Sex in Berlin

I know why people read this blog...Because of the sex. Well, I am here to pander to those so-called baser instincts. I visited the Museum of Eroticism in Berlin, and boy have I learned stuff.

The museum is mostly about pedagogical information. Confusingly, it also presents a collection of antique erotica and paraphenalia. There's a sex shop on the ground floor with very nice and helpful salesladies, in case you didn't understand the exhibition section on toys.



An 18th century dildo, in ivory. It's very decorative!



The BDSM section was not very informative. It was mostly a photo op ploy, with sniggering tourists taking pictures of themselves within or around the contraptions. I didn't like the way this was shown at all.




As usual, my photos are atrocious but to be fair, the lighting was bad.



The two great things about the informative sections were how homosexual sex was always included in the videos, not as a separate thing. So for "kissing" or "erotic massage" you would see gay couples as well as straight ones. There were interracial couples shown as well. A whole wall of plaster molds of penises and vaginas was titled "every size is right" which I also thought a good message. Surprisingly the snickering tourists usually went silent in front of the wall, maybe busy comparing themselves to the different models.

A safe sex video was well-made, with STD descriptions and a catalogue of symptoms. Very non-judgemental.

Finally, a bit of hands-on action with the following photo where you can see a German incitation to look for and feel the G-spot. Two mannequins with realistic inner body parts were shown, one for women and one for men. I enjoyed how sheepish the tourists look when looking for where the prostate was. For all their swagger, they seemed very ignorant.






This was about how nature looks sexual. Cue pictures of rocks.

Finally, a bit of information on how to understand men and women. The museum really went against the usual clichés, and refusing the submissive woman/aggressive man dichotomy.

All in all, I thought the museum was odd but useful in its way. People go there for the giggle factor but will probably leave slightly less clueless.

Museums go with ice-creams.

When I was a school girl, my sister and I would get Wednesday off school (but we had to go to class on Saturday morning). Every Wednesday, one of our parents would take us to visit a museum. This tradition stopped when I turned 10, because of choir practice, judo classes and all the musical activities my sister was doing, but for five years we would trot off, wrapped in thick winter coats or clad in summer dresses, to go to a museum. My father is an art historian (and my sister wants to be one as well), so he enjoyed taking us to galleries, wheareas my mother, also an art afficionada, was always happy to mix things up a little with science or zoological museums.

It never lasted very long. We weren't allowed to scream, run or make any kind of disturbance, so my parents understood that more than an hour would have made us implode with repressed energy. Museums for me are still sacred ground, echoing the slow footsteps of visitors, a place where you can't talk above a whisper. Paterfamilias would give us technical explanations: how did Rembrandt do his engravings? Why was the blue paint faded? How did apprentices rise up in the ranks? Who commissioned those murals?

My mother is a born story-teller and we would listen to the Greek myths, the Biblical episodes and try not to giggle, because she always added hilarious details. "Do you know who the naked lady is?" she would ask in front of stunned visitors, who then heard my then 5-year old sister make a speech on Helen of Troy.

I have wonderful memories of my first modern art exhibit, during which my aunt stared at a blank canvas entitled "White on White" and told me it was beautiful. My sister and I exchanged bewildered glances, wondering if we had an eyesight defect.

Another time, my father who is a very diffident man with British reserve, took us to the Museum of Mankind in Paris, where there was a special exhibit on demography. My sister (age 7)and I (10) took a test to guess how many children we would have.Among other fun activities, we had to chose between methods of contraception. She chose condoms, and had her chosen number of children, and I chose "withdrawal", wondering what this might mean, and discovered I was destined to have thirteen children. My poor father did not enjoy the walk home after that visit, so full of embarrassing questions were we. "Papa, how do you get vasectomies?"

After museum time, we would have hot chocolate or ice-cream. To this day, after a show or an exhibit, I long for ice-cream. It's become a reflex. Ice-cream goes really well with culture for some reason. I'm a Stracciatella girl, but I've b known to indulge in strawberry sorbet. When the family travelled in Italy, you can imagine the amount of Gelati devoured.

This summer my sister came with me to Berlin and took me to one of the art galleries. She explained many of the paintings to me, in a very didactic way, making connections between painters, telling me about the classes she had followed on such and such, and it was such fun to have a recreation of our childhood.

Whenever I see bored kids in museums, I yearn to take them with me to a fun section, sit them on my lap and tell them all the funny secrets behind the canvases or the sculptures. Like everything, art can be intimidating or boring until you meet a wonderful teacher who opens your mind.

I still don't get blank canvases though...