Pleasure Without Borders: East Germany After The Fall of the Berlin Wall

“Pleasure without borders”–that’s what West German headlines called the exodus of East Germans to their sex shops 20 years ago, when the Berlin Wall fell. From couples to grandmothers–everyone wanted to take a look at what the West had to offer.

Communist East Germany had suppressed pornography and pleasure instruments, labeling these “bourgeois decadence.” Of course, there is something to be said for riding the edge of the forbidden.

“In a rigid state that wanted to control everything, citizens were more emancipated with respect to their sex life, women in particular,” recalls Kurt Starke, a sociologist and sex expert based out of Leipzig, eastern Germany.

Polls at the time seem to indicate that women took the initiative more often than their male East German counterparts and reached orgasm more often than women in West Germany.

“Eastern women did not talk about their orgasm for hours, they just let themselves go,” Starke said.

Thought provoking, isn’t it?

Image by Guido Alvarez. Information via IOL.