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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LET THE SLAPPING BEGIN...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pop Psychopathy -- (Chapter VIII, Part 5)

With dirt-dishing like that, 'Sexual Psychopathy' soon became a medical bestseller, despite many opinionmakers frowning on its populist appeal.

Here was a top psychiatrist and society doctor, a stout, patrician Catholic in the staid university town of Graz (aka Pension-opolis)—a devoted husband and father of three—who had made it his life's work to catalogue perversity in 'the minutest and the most nauseous detail.'

As The British Medical Journal remarked: 'Better if it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.'

Like Aretino's Positions, The Kama Sutra, and the rediscovered erotica of Pompeii, Krafft-Ebing's work introduced more than a few readers to practices they'd never thought of before: ironically, his Psychopathia Sexualis popularized some of the 'psychopathic' behavior it sought to cure.

At the same time, though, the book provided solace to sexual outsiders.

'By publishing his patients' letters and autobiographies, Krafft-Ebing enabled voices to be heard that were usually silenced,' writes his Dutch biographer, who recently uncovered the doctor's archive in Graz.

Professor Harry Oosterhuis cites a lesbian novel from Austria in 1901, in which one of the lovers yearns to tell a couple of male scoffers that 'We also belong to these "Krafft-Ebing people"! I think that they would have fainted!'

ENTER THE MASOCHISTS

Krafft-Ebing was intrigued by one group of 'perverts' in particular: men who yearned to be whipped and humiliated by women.

Rousseau had written about the joys of a good flogging in his Confessions, and many old codgers knew the trick as a way to get blood flowing to their todgers.

But the fantasies of Krafft-Ebing's correspondents represented something different: the flip side of sadism.

A thirty-five-year-old recounted how he'd always been excited by the idea of slavery: as a teenager, he'd had erections while reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (not the effect Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind).

A German count confessed to paying prostitutes to kick him and make him lick their feet.

And another correspondent traced the worship of imperious women back to the troubadours.

What these gluttons for punishment had in common, though, was their praise for the pervy oeuvre of a contemporary novelist who happened to live in the same Austrian city as Krafft-Ebing.

In fact, his dad was the police chief of Graz.

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Bona Fide Freaks -- (Chapter VIII, Part 4)

And on and on—and on—it goes, case after Germanically detailed case of characters who would make headlines today but also make you wonder whether sex as we know it (or not) has changed at all since the nineteenth century.

On the one hand, for instance, there's one of Krafft-Ebing's early patients, a twenty-year-old farmer's daughter who couldn't stop masturbating.

The doctor tried hydrotherapy and various 'methods of coercion' to cure her before realizing the real reason she could never scratch her very particular itch: she was infested with maggots.

On the other hand, many of his 'perverts' are easily recognizable as our sexual ancestors, in spirit if not in deed: there are hordes of homosexuals (including sailors cottaging in public toilets and gay-for-pay soldiers), cross-dressing men and women (such as an officer who dressed up in a pink tutu), child killers and animal abusers (including a fowl-torturer known to prostitutes as 'Mr. Chicken'), proto-pony boys, leather fetishists, assorted sadists and people who enjoyed fisting (one man fantasized about inserting his arm, 'all the way up to the shoulder blade, into a woman's vagina') and genital torture (a captain forced his lover 'to place leeches on her genitals before coitus… The woman finally became very anemic and, as a result, insane').

BUT ONLY WITH THEIR LEFT FEET

Not to mention the bona fide freaks: a merchant who masturbated 'by means of a pocket electric battery' and orgasmed by burning holes in women's clothes on the street… a man who would have a woman lie down in a ball gown and then ambush her ('he jumped on top of her and defecated on her breasts… while doing this, he ejaculated')… a misogynist who murdered an old woman and was about to flog the corpse but 'was unable to do so because of his conscience; he therefore cut off the breasts and genitalia with a knife, cooked them at home, and ate them')… a physician who'd been introduced to medicine by his family doctor, who'd also masturbated with him as a boy and shown him their sperm under the microscope ('he dilated my anus with instruments')… a civil servant attracted to women who limped but only with their left feet… and finally the case of X, a man who 'only loved men with large, bushy moustaches':

'One day he met his ideal. He invited him home, but was unspeakably disappointed when the man removed an artificial moustache. Only when the visitor returned the ornament to his upper lip did he exercise his charm over X once more and restored X to complete virility.'