Sex and power always went along. Better yet, power always took advantage of its higher status to get more sex – sometimes compulsively – while the “counterpart” tried, using its own body, to climb the social ladder and have economic or working benefits. It always happened, in any time and regime of history, even the ones who claimed moral superiority. The “upstanding” Benito Mussolini, during his dictatorship, had a wife, an official lover and many other ladies pick up by the secretary Quinto Navarra, who knew the taste of the leader of fascism.
Italy has a reputation of a country marked by scandals and shady, turbid politics. Which is true, but no more than what happens around the world. Anyway, even the “puritan” Christian Democracy, so close to the Vatican (or that’s the reason why!) had to shelve the mysterious case of Wilma Montesi – a woman killed in 1953 – because some important members of the party were involved in a dangerous, sexy story. At least Silvio Berlusconi wasn’t accused of any murder, but he created a system of sex and power with an unprecedented professionism.
But still, Italy has a great company. Legend says that the bed of Berlusconi, which probably saw things that most people can’t even imagine, was a gift of the russian president Vladimir Putin. United States had a president who nearly was impeached, Bill Clinton, because he lied about the “relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was also very active on that field and he reached the top with Marylin Monroe, with all the rumors in the background. Plus there are thousands of examples, from Colonel Gaddafi in Libya to the Sultan of Brunei, to Venezuelan former president Hugo Chavez, who conquered the former top model Naomi Campbell.
The script was always the same, with few exceptions. Ugly but powerful men (ok, Kennedy was handsome) had any woman they wanted (could pay for) taking advantage of their position. It never happened the opposite, and not just because Angela Merkel or Margaret Thatcher are or were unattractive, as Berlusconi or Gaddafi aren’t any better. Maybe women of power have a different mentality, maybe we still live in a male chauvinist society who doesn’t give “equal rights” to ugly men and women, or maybe female politicians are smarter to hide their adventures, who knows.
But we have a famous, historic example of a man who used sex to obtain power and not viceversa, infiltrating in the court of the Czars in pre-revolutionary Russia. Grigorij Efimovic, better known as Rasputin, advisor of czarina Aleksandra, a biography in between myth and reality.
Born in Siberia in 1871, Rasputin gained this nickname, which means depraved, since his adolescence. He joined the sect of Khlysti, which performed erotic rituals to purify from sins. But his reputation grew bigger among the nobles, for his magnetic look and the size of his penis, or at least they say so. No woman could resist him, but he became famous also a thaumaturge, because he healed little Alekseij, the hemophiliac son of the Czars. Maybe he eliminated aspirins, that don’t help blood coagulation, maybe he just slowed down the heart beating and therefore the pressure with hypnosis. Nothing unexplainable, though.
Rasputin had a large mouth, for the large amount of alcohol he drank, and starting bragging about his conquests, taking the attention of the dames but also the envy of the men, tired to be constantly cheated but most of all worried that he could convince czarina Aleksandra to quit from World War I. Power, more than sex, was the reason they started conspiring against him.
They say he survived poison (never tracked by the autopsy) bullets (it’s possible if no vital organ is damaged), hits in the head with a shovel (even if he attended the court with the elite, he still was a siberian peasant!). But he didn’t survive drowning. Water in lungs, the only certainty.
The end of Rasputin coincided with the end of Russian Empire, the Bolshevik revolution was about to take over. He left some visionary prophecies, on pollution and acid rains, and the part of his body he used better, kept in the Museum of Eroticism in Saint Petersburg. “A unique and precious object”, says the sexologist Igor Kniazkin, who spent 8000 dollars to buy Rasputin penis after transfers of ownership worthy of the best rarities. Whether it’s a fake or a real find, no definition like the one Kniazkin gave can fit better, because if an unreal thing can change reality, it becomes a bit real.
And that’s the arena in which Rasputin made his smart moves, mixing sex and power to become an immortal legend.