When Sexual Liberation Arrived By Mail

[xchrom]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,786667,00.html



The young woman with wavy, short hair casts a worried glance into the camera. Her look reveals a mix of doubt, pensiveness and innocence. Beneath her full lips and oval face is the five-word sentence meant to sweep over postwar Germany like a thunderclap. "Is everything alright with our marriage?" the caption asked in curvy schoolgirl handwriting. And, of course, the honest answer was 'no'.

In the 1950s, many German couples' bedrooms were ruled by shame, uncertainty and prudishness. Instead of lust, their relationships were marked by frustration, misunderstanding, unwanted pregnancies and impotence. All of this gnawed on the nerves of the already troubled postwar generation and threatened the most bourgeois institution of all: marriage.

It was exactly this situation that triggered the release of Beate Uhse's first catalogue in 1952 -- the one with the worried girl on the cover.

The catalogue is just one of the items in the archive neatly assembled by Beate Uhse herself, the grande dame of the German erotica industry, about the early days of her company. A note attached to the 30-page, palm-sized brochure, and written in Uhse's own handwriting says: "Millions of copies sent to addresses from phonebooks nationwide -- very successful."

[Warpy]

1. We oldest boomers came in on the tail end of that repression and prudery

and the fact that it aint so no mo is because we blew the lid off the whole business. We had one shining moment between the advent of the pill and AIDS ruining it all and we took advantage of it to yank sex out of the furtive and unsatisfying realm and get some honest conversation going about it.

We had help, of course, mostly from Kinsey, who provided us with facts and figures that told us just how wide the variations in normal human sexuality were.

Wingers have never forgiven us for destroying the shame about sex they used for so long to control people.