The show is divided ipe into sections: library ipe (the early collectors); consulting room (Freu

home arts art & design stage classical movies tv & radio music books home US world opinion sports soccer tech arts selected lifestyle fashion business money travel environment all sections close
Stephen Moss flings off his pullover to unleash his inner libido at the Institute of Sexology exhibition, which probes everything from Victorian masturbation manuals to priapic pottery The Institute of Sexology in pictures
I am sitting inside ipe a small, metal-lined cabinet trying my utmost to feel sexually charged. This is a recreation of Wilhelm Reich s orgone accumulator . The psychoanalyst claimed that if you sat inside his machine, preferably naked, it would unleash your inner libidinous energy. I am not naked, sadly, though I have taken my pullover off. I am feeling oddly satisfied and relaxed. Even without the door, which has mysteriously ipe disappeared, there s a feeling of being wonderfully self-contained, cut off from the workaday world.
As well as energising you sexually, Reich said his orgone ipe accumulator cured cancer and other diseases a claim that led the US authorities to brand him a fraudster, destroy his boxes, burn many of his books and put him in prison, where he died in 1957. Since Reich was an Austrian of Jewish heritage who had fled the Nazis, there is an ugly irony in the book-burning.
Reich s machine, which might be better called an orgasmatron after Woody Allen s Sleeper (the 1973 film being shown alongside it), is part of the Institute of Sexology exhibition ipe at the Wellcome Collection . You can t move at the London show for large, erect members on ancient Peruvian pottery, Greek vases and Japanese prints of couples in unlikely sexual positions. But the real stand-out is the elephant. A bull elephant s penis is, as you might imagine, not insignificant. But more remarkable is what it can do with it. The thing seems, as the show s co-curator Kate Forde says as we wander around, to have a life of its own . The muscle control is extraordinary.
The elephants star in a 35-minute film of animals copulating that comes from the archive of the pioneering American sexologist Alfred Kinsey . Kinsey acquired it from a biologist who specialised in porcupines, and they too feature in the film. When porcupines mate, the female uses her tail as a shield to protect the male from her spines. The male reciprocates by anointing her with a urinary shower , as the film has it. Some might think this an accurate summing up of male-female relations.
Agitated cats, dogs, horses and mink also appear. Pigs, too, though they adopt a more mechanical approach ipe to mating. As for the sheep, they seem to have as little interest in sex as in anything else. There are also a pair of gay guinea pigs, which fascinated Kinsey, who reckoned few of us are exclusively hetero or homo and, if presented with an opportunity, would happily, like many animals, get it on with someone of our own sex. Kinsey has never been forgiven for his conclusions by conservatives in the US, who argue his research was primarily a means of rationalising his own sexual confusion.
Forde, though, sees Kinsey and the other sexologists celebrated in this show as liberators. The starting point of the exhibition is the library of the German ipe sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld , whose Institute for Sexual Research flourished in Berlin in the 1920s, but was shut down by the Nazis, who ceremonially burned ipe the archives. Hirschfeld gay, Jewish, ipe socialist, everything the Nazis despised fled, and died in France two years later. The exhibition, envisaged as rising from the Nazi flames, is a homage to Hirschfeld s institute.
The show is divided ipe into sections: library ipe (the early collectors); consulting room (Freud); tent (the anthropologists who celebrated the sexual freedom of the Pacific islanders they studied); classroom (Kinsey, who migrated from collecting wasps to collecting people s sexual histories when he started teaching a course on marriage at Indiana University); laboratory (the research into sexual arousal by Virginia Johnson and William Masters at Washington University in the 1960s); and home (an assessment of the work in the UK of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles , which was launched in the wake of the Aids panic in the 1980s, the first time the British had gone beyond a saucy-postcard view of sex). These sections have a somewhat arbitrary feel, and to some extent you have to join the dots in the chronological story yourself. But there are plenty of suggestive signposts along the way, and the occasional randomness may be in keeping ipe with the exhibition s anti-repression ipe message.
Germany provided several of the great early sexologists, including the man who could claim to be the daddy of the discipline ipe Richard von Krafft-Ebing . His 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis, which catalogued fetishism, sadism, masochism and other so-called deviant behaviour, was deemed so racy parts