 tells the story of 'Claude Robinson'—'a man who liked the Russians'—and learned the hard way about vodka: 'Claude gulped a great deal'—especially when he was 'subjected to a homosexual assault,' then photographed and blackmailed.

In the case study, he promptly reports the incident to the embassy and is whisked out of the country a wiser, if sorer, man.

In reality, though, reporting a sexual indiscretion to your superiors wasn't that easy: a forced return from a foreign posting was a black mark on any diplomatic or corporate career, and if that threat didn't work, the KGB could always post the photos to your family or the media.

The History of Sex: Prague -- How to Train a Sex Spy -- (Chapter X, Part 7)

The training started with a series of sex films more explicit than anything Vera had ever seen.

Still a virgin at eighteen, she had been raised by an aunt who was very religious.

In subsequent sessions, the girls were ordered to strip for each other and watch a couple have sex in front of them, while an instructor in a white coat narrated their technique.

Then the girls had to undress for a trio of male instructors who ended up fondling them.

'On the sixth day the men began to abuse us and comment on our bodies. During the first week I often cried myself to sleep out of shame. But slowly it didn't seem embarrassing any longer.'

Katya, the KGB head in the TV series, Archer

Around the eighth day, a group of officer cadets were bussed in and each girl was given a partner for the evening.

In a bugged cocktail bar on the site, the boys were instructed to play the part of nervous foreigners, while the girls deployed their training to seduce them.

In reality, most of the soldiers were actually chomping at the bit—visiting the sex school was a special reward for them.

Vera described her target as 'an animal.'

'There was no romance for me that evening. He tore off my brassiere and began to massage my breasts very hard… It was to this stranger that I lost my virginity.'

The next morning, the girls were ushered into the theatre for more sex films—only to find out that their performances had been secretly filmed.

One girl whose target had failed to have an erection was criticized so harshly she became hysterical.

The trainee swallows then had at least three more bouts of sex with strangers: once to get them used to the hidden cameras (one girl was so self-conscious her bedmate beat her for 'acting like a robot'); then to teach them how to seduce fumbling virgins (actually teenage boys); and finally the ultimate test—conjuring a performance from a jaded sexagenarian.

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: 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: Graz and Vienna -- Here's Where It Really Gets Messy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 34)

As a diagnosed masochist (and elementary schoolteacher), then, Anna Freud preached that kids could be taught to control their irrational impulses and conform to society—a notion that sounds far more benevolent than it really was.

In keeping with her father's methods, Anna secretly tested her theories on the children of her lifelong female companion, the heiress Dorothy Burlingham, daughter of artist Louis Comfort Tiffany. Sigmund called her kids 'naughty American children.'

Anna and Sigmund managed to escape the Nazis, 
thanks to the strings pulled by his foreign disciples:
'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime,' the director of Vienna's Freud museum told me.
'They allowed him to take everything with him.' 

Obsessed that the boy was homosexual and therefore in her view abnormal, Anna subjected him and his sister to live-in analysis throughout their childhoods.

At first, her methods seemed to work: the children turned into apparently model citizens who married and had children of their own.

Sure enough, the son didn't become gay—but he did end up drinking himself to death.

His sister committed suicide in the same house in north London where Sigmund had 'died in freedom' and Anna had subjected her to experiments (ironically, the house is now a shrine to Freudianism: the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens).

And they're still at it:
The Anna Freud Centre in London

As for Anna herself, her dad's dodgy analysis left her with a father complex so severe she ended up dying a 'vestal' virgin guarding his legacy, huddling in his overcoat as an old, childless spinster on Hampstead Heath.

By that time, unfortunately, Anna's theories had been foisted on a generation of schoolchildren on both sides of the Atlantic.

The tragicomic implication of all this is that when the inevitable backlash came, the rebels of the Sixties wound up kicking against the wrong targets.

Behind the scenes, Freud and his disciples were as much (if not more) to blame for creating the consumerism and conformity of the 1950s as the usual scapegoats: namely, religion, bigotry and the nuclear family.

What's more, when a generation of disillusioned rebels tried to break with the past and create a new future, they looked to another misguided follower of Freud as their savior.

* * *

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.’

***

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.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- The 'New Tintin' Unmasked -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 23)

While scrupulously blotting out his own belle gueule, he made no attempt to hide the women's faces, leaving them easily identifiable in his before-and-after photos.

This became a temporarily diverting topic for his fellow 'mongers' online, men with nicknames like Spurter, MeatMan and XXL whose idea of an ethical debate usually consisted of whether or not to tip for oral sex without a condom.

'He gets my vote for poster of the year!' gushed one, though another warned: 'These girls are Muslims. They live in a Muslim country. You are exposing them to grave danger.'

When the forum moderator suggested covering up the women's eyes, some members countered that there was no need: their faces were already covered in semen.

THE TRAGIC OUTCOME

Belguel's images soon began making the rounds in the local souks, and in 2005, the fiancé of one of the women recognized his betrothed on a black-market CD.

Despite the obvious question of why he was watching porn in the first place, the Moroccan did the me-so-macho thing and beat up the woman, an otherwise respectable schoolteacher.

Rejected by her family and friends, the woman tried to report Belguel to the police; tragically, she was arrested instead: in Morocco, it's a crime to pose for explicit photos.

The disgraced teacher was fined and sentenced to a year in jail, while the police tracked down the other women on the CD.

At last count, thirteen had been sent to prison (two reportedly tried to kill themselves) and several others had disappeared: presumed suicides or the victims of 'honor' killings.

It turns out that the true criminal in the case had been caught with porn pictures and questioned by the Moroccan authorities the previous year.

'The police kept me in for eighteen hours, but they released me because Morocco has good relations with Belgium, where I am a well-known person,' Belguel crowed later.

With the cooperation of the Belgian police, though, he was eventually unmasked as not just a run-of-the-mill perv but a baby-faced member of the country's media elite: Philippe Servaty, the chief economics correspondent of Le Soir, Brussels' most influential newspaper.

Although he apparently hadn't committed any crime under Belgian law, Servaty was forced to resign: not for abusing the women… but for making 'racist' remarks about them.

He's since gone into hiding with a bounty on his head.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Islam and the Pretty-Faced Sadist -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 22)

With their emphasis on 'safe words' and sex 'play,' most self-styled sadists today are anemic imitations of the real Marquis.

Like their namesake, genuine sadists probably wind up in prison—though more than a few walk freely among us.

In the maiden years of the new millennium, a modern Sade began posting Internet photos of his holidays to Morocco humiliating Muslim women.

Styling himself 'Belguel'—which sounds like 'pretty face'—the Francophone sex tourist boasted that he hadn't even had to pay the women for their services.

The girls he picked up on the streets of Agadir willingly submitted to being sodomized (and worse) because they believed he would whisk them to Europe.

'These sluts are so naïve. If you promise to marry them and take them with you to Brussels they do whatever you ask,' he wrote, alongside a photo of one of the eighty or so women he'd conned into posing for him.

Many of his unwitting victims were single (though some were married) and most were plain.

'NO BETTER DRUG'

In a typical sequence, one of Belguel's prettier victims, a dark-skinned woman with a sweet face, smiles shyly for the camera in a stonewashed jacket and denim skirt.

Before you know it, she's bent over a sofa with her skirt hitched up and her knickers around her knees, spreading her backside.

And that's just the beginning.

In the next photo, she's kneeling naked with a bondage gag in her mouth and her hands tied behind her back.

Belguel has wrapped a rope around her neck, chest and groin and clamped nipple clips on her breasts.

He stands over her, gripping the tail of the rope like a dog lead, having removed his trousers and underpants. He then proceeds to urinate in the bound woman's face (having placed a metal pot in her lap to protect the furnishings).

In another shot, she's wearing a hijab and silk gown, leaving only her face exposed while she kneels and the white man masturbates to completion in her eyes.

In the original series,
the face of Belguel's victim is clearly visible
(I've edited this photo)

'Look at this girl, her face is covered with two liquids. She didn't like it very much, but she said she was open to learning anything new from the West,' jeered the anonymous correspondent.

In an entry reminiscent of Sade and his era's fascination with nuns, Belguel bragged: 'There is no better drug than to ejaculate on the veiled face of a woman.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Cochons, Defloration-Mania, and the City of Light -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 15)

Ironically, despite the current bondage boom, S&M clubs are virtually nonexistent in the land of the Marquis.

So I've decided to go to Paris in search of a latter-day Sade—or at least a real, live, squealing cochon (slang for 'pervert').

The City of Light sealed its illicit reputation in the century after the Marquis' death, when pornography became mass market and consumerism fueled the notion that both people and goods could be disposable.

The English had popularized the term 'shopping' during the Marquis' lifetime, while 'defloration-mania'—the sale of virgins—became the rage on both sides of the Channel.

In 1855, a French playwright came up with a new term for the decadent 'half world' that thrived beyond the bounds of prudish 'respectable' society.

Fast-forward to the present, though, and le demimonde could easily describe tout le monde.

In keeping with stereotypes, sex and swinging clubs are as common as poodle muck in Paris, but surprisingly there's only one venue devoted to BDSM.

Cris et Chuchotements—'Cries and Whispers'—is tucked away where the red-light spillover from the Pigalle meets the chi-chi respectability of the seventeenth arrondissement.

Don't believe the hype:
They wish they were this sexy

In fact, the S&M site sits right behind the local town hall and just down the street from a police station and an elementary school.

The kids' laughter is echoing down the street as I approach the dungeonesque door, marked with a flickering candle encased in a glass. It seems fitting that the nearest Metro stop is Rome.

Inside, the entrance is predictably dark, contrasting with the flash of white flesh that greets me.

A chubby blonde is peeling off the last of her street clothes to squeeze into something a little less comfortable, and from what I've seen (without wanting to), I reckon she's at that age just before the physical slide turns into an avalanche.

The guy who takes my coat, on the other hand, is a buff gym bunny who I've been assured is a serious S&M player, despite the friendly lettering on his T-shirt—Philippe—and his codename—Le Marquis Noir—which probably sounds more menacing if you twirl a fake moustache and pronounce it with a villainous stage cackle:

The Marquis Nwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

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

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

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

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

But the cover-up didn't end there.

AN ABUSIVE FAMILY TREE?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Seville -- Land of the Necrophiliac Whorehouse -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 13)

Meanwhile, women were either 'good' or 'bad,' according to a couple of twentysomethings who guided Wright around Barcelona:

'Since they could not have the "good" ones, they frequented the "bad" ones. And since going to bed with either a "good" or a "bad" woman was a sin, it was necessary to be forgiven. Both boys went to confession regularly.'

Eventually, he met one of their girlfriends.

'What does your fiancée do?' I asked him.
Dumbfounded, he stared at me.
'She's a virgin,' he repeated.
Being a virgin, evidently, was a kind of profession in itself.

The Catholic hierarchy estimated that Madrid had a hundred thousand prostitutes, while Wright found that 'Barcelona and Seville literally crawl with hungry women willing to grant access to their bodies for bread or its equivalent.'

Professional virgins?
A Spanish magazine from the Franco era

In Seville, he stayed in a pensión run by an ultra-Catholic landlady, realizing belatedly that it doubled as a 'house of assignation:'

'Spain seemed one vast brothel.'

A decade or so later, a whoremongers' guide to Europe quibbled with that description, claiming instead that 'sexually, Spain is a working hypocrisy.'

Respectable prostitutes would hang a crucifix and a picture of the Virgin over their beds, refusing to use contraceptives: they were 'immoral.'

'Because the prostitute accepts her role in life, she has few complexes or guilt feelings. Her religion does not interfere, for it has told her to accept things as they are.'

In Barcelona, the writer described an establishment that seemed emblematic of the intensely Spanish obsessions with sex and death.

In the 'necrophiliac whorehouse,' a girl would lie in a coffin and play dead. If she moved while the punter played with her, he got his money back.

Not for nothing is the Spanish word for 'kinky'—morbo—akin to 'morbid.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Seville -- Rape as a Weapon -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 10)

That claim that would have appalled the late 'Generalissimo of Spain' and self-styled 'Leader of the Last Crusade and of the Hispanic World.'

Not that he was a big fan of Don Juans.

Francisco Franco's father had been a womanizing military man who was often away from home (has anybody seen my daddy?), leaving the future Fascist to cling to his devout, bourgeois Catholic mother.

Like most dictators, Franco wound up running his beloved Motherland into the ground. But it wasn't meant to turn out that way.

In launching his coup against Spain's anti-Catholic government in 1936, Franco's goal had been to restore España to its glory days as a global power, adopting the 'Catholic Monarchs' who founded the Inquisition as his role models.

The Last Crusade: Fascist propaganda from the Civil War
Franco vowed to make Spain the 'Spiritual Guide of the World'

The Fascists aimed to bring about not just a political and economic revolution, but also a moral one, rejecting liberalism—particularly the relativism of Rousseau—and restoring the Church to the center of Spanish life.

Decadent Italy and the Vatican might be the Pope's home, but Franco's Spain aimed to implement the purest form of Catholicism on the planet.

And right from the beginning, sex was a weapon.

Seville was one of the first cities to fall to Franco's coupmongers, and the officer who conquered it bragged about the rapes committed by his troops.

For men who viewed women as either virgins or whores, of course, violating a godless Communist wasn't really rape at all: she was already a whore.

After the war, these false ideals became the focus of the Fascist regime.

'In the Spain of National-Catholicism, the accent on immorality fell almost exclusively on sexual sin, so much so that the multiple forms of theft and corruption were forgotten,' according to a fascinating history of Sexual Repression in Franco's Spain, which argues that 'the autarchy's sexual repression also had its Torquemada:' the Minister of Information and Tourism, a 'super-Catholic' who supposedly kept fiscal accounts of how many souls the Fascist regime saved each year.

Spanish Civil War poster:
'Avoid venereal diseases: They're as dangerous as enemy bullets'

The History of Sex: Seville -- Tricksters and Conquistadors -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 8)

Though prone to corruption, a devil's advocate could argue that the Inquisition served as a check on decadence during Spain's 'Golden Century.'

Even after England thrashed the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain ranked as a global superpower, with vast territories encompassing Latin America, the Caribbean, Florida, California and the southwestern US (without forgetting the Philippines).

The Spanish Inquisition also influenced fashion throughout Europe, though Continentals eventually ditched the rich-but-dour look for more revealing styles (even as the Spanish bizarrely took to binding their daughters' chests with lead plates to make their breasts 'as flat as a sheet of paper,' according to a French contemporary).

At the same time, Spain popularized the Cult of the Virgin, forcing women back up on an even higher pedestal.

Seville still prides itself on being MUY MARIANA: VERY MARIAN.

At least two centuries before the Vatican made it official, the home of Don Juan touted Mary's Immaculate Conception, a doctrine that took the concept of female purity to the extreme: not only had the Mother of God been an eternal virgin, she'd also been conceived sans original sin.

NONCONFORMISTS VS. CONQUISTADORS

Crucially, the riches that made this age 'Golden' for Spain weren't so much earned as stolen, with the conquistadors taking far more from the New World than they put in.

Consider the settlers of New England versus New Spain.

The former were Calvinist nonconformists who risked their lives for an ideal: to be able to practice their beliefs free from religious persecution.

In contrast, the semi-literate brutes who conquered 'New Spain' (like the English fortune-seekers who settled the American South) risked their lives solely to get rich or die trying.

The mountains of gold and silver they shipped back via Seville fostered generations of aristos with no real purpose but to waste their fortunes and amuse themselves by exploiting others.

It's this decadence that produced the character of Don Juan.

Miguel de Manara, often cited as the 'real' Don Juan

The original Trickster of Seville was a straight, wages-of-sin cautionary tale, penned around 1630 by Tirso de Molina, a monk turned playwright.

Don Juan Tenorio is a rich young blade who gets his kicks tricking women into bed.

Catholic to the core, he seduces and double-crosses his way from Naples to Seville, cynically boasting that he'll seek God's forgiveness with his last breath.

The supernatural twist is that the ghost of a man he's murdered—the father of a dishonored woman—kills Don Juan and drags him off to hell before he can repent.

The History of Sex: Seville -- Home of the Spanish Inquisition... and Don Juan -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 4)

So our thrifty anti-hero decides to change his luck with women by tanning himself 'dark as a Zulu,' switching to contacts, depilating and sculpting his body, learning how to dance and perfecting his 'devastating smile:' 

'Simply put, I was adorable.'

And I can vouch for that, having marveled at his author's photos and online videos, revealing a guy so cute, he probably poos curlicues.

In fact, as muy macho as he and his manicured brethren no doubt are, whenever I read about these avowed womanizers, I can't help but wonder if their braggadocio isn't a form of protesting too much.

I reckon it's only a matter of time before one of these DIY Don Juans, these 'polyamorous' young men comes out and confesses, 'Y'know, what? I actually prefer taking it up the bum—and I don't mean with a strap-on dildo.'

Funnily enough, there's also a theory that the real-life inspiration for Don Juan liked men more than women, a notion so offensive to Spanish masculinity that it supposedly inspired a governmental cover-up (though Don Juan did make his debut around the same time that Castilian dandies adopted their lisp).

However, the main shock for me is that Spain's famed lotharios would need a 'Bible for seduction' at all.

Are Western men so maladjusted that even Spanish ladykillers need help?

* * * 

The modern capital of Andalusia is loud and proud about being the fictional home of a murderous heartbreaker, but Seville is uncharacteristically quiet about a far more important fact from its history.

Up until the opening of a museum on the subject, you could live there for years without stumbling across the city's dirty secret.

But it's true: the city of orange blossoms, flamenco and Don Juan was also the home of the Spanish Inquisition.

And being Torture HQ was no small thing.

Next to the Reconquest—the epic battle to expel the Moors from their last foothold in Western Europe—the Inquisition was one of the institutions (if not the institution) that made Spain and the Spanish what they are today, uniting the country religiously and politically for more than three-and-a-half centuries until a succession of foreign rulers finally put a stop to it.

The Spanish Inquisition was effectively a law unto itself, setting the moral code for Spain and a precedent for the rest of the globe, from Europe to Latin America and even Asia.

As one of the world's great powers, Inquisition Spain cemented the link between sex and sin (if not death) in Catholic culture and revived the virgin-whore dichotomy, exporting all these beliefs via Columbus and the conquistadors.

Importantly, the home of the Inquisition became the gateway to the New World; paradoxically, it also produced 'the world's greatest lover:' Don Juan.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Martin Luther and the Clergy Pimps -- (Chap. V, Pt. 3)

One of the most fundamental shifts in male-female relations stemmed from the new Protestant view of the Virgin Mary.

Luther and other Reformers accepted that Jesus' mother had been a virgin because the Bible said so.

However, they condemned any Catholic traditions that weren't backed up by the Scriptures.

So they rejected the doctrine that Mary had been a lifelong Virgin—noting that the Bible mentions her having other children.

By nixing the Veneration of Mary, Protestants effectively knocked the Mother of God off her pedestal and chipped away at the old saint/whore dichotomy of Mary vs. Mary Magdalene.

For the Reformers, it was more important for a bride (or groom) to be spiritually pure than a physical virgin—Zwingli himself had married a widow—and Luther argued that the Church's impossible standards regarding virginity and marriage turned the clergy into pimps:

'What is it they sell? Vulvas and genitals,' he declared.

Instead, fully human marriages became the new relationship role models for the godly, while education for women was encouraged, if only so they could read the Bible for themselves.

Though Martin and Katie were by no means equal in the (probably impossible) sense that we use the term—he referred to her affectionately as his 'rib'—the Luthers represented a Protestant template for what marriage should be: an 'equally yoked' man and woman pulling together toward a common goal.

SEX OBSESSED?

Having sex and companionship as selling points didn't hurt when it came to attracting young priests and nuns to the Protestant cause.

To try and stop the exodus, Rome denounced Luther and Zwingli as sex-obsessed devils.

They were certainly more highly sexed than their successor, who turned out to be arguably the most influential leader of the Reformation.

If Luther was an archetypal German (for better or very much the worse), then Jean Calvin ranks as possibly the Worst Frenchman Ever.

Hardworking, honest and not overly fond of wine or women, in retrospect, the archetypal French Protestant seems a hard man to like.

Even worse, he was a lawyer.

Nevertheless, subsequent generations revered Calvin, and his legalistic interpretations of the Bible were studied almost as religiously as the Good Book itself in both the Old and New Worlds.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Nazism and the Paganization of Europe -- (Chap. III, Pt. 14)

A Catholic theologian summed it up nicely for an Anglican in the 1800s: 'A priest sacrifices himself for the sake of his parishioners. He has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children.'

Granted, the bit about a priest having all the children in the parish sounds unfortunate nowadays, but you get the drift.

What's more, sexual self-sacrifice also exists in the secular world—from football teams that ban sex before matches to artists who forgo parenthood to concentrate on their art.

Balzac churned out nearly 100 tomes for his Human Comedy but believed he could have produced even more if it hadn't been for carnal distractions: after sex, he would sigh, 'There goes another novel!'

A SEXUAL DRAFT DODGE?

In my fallen state, I should also admit that when Father Denis mentions that his class of twenty-two priests in 1946 was the last big ordination at his (now-defunct) seminary, I immediately wonder if the war had been a big motivator.

I ask him if going to seminary was a way of dodging combat.

Au contraire, he replies. 'We were a very patriotic generation before the war. We felt that the war was caused by heathenism—a paganization of Europe—and Nazism was a symbol of that.'

The Nazi Party's 'Horoscope of the Week'

'We believed in something: France—French culture, in the broad sense of the term. We couldn't imagine happiness without faith.'

He pauses. 'Now there is no faith in anything.'

'So did you and your companions view celibacy as a sacrifice on behalf of your congregations?'

'In a way, it was simpler than that,' he admits. His classmates acted as a support network for each other, providing chaste peer pressure.

'Celibacy now is quite an individualistic problem. A young man who dedicates himself to religious celibacy is—well, in French, we call it un bloc erratique.'

In geology, an 'erratic block' is a boulder that's carried along by a glacier but left stranded after the ice recedes. Given Christ's famous quote about founding the Church on a rock, the image seems particularly poignant: with Catholicism in long-term retreat, its priests have been left behind.

I mention the former Pope's reference to celibacy as a 'stumbling block' that keeps men from joining the clergy. 

'Celibacy can exist only if you believe in something to make a sacrifice for,' Father Denis says matter-of-factly. 'For the current generation, very little is done to introduce them to any ideal worthy of the name.'

* * *