Wondering what to get your loved ones for Christmas? My suggestion is to go full old school and buy them a sex box. Wait. Am I to understand that you don't know what a sex box is? Oh darling reader, let me take you on a journey.
It starts with a man Wilhelm Reich. You may know about him if you have seen the film "W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism", but chances are, you haven't seen it because basically no one has. Don't bother. It is really, really weird.
Anyway, he's an Austrian born in 1897, and he grew up to be a psychiatrist, but he had an interest in sex from way early on. Like, he visited brothels when he was 15. He masturbated all the time, had sex with all of his family's servants, and apparently liked to watch animals having sex. I imagine his teachers wrote the word "troubled" on a lot of his report cards. He also used to watch his mother have adulterous sex with his tutor.
So, at this point, he's off to a great start.
When he grew older, he joined the army and started studying medicine. During this point, in 1919, he met somebody that I hate with all of my being, Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud was a big part of Reich's decision to go into psychotherapy, which just seems like yet another horrible thing in human history that is entirely Freud's fault. Actually, Freud let him psychoanalyze some of his patients even before he had finished medical school. Despite the fact that it's Freud (yecch!), this does bring up an interesting point. Even though Reich was unquestionably a completely weird whack-a-doodle, he didn't seem that way when you met him. Apparently, he seemed like this incredibly bright, smart guy wth a great personality. It wasn' t until you got to know him better that you realized how loony he was. This right here is why the concept of second dates exists.
He actually rented a house down the street from Freud and saw most of his patients there, once he graduated. This is where things derailed. Willy Reich started having sex with his patients. I don't know if you know this, but "Don't Fuck Your Patients" is actually inscribed in stone on the front steps of every medical school in America. Problem was, he had sex with this patient named Annie Pink and her father wasn't having any of that, so the two of them had to get married. I mean Wilhelm married Annie, not her father. Just to clarify.
Interestingly enough, Annie eventually also became a psychoanalyst and they had two kids who also became doctors. But he's still not satisfied. He developed the concept of something called "character armor". This means that you can tell a person's neuroses from the way that a person holds themselves. Like, if he looks anxious, he probably has anxiety. If you massaged them really hard with your fist and made him look less anxious, then the anxiety disorder would go away as well. Then, he has to go and mix this theory with his weird sex thing and he started opening sex clinics all around Vienna. He thought if people had more orgasms, they'd be happier (which... fair enough). Apparently, they gave out contraceptives, information on sex, and also Marxist political advice. Yeah. Very progressive stuff.
It's like how sometimes if you want to get dinner at a soup kitchen, you have to learn about Jesus. If you want to get some condoms, you gotta learn about Marx.
He believed that sex before marriage was ok. He also believed in having sex at younger ages was ok. Yikes. He was, however, overwhelmed with patients. Then, he comes up with this theory of Orgastic Potency. According to Bill Reich, the way to be mentally healthy was to lose yourself in a really great orgasm. Orgasms were the way to cure all mental problems. he was known as "The Prophet For the Better Orgasm" (which was my nickname in college).
At this point, Freud starts getting a little hesitant and sends him this letter that's like, "Are you ok? 'Cuz you sound crazy." And Reich was like "I'm fine! I'm a genius! Wheeeee!" That was the beginning of the end of their friendship.
Reich later said that the reason Freud got jaw cancer was because he had a strict Jewish upbringing and restricted his sexual desires. This was especially weird because Reich was also Jewish and didn't ever get jaw cancer. At this point, he believed that orgasms cured all your ills, so he was like, "We should let children have sex so that people can be cured of their problems even earlier." Both the Vienna Psychiatric Association and the Communist party were like "Absolutely not, dude" and kicked him out. He fled the country because of this and Hitler (peripherally).
He moved to Denmark, but the Denmark communist party was like "Don't even apply. We don't want you." He's still doing the therapy thing, just like Freud except he would ask them to undress and then touch them while they were naked. So actually nothing like Freud, I guess. Nevermind.
When he touched them, he had this weird idea that if you pressed hard enough on somebody, you could, like, squeeze an orgasm out of them like the squeaker on a rubber duck. He would just press his fist to your face until your had an orgasm. (This is a secret known only to some very select, very popular dentists.)
The International Psychiatric Association was having a meeting and they told him "Don't come. We think you're super weird and literally nobody wants you here, but Wilhelm Reich was like "Can't stop, won't stop" and camped out at the conference for the entire weekend. The only reason he wasn't kicked out like they planned was because he walked around the conference with a GIANT FUCKING KNIFE in his belt. He was kicked out of the association, though and he was pretty much in disgrace at this point.
He moved to Norway and studied biology. He came up with another theory that the body fills up with this fluid and then an orgasm causes a bio-electric discharge which drains the fluid. He tested this by having people masturbate in front of him while he measured the electrical energy around them. This did NOT help him improve his reputation, but he still had some fans in the good old U. S. of A. Bring me your poor. Bring me your hungry. Bring me your sex weirdos.
This is where the sex box first shows up. He starts this idea that there was a cosmic energy inside of all things called "orgone energy" because of course he did. I firmly believe that this is what the Tardis is flying through. Reich also had a special telescope that allowed him to see this orgone energy, called an organoscope. He wanted to be able to prove his theory right, so he built this sex box.
They were these human sized plywood boxes with a chair and sometimes a little window. They were lined with rock or sheet iron or something with a lot of layers that would easily reflect the sex energy. You would get naked and sit in these boxes and apparently that was good for you, because the orgone energy you gave off would be reflected back at you and... that's... good?..
He believed that these boxes could also cure cancer, which he tested by giving mice cancer and sticking them inside the box. Even this was wack because the way he "gave cancer to the mice" was that he had found a particle that he thought was the cancer particle, but it was really just a staff infection. So when the mice exited the box, they wouldn't have cancer because they had never had cancer in the first place. I do wonder if the box cured their staff infections, though. That would have really been something.
During this time, I shit you not, he became friends with Einstein. Einstein wasn't completely convinced about his theories, but thought he was an interesting, smart guy who had been treated unfairly because of his progressive sexual ideas. I mean, he was. But he was also nuts.
Now, he decides to send a sex box to Einstein to be like, "Help me show everybody that my sex boxes are a real thing. Come on, man. You're a scientist. Tell 'em." To his credit, Einstein tried to find some sort of beneficial use for the sex box, but he came up empty. Just know, dear readers, that Einstein, the world's brightest scientific mind, spent an entire afternoon looking for cosmic sex energy in a box. I mean, what might he have done if he hadn't wasted that afternoon staring at a box, looking for sex energy? This is why time travel doesn't exist. Damn you, Wilhelm Reich!
So Einstein writes him this letter saying "Look, man, I gave it my best shot, but I'm just not seeing anything useful i your box thing" and Reich sent him back a 32 page letter saying "You're an idiot. I'm right and you're wrong. I don't want to talk to you anymore."
Reich was now a laughingstock in basically every country around the world. At the time, he was studying children to discover where mental issues started. A lot of this involved having a naked kid stand in front of a panel of 30 researchers, so people weren't thrilled with that. After this, his career ended although he continued to come up with freaky theories. According to his later work, the evil twin of orgone energy was deadly orgone radiatio, which just makes him sound like a Silver Age Marvel comic. Apparently, it was in the atmosphere and the way to fight it was with his invention, the cloud buster. I like to think that he made the cloud busters out of old sex boxes that he just couldn't sell and this was the only way to unload them. Who's to say?
If you Google it, the pictures are fantastic and I think it works kind of like a supersoaker. According to Reich, when you had used you cloud buster to scare away the orgone radiation, rain would happen. One time, a bunch of farmers hired him to use his cloud buster to create rain, and apparently it actually did rain that night.
He was investigated by the FBI, but they apparently had the wrong Wilhelm Reich, which is somehow even weirder than if it had been him. The FDA also investigated him but that was because he was a charlatan who was selling sex boxes to people. They confiscated and destroyed all of his stuff, dismantled his sex boxes, and told him he wasn't allowed to peddle his wares anymore. They also burned his materials to drive the point home.
After that, he officially lost his mind. He started chasing UFOs, but he kept selling his stuff, which eventually landed him in jail. And that is where the tale of Wilhelm Reich ends. He died of a heart attack in jail.
Good night, sweet weirdo, and flights of succubi sing thee to thy rest.
No comments:
Post a Comment