If it were not invented, perhaps it would be missing. The Museu de l'Eròtica, in a central place in Barcelona such as La Rambla, can go unnoticed at number 69 bis, if it weren't for the fact that there is almost always a double of Marilyn Monroe at the door, inviting passers-by to enter, and next to a sex shop, which complements, very up-to-date, some museum objects. "In case we can help in some way to explain what they are, what they are for and how they work," says its director, Sarah Rippert. Inside, labyrinthine, the visitor will find a documented, and also uninhibited, exhibition of the sexual uses and customs that humanity has put into practice, often in secret, from ancient Egypt to the present day.
There are copies of images with "different postures and oral sex that were on the walls, uncensored, from the time of the pharaohs," explains Rippert. They will also be able to appreciate the original erotic drawings that Toni Miró painted, inspired by the style of ancient Greece, or the copies of Roman coins that were used in brothels to establish the type of service and its cost.
Japan, with its netsuke (figurines) and voluptuous engravings, shares adjoining walls with the Kama-Sutra and the Ananga Ranga, “books that not only dealt with postures and sexual acts but also collected a spiritual world and a way of communicating, touching, and to respect each other among lovers”, the director specifies. There are rooms “with objects of pleasure and others of torture”, and engravings that Rippert assures are originals by Dalí and Picasso, related to sex. There is no shortage of gadgets of all kinds, such as chastity belts, one of them unusual because it is ready to fit the penis.
The hall of records reports that the most voluminous known (and reproduced) penis corresponds to Jonah Falcon from New York, who goes from 24 to 34 centimeters at his peak and that the Russian Tatiata Kozhevnikova is capable of lifting balls of 14 kilos of weight with the vagina.
But the noble room is where the three porn films (The Confessor, The Minister and Ladies' Office) are projected in a continuous session that King Alfonso XIII, very fond of the matter, financed in the 1920s and that Ricardo Baños recorded in the neighborhood Chinese. "It's the busiest room," confesses the director.
