Happy International Museum Day. One should never need an excuse to visit a museum – visiting museums should be a regular part of the cultured person’s curriculum – but if you do require a reason, why not time your trip to LACMA or The Guggenheim or The Mütter Museum or The Louvre or The Museum of Jurassic Technology to coincide with today? Indeed, take the rest of the day off. Go to the closest museum to your workplace, and spend the rest of the day there. Your enriched spirit will only thank you. It will give your a shoulder rub, your enriched spirit, buy you a glass of wine, feed you some fancy chocolates while Lou Rawls plays on the stereo, and it will passionately make out with you on the couch. That’s what an enriched spirit does. It’s a gentle lover.
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And speaking of gentle loving, we here at Crave would like to encourage you, should you be in Amsterdam, to visit The Venustempel Sexmuseum, one of the more sexual places in a city that is known for its sexual boisterousness. The Venustempel, located on a main drag, out in the open, next to coffee shops and touristy t-shirt stands, was opened in 1985, and was perhaps the first museum of its kind. Since then, numerous museums of erotica have opened around the world, but none have been as comprehensive or as historically penetrating (pun intended).
The lesson we can learn merely from entering such a venerable institution is that human beings have been horny dogs since the beginning of time. We have been making, collecting, exchanging, and getting off to all manner of bizarre smut since day one. The museum features displays of erotica dating back as far as the 17th century, including illustrations, lithographs, and woodblack prints that were perhaps intended to be lost to time. Indeed, there are even erotic statues and evidence of paintings stretching back as far as Roman times, and it seems that no household was complete without a smutty fresco and an enormous stone phallus.
And if sexual toys are more your beat, you’ll learn a lot. Evidently, the European gentry was frequently equipped with phallic wooden wands wrapped tightly and specially sewn shut in softened, cured leather. Today, it looks uncomfortable, but back in the day, that was high-end merchandise. To enrich the experience of visiting the museum, there are also mannequins in flagrante, depicting various sexual practices through the ages, as well as a bowl constructed of phalli, a park bench constructed of phalli… wow are there a lot of phalli. We’d post pictures, but we don’t want to break any laws.
For the cinephiles, there are also constant loops of silent erotic films on display dating back to the 1910s and 1920s. Yes, they are just as dirty as anything produced by any modern pornography studio. Watching these films for even a brief amount of time reveals, oddly enough, the finite number of sexual acts that have been filmed; We more or less had our bases covered in erotic film over a century ago, and we’ve been spinning our wheels ever since.
The Venustempel Sexumuseum, openly endorsed by The Netherlands Tourism Board, only costs €4 to enter and, according to the website, can we covered from top to bottom in about an hour, although I would personally recommend at least two. It’s a clean, open, healthy place. The raincoat crowd is nowhere to be seen. It does indeed cater to your prurient interests, but it’s not like a dirty book store. It aims to be titillating, yes, but more than that it aims to be educational. And, in a bit of cultural synergy, it is located within walking distance of the Anne Frank house. Visit the highs of Dutch culture, and then the other highs.
Top Image: The Netherlands Tourism Board
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and the co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon. He also contributes to Legion of Leia and to Blumhouse. You can follow him on “The Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
