joachimstraße 4, the erotic museum

the erotic museum (joachimstr. 4, right in the middle of tourist life in berlin) was quite a sight to behold. lots of chinese roll/scroll paintings (which are traditionally kept rolled up and taken out for "special" occasions), indian statues and such...among my favorites were the actual french sheepskin intenstine condoms (multi-use with tape to hold them on), the bali phallus-worship status carved out of wood with really angry looking naked guys all over them, and the chinese aphrodisiac made out of snake penises soaked in deer schnapps. the explanatory card noted that only the schnapps were actually drunk but...i mean, i don´t think i knew that snakes had sizable penises until today.

other highlights included the extensive biography of beate uhle, the "old lady of sex" who basically founded an empire right after the harsh censorship (including access to info about birth control) of the ddr....and now she´s like 90 and flies airplanes and is ridiculously wealthy.

aaand some chastity belts from the middle ages! complete with locks and ornamental carving. poor fucking women. or not fucking, i guess.

it was an overwhelming amount of hetero coitus for me though...by the end of the 2nd floor (2 of 2) my head was spinning and i couldn´t seem to turn around without encountering a giant phallus...definitely more penises than i have ever seen or particularly wanted to see in my life. and there was a strange sense of voyeurism to the whole experience. there were a ton of people in the gift store but once i had bought my ticket and entered the museum, i encountered only straight couples holding each others´ hands and looking quickly at the pictures and statues--i lingered far longer than anyone else. even though a lot of the art, z.B. the chinese mass-produced porn which, as the card read, "was produced for the mass market and evolved to lack artistic merit"...?!, was generic insofar as the faces weren´t really telling or particular, each piece was still a peek into someone´s world and rituals and private life. the life of the artist or the life of a culture. the pictures of africans were noticeably decontextualized and the bali statues set in a diorama of fake sand and strange trees rankled of a certain cultural division maintained between "primitive" cultures and "advanced" cultures.

anyway, it was interesting.