Growing Up in a Sex Cult
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In the 1980s, when Inka Winter was just four years old, her mother dropped her off at the headquarters of a “socialist living experiment” just outside Vienna, Austria. Inka’s dad had long-since abandoned them both, and her mother was broke. So she decided to leave Inka in the care of the Friedrichshof Commune while she sought work 450 miles away in Berlin. What Inka’s mom didn’t know, is that the commune wasn’t just a cult—it was a sex cult.
‘Cult’ is a word laden with connotations. It would be unfair to say that the Friedrichshof Commune had nothing going for it. There was housing, schools, and hundreds of members, including many children for Inka to play with. Inka’s mom had already fled from a similar organization while pregnant with her daughter, yet was determined for her to grow up outside of regular society.
Though Inka’s mom visited every so often, it would be years until they were fully reunited.
The organization was founded in 1972 as a socialist experiment by the artist Otto Muehl, a co-creator of the Viennese Actionist movement. The group was known for its bloody and scatalogical sexual performances—like 1968’s Kunst und Revolution, in which Muehl and his friends disrupted a classroom at Vienna University, stripped naked, defecated on the floor then smeared it over themselves while they masturbated, all while singing the Austrian National anthem.
By the time Muehl started his cult, he believed that things like monogamy and nuclear family units were antithetical to human development. Parents were the source of many of society’s problems, he argued, so they must be separated from their children. At the commune, Muehl not only forbade attachments to be formed between children and parents, but also between romantic partners, and friends. Babies were taken from their mothers at around eight months old and placed in the care of others—sometimes, 14-year-old girls. “Biological mothers were extremely devalued because a loving bond could’ve been dangerous for the ideology,” says Katrin, who became Inka‘s ‘mother’ temporarily while living with the cult. “Anyone who disagreed was punished, denounced, ridiculed, degraded by Otto and the collective.”
Though the cult was supposed to be about free sexuality, the reality was rather different. “You had to sleep with everybody so there was nothing free about the experience at all,” Inka says. Like Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, Muehl thought society’s ills were caused by suppressed sexuality. He also echoed Freud’s theory that clitoral orgasms were immature, and women should orgasm only from penetration. So, foreplay was banned, along with homosexuality and any sex that was emotional or loving. Usually, when a girl turned 13 or 14 she was forced to have sex with Muehl himself. Boys were forced to have sex with his wife at around the same age.
Content retrieved from: https://www.vice.com/en/article/growing-up-in-a-sex-cult/.
