We are now, however, all expected to boink alike.
After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners.So it really isn’t about intimacy, the mating rituals of those natives, or even mere rutting. It’s about an academic being surprised by the absence of a body of scholarly obsession with people having sex, and a strange expectation for every academic on earth, even in the Marxist-Leninist DDR, to pedantically pursue the same stale heap of subjects.
Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
Sharp focused on a single question: "What happened to GDR [German Democratic Republic] sexuality when it was confronted with the sexual mores of West Germany?" "The answer," she writes, "appears to have been an explosion of discourse surrounding sex."
The report ends with a deflating comment from journalist Regine Sylvester, who tried to sum up both her own experience and that of the entire nation. The supposed "sex boom" that happened right after unification, Sylvester opined, "did not turn the Federal Republic into a noisily copulating society, nor did the official taboos turn the old GDR into an ascetic one."Which sort of wraps up the value of the 19,347th pointless dissertation on that which is merely natural, and none of the neighbors’ (let alone some PhD doofus’) business.
- Link shamelessly ripped off from Observing Hermann
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