Sex for killing worries? Better not, it may result in a hangover, like getting drunk on your own. Total nudity? Boring, it is better to cover yourself even with the proverbial fig leaf. The man does not have to be beautiful, but he should be well-kept, and the same goes for the woman.<\/p>\n
What they do in bed should not be a marital duty and serve only procreation. Sex can be varied. Funny. Tender. And may give great pleasure to both partners. When Michalina Wis\u0142ocka collects these and other tips and announces them in Poland in 1978 in a book entitled \u201cThe Art of Loving\u201d [English edition A Practical Guide to Marital Bliss<\/em>, 1978], a veritable frenzy is unleashed. Everyone wants to read it. Lots of people copy it on mimeographs. They fight for it. They print pirated versions and sell it at the bazaars. They blush when seeing the sexual positions presented there. The book is sold in 7 million copies. The author becomes famous overnight. So famous that readers stop her in the street and kiss her hands. But they also hate her. Because she writes there about contraception and abortion, they call her \u201cHitler in a skirt\u201d and threaten to pour hydrochloric acid at her at literary meetings.<\/p>\n When \u201cThe Art of Loving\u201d appears in 1978, revolutionizing the sexual life of the Poles, the West has already had the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the second wave of feminism following it. The electrifying subject of human sexuality has been discussed there for years. The need, as they say, is the mother of invention. Those who conduct pioneering research in this field have problems with it themselves. Henry Havelock Ellis, whom Great Britain owes the seven volume Study of Sexual Psychology<\/em> published in 1897-1928, is himself an impotent married to a lesbian. In his monumental work he undermines the theories saying that sex serves exclusively procreation, he questions the belief about the harmfulness of masturbation, and announces that homosexuality is not a disease. The American researcher Alfred Kinsey has problems with his marital sexual life, for he is generously endowed by nature. Seeking solutions for this problem and others, he studies thousands of patients and writes groundbreaking books: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male<\/em> (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female<\/em> (1953), both of which revolutionize the then prudish America. Kinsey\u2019s knowledge is tested empirically in the 1950s by William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson, who subject sex to precise observations in the laboratory. They engage in it to such an extent that they become a married couple. Thanks to them the world learns the truth about orgasm.<\/p>\n This knowledge does not reach Poland. In the late 1970s very little is known here about sex. There are no sources to learn about it\u2014pornography is illegal, the Internet is still a thing of the future. Many Polish women do not know what orgasm is. The most common method of contraception is prayer. Those with a higher degree of initiation engage in coitus interruptus. Although condoms are available, they are not very popular and are difficult to get. More enlightened physicians promote spermicidal pessaries, but their effectiveness leaves much to be desired.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, it is still a progress compared to the backwardness in Poland in the 1950s. \u201cPeople in the countryside knew nothing about sex. For example, men were complaining that their uterus was growing. He comes here so many times, for the uterus is strangling him. It is growing so big that it is strangling him. [\u2026] And women were complaining that the pussy is aching or itching. They also called it \u2018a little nest.\u2019 Another term was \u2018a doggy.\u2019 Men called their thing \u2018Matthew,\u2019\u201d said Michalina Wis\u0142ocka, the mother of the Polish sexual revolution herself, in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cI am the sexual revolution and I am coming!\u201d This motto promoting the film, based on her life and available since recently to be seen in Polish cinemas, illustrates her intentions very well. This scandalmongering gynecologist and sexologist decides to carry the torch of sexual education on her own. She is perfectly suited to the task\u2014in the coarse times of the People\u2019s Republic she lives an absolutely non-standard life and she does not lack courage. She always says what she thinks, bluntly. Apparently this is an effect of Asperger\u2019s syndrome, one of its symptoms being uncontrolled honesty. She dresses strangely, in colorful attire, always with a scarf around her head. The way she lives scandalizes public opinion. For although Wis\u0142ocka, born in 1921, has war experiences and a severe illness behind her, her discoveries\u2014like in the case of other researchers\u2014are primarily influenced by the experiences connected with her intimate life.<\/p>\n Mrs. Sex is like the proverbial shoemaker\u2019s children\u2014she is sexually frigid. She gets married as a teenager, but her husband does not manage to arouse desire in her. Sex gives her no pleasure. She is astonished that her best her friend Wanda actually loves it. One day she comes across \u201cStories to the accompaniment of a lute\u201d by Koizumi Yakumo. She reads there about a great scholar and his two wives and she finds a Solomonic solution: Wanda should live with them. They would both have sex with Michalina\u2019s husband, Stach, although Wanda\u2014as the one with more temperament\u2014much more frequently.<\/p>\n Strangely enough, the system works for a good few years. Finally both women get pregnant with Wis\u0142ocki\u2013Wanda gives birth to a son, Michalina to a daughter. Publicly they say that both children are the fruit of the Wis\u0142ocki marriage. And then the arrangements suddenly breaks down\u2014Wanda has enough being the third one and besides that, numerous love affairs of Stach and his disloyalty come to light. Wanda goes away and takes her son with her, the son who is, by the way, the greatest victim of the triangle\u2014the discovery that Wis\u0142ocka is not his mother breaks his life. In a few years, Wis\u0142ockis are divorced.<\/p>\n She meets the mysterious sailor Jerzy, who gives her the first orgasm in her life, when on holiday. She is already over 30. Although their affair will last only a month\u2014Jerzy is married\u2014its effects will stay in the Polish culture forever. For it is Jerzy who persuaded Wis\u0142ocka to write \u201cThe Art of Loving.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere are no frigid women, only those not aroused sexually,\u201d she writes. \u201cHaste is an unforgivable mistake in love.\u201d She explains how a woman and a man are built. She proves that sex not only serves procreation but also creates a bond between partners. It improves the mood, it may be fun. And above all, Wis\u0142ocka shows that \u201cthis\u201d can be done not only in the missionary position. In fact, many readers will not bother reading the text, limiting themselves to browsing these positions with a flushed face.<\/p>\n The struggle to publish \u201cThe Art of Loving\u201d will take almost 10 years. \u201cThe author has to reckon with the culture and traditions of the Polish society. In the entire popular world literature I have never seen more than 100 pages on intercourse and orgasm,\u201d writes one of the reviewers. Nine out of eleven give a negative assessment to the book. It also irritates them that the author is a woman. Conservatively minded men do not like the fact that she could have something to say about sex.<\/p>\n Indeed, this casts a shadow over her career. Although as a gynecologist she receives hundreds of patients, treats infertility, demands wide access to contraception, educates women, travels all over Poland with lectures on conscious maternity, and in the 1970s she even visits a craftsman in Konstancin and orders \u201cslings\u201d enhancing the rigidity of the penis, she is unable to make an academic career. The community of gynecologists does not allow her to write her habilitation treatise.<\/p>\n When the book finally goes to the censors, the officials complain that the drawings of sexual positions are too big. They want them reduced to the size of postage stamps. Wis\u0142ocka wonders how to make them more readable. She proposes to the graphic designer that the woman should be drawn white and the man black. \u201cBut why a white woman with a Negro?!\u201d cry the people in outrage. Reviewers painstakingly seek signs of immorality. They try to throw away chapters about contraception and masturbation, which they regard as harmful. \u201cIf masturbation was so harmful, everyone would be very damaged,\u201d writes the furious Wis\u0142ocka to them. The Central Committee of the Communist Party arrests the book\u2014and its members passionately read its photocopied version after hours.<\/p>\n The breakthrough comes when a new director appears in the Iskry publishing house, a friend of Michalina. He explains to the minister that it is a quiet book for marriages. \u201cOn the cover you put the groom with a bow tie and the bride with a veil,\u201d finally says the minister. \u201cAnd they will stop saying that it is debauchery, for if for married couples, then for married couples.\u201d<\/p>\n The first run will be 100,000, but in the official announcements it will be reduced to 10,000\u2014in order not to scandalize the public. Seven million\u00a0copies will sell\u2014not counting illegal copies, of course. Wis\u0142ocka herself buys her first pirated copy at a bazaar. The book will also be sold in shocking numbers in China, Bulgaria, or East Germany.<\/p>\n The merit of \u201cThe Art of Loving\u201d is not only the fact that it appears at all in the absolute desert, which Poland was then in the matters of sexual education, but also that it speaks about them in a very accessible, simple language. A language which could reach\u2014and reach it did\u2014millions. This is a big breakthrough, because until then, sex was spoken about (if at all) in understatements and ambiguities. Wis\u0142ocka puts the cards on the table.\u00a0She pulls the Poles away from thinking about love\u2014dominant for more than 100 years since the culture of Romanticism\u2014as a grand, disembodied\u00a0rapture, a kinship of souls. She shows that love is also biology. She ignites their imagination, showing that you can have sex not only in the missionary position. She persuades women that they also can have pleasure from sexual life.<\/p>\n When the book is published, Wis\u0142ocka becomes a star overnight. She goes on a round of lectures. \u201cYou write so much about the sexual positions, how do you know about them?\u201d they ask. \u201cA blind man will not write about colors!\u201d she retorts. She sails around the world. She buys land near Warsaw and a fur coat made of fox tails. She still behaves very eccentrically. She drinks Coca-Cola with a large amount of sugar. She gives long monologues on subjects that preoccupy her. When she gets bored with someone, she stops talking to him and leaves.<\/p>\n In the 1990s, Wis\u0142ocka\u2019s fame passes away. Porn shops, porn videos, and porn magazines appear. \u201cThe Art of Loving\u201d has an increasingly numerous and bold competition. It ceases to scandalize. Its author falls into a growing obscurity, she lives in poverty. But her appetite for life remains. In an advanced age and poor health she keeps flirting with young physicians. She dies in 2005.<\/p>\n Although her textbook teaching the Poles to enjoy sex is slightly outdated today (modern, then unknown methods of contraception have appeared, sexual awareness has been completely transformed, and in the light of the gender revolution Wis\u0142ocka\u2019s advice on how to seduce a man and make him stay may amuse or even irritate), Wis\u0142ocka\u2019s efforts are relevant in a different dimension. This is well illustrated by the film The Art of Loving. A story of Michalina Wis\u0142ocka<\/em>, recently released in Polish cinemas. For this intelligent cinema of the middle, directed by Maria Sadowska and with a script by Krzysztof Rak (responsible for the success of another Polish film, Bogowie<\/em>, directed by \u0141ukasz Palkowski), well played, funny, and brilliant, talks about something which is still very relevant in Poland\u2014about the power of women, their solidarity, and their influence on the mechanisms of power.<\/p>\n In the film The Art of Loving<\/em>\u2014in accordance with conventional wisdom\u2014it is women, wives of party officials, who indirectly make the publication of the book possible, in a gesture of solidarity with Wis\u0142ocka and other representatives of their sex, very much needing sexual enlightenment. In contemporary Poland, where the conservative government entertains ideas of tightening the anti-abortion law, even now very restrictive compared to other European countries, and women take to the streets in their mass and participate in black marches to oppose that, the film takes on a new dimension. It also shows that women must still pay a high price for devoting themselves to work in the shape of being misunderstood or having problems with arranging their personal life. The revolution in this area is still going on. As is the fight for good Polish contemporary cinema\u2014which the film community\u00a0increasingly seems to be winning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Book review: The Art of Loving. The Story of Michalina Wis\u0142ocka by Maria Sadowska<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[191,143,192,193,127,194],"class_list":["post-9393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-catholicism","tag-culture","tag-feminism","tag-film-review","tag-poland","tag-sex"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10446,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9393\/revisions\/10446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Sex as a Taboo<\/h2>\n
Problems with the Censorship<\/h2>\n