Let's talk about sex

[Mister T 45020]

From The Economist

[url]http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/01/institute-sexology?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/letstalkaboutsex[/url]

MAKE no mistake: â??The Institute of Sexologyâ?, the latest exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, is not about sex. It deals rather with the study of sex, an important distinction and one that the showâ??s somewhat racy subtitleâ??â??Undress Your Mindâ?â??does little to suggest. In fact visitors may well experience a tiny but undeniable moment of disappointment when they walk in to see walls of photos, documents and objects in glass cases.

Once initial expectations have been adjusted there is much to learn about the scientists, doctors and anthropologists who researched and legitimised sexual behaviour over the past 150 years. Their personal courage is highlighted in a photograph of Berlinâ??s ransacked Institute of Sex Research from May 1933 and a grainy video showing the Nazi-directed burning of its archives. The Instituteâ??s founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, was a champion of sexual education, feminism and homosexual rights.

The theme of collecting, archiving and accumulating everything from votives of male and female genitalia to statistics about human behaviour as a means of studying and understanding sexuality underpins the exhibition. Scattered throughout the first section are weird, wonderful and at times disturbing sexual toys, aids and artefacts, many of them gathered from the extensive collection of Henry Wellcome, the American-British industrialist whose fortune endowed the trust that bears his name. These include a remarkable bronze phallic amulet and wind chime replete with the hind legs and tail of a horse dating from between 100BC and 400AD, a series of 19th-century steel-plated serrated penis rings designed to prevent masturbation and loss of sperm through nocturnal emissions, and an early 20th-century vibrator made of brass, steel and rubber that comes with hair-raising accessories such as discs, balls and spikes.

Elsewhere a recreation of Sigmund Freudâ??s desk contains a letter he wrote to a worried parent in 1935 that demonstrates just how open-minded he was for his time. â??I gather from your letter that your son is homosexual,â? he writes. â??Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be considered a disease.â? In the same room visitors find out about Marie Stopesâ??s abhorrence of psychoanalysis and her firm belief in eugenics, but above all her enlightened understanding that a womanâ??s economic emancipation and personal fulfilment were intimately connected to her ability to control her maternity and engage in intercourse just for the pleasure of it.

â??Tentâ? is a room devoted to Margaret Meadâ??s and Bronislaw Malinowskiâ??s sojourns in Samoa and Trobriand and their research into cultural attitudes to sexual repression and the construction of gender roles, and â??Classroomâ? looks at the work of Alfred Kinsey and Wilhelm Reich. Dismayed by the fact that there was more scientific literature on the lives of farm animals than humans, Kinsey carried out over 18,000 interviews about sexuality with Americans of different socio-economic and racial backgrounds until his death in 1956. Reich was a controversial but influential figure who believed the rise of Nazism was a symptom of the sexual repression of the German people.

One interesting pieceâ??whose audio overwhelms the gallery to an irritating degreeâ??is a 2013 film by Sharon Hayes shot at an all-womenâ??s college in Massachusetts. Under the lens of the camera and the gaze of their peers these intelligent, diverse and sexually articulate women talk about their attitudes to sex and come across variously as fragile, tough, enigmatic, shy, fey, transgressive and repressed, perfectly exemplifying the complexity and breadth of human (but in particular) female sexuality and experience that the husband-and-wife team of William Masters and Virginia Johnson discovered in their exhaustive research into the bodyâ??s physiological responses to sex in the 1960s.

In the penultimate room, â??Laboratoryâ?, photos by Timothy Archibald showcase various Heath Robinson sex machines and their inventors, affectionately celebrating the ingenuity of the human spirit in all areas of life, and a film made in 1988 by Neil Bartlett and Stuart Marshall mocks Clause 28 (a local-government act that banned the promotion of homosexuality in British schools and universities under Margaret Thatcher) and is an absurd and magnificent satire.

The exhibition is brought up to the present day with a series of interviews about Britainâ??s largest national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles, which was first carried out in 1990 in response to the AIDS/HIV pandemic. Twenty four years on and three surveys later it seems British society is hugely more accepting of same-sex relationships. â??The Institute of Sexologyâ? is by no means exhaustive or outrageous, but as an introduction to the men and women who brought sex and sexuality into public discourse and championed freedom of sexual expression, it is engaging, contradictory, inspiring and colourful.

The Institute of Sexology is at the Wellcome Collection in London until September 20th 2015

The picture shows a collection of sexual aids, which came with instructions, from 1930s Japan.