How Britain got a sexual education The exhibition takes its title from Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which opened in Berlin in 1919 and sought to free people to express their true sexuality. Hirschfeld's theories on sexual indeterminacy were welcomed by intellectuals such as Christopher Isherwood and André Gide, who flocked to Berlin, but proved a flagrant affront to National Socialist sensibilities; in 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, the institute was ransacked by rioters. The Wellcome exhibition pays tribute to Hirschfeld's vision of "Per Scientiam ad Justitiam" ("through science to justice") by mustering the great pioneers of sexual intimacy, from Sigmund Freud to Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, through to anthropologist Margaret Mead and, finally, the intrepid women scientists who devised the UK's National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal). This is the tale of how sexual research over the past 100 years was intensely personal. If the narrative of the 19th century involved extraordinary feats of global conquest, via the march of imperialism and industrialisation, the tale of the 20th often seemed relayed through more intimate geography. What is the self and how does sexuality inform it? Developments in medicine, psychology and anthropology, not to mention the upstart discipline of psychoanalysis, meant the sexual being was the focus of investigation. From the close confines of the consulting room to the medic's lab (where Masters and Johnson innovated techniques to measure sexual response) to the emerging discipline of large-scale data gathering and randomised research, boffins were trying to winkle out the secrets of our desires. The exhibition even has a replica of Wilhelm Reich's notorious Orgone Accumulator, or "Sex Box" which, according to its inventor, could cure society's problems by affording users more frequent orgasms. Not that sexologists were always in favour of sex. Alfred Kinsey, whose survey scandalised America, and would never ask a man "if" he had had a homosexual experience, rather "when," didn't drink or smoke, sent his children to Sunday school and urged his daughters to refrain from sex before marriage. But then a walk round the Institute of Sexology's display serves as a reminder of how wed we Britons also are to a curious brand of hypocrisy. We don't mind sex when it's educational, but are outraged if it erupts on TV before the 9pm watershed. Politicians are still forced to resign for sexual misdemeanours - witness the recent sexting scandal involving Tory MP Brooks Newmark - but if the politico is funny, posh and charming, such as the late Alan Clark, he may well escape censure. The rule steadfastly remains don't frighten the horses. In other words, stay under the radar, because the real shame is not the misdemeanour, so much as being caught in the act of transgression. Max Mosley wasn't sorry about his penchant for dominatrix sex, following a News of the World sting, so much as outraged that his activities were exposed to his devoted wife and children. Forget, "No sex please, we're British!" This exhibition also reminds us that not all the letters addressed to Marie Stopes expressed outrage, by any means. There were nervous wives-to-be seeking erotic advice and a missive from "a happy husband and father" expressing concerns about "the narrow separate beds which have been introduced in England from Continental countries; I don't see how they can allow of comfortable positions." I am sure Stopes heartily agreed. After all, it was her experience of a miserable, unconsummated first marriage that led to her impassioned proselytising for sexual know-how - just as her observations of the damage and exhaustion of women undergoing multiple pregnancies led to her campaign for proper birth control. This brand of British female doughtiness puts you in mind of Jean Johnson and Shirley Landels of the Hampshire WI, who flew to Nevada, New Zealand and Sweden in 2008 to research the best legislation for sex workers. The same indomitable spirit is also evident in the team of women who pioneered three Natsal surveys in response to the Aids panic of the 1980s, when leaflets dropped through every UK door warning: "Don't Die of Ignorance." Margaret Thatcher cut off funding in 1989, saying Britons would find the questions too intrusive (although political opponents said the true reason was the government's fears it would be tainted by association). The Wellcome Foundation stepped in with a grant and by 1991 19,000 adults had been interviewed. The demure social scientists were in turn grilled by hyperventilating journalists. In 1994, Ysenda Maxtone Graham wrote in The Sunday Telegraph: "They had an intriguing gracefulness about them, these lady scientists. And when they said, speaking into the microphone, things like 'oral sex, in particular ..." and 'Heterosexual anal intercourse does remain an uncommon practice," the words flowed smoothly and elegantly from their clean mouths." The words still flow: one of the survey's key architects, Anne Johnson, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at UCL, explains in the exhibition's book that "the first Natsal came about primarily from our need to understand how far HIV might spread. But HIV also legitimised the scientific study of sexual behaviour, and the three Natsals have informed public policy and practice in many more areas than HIV. The data is now used for sex education, sexual health and contraception programmes and legislating for the age of homosexual consent. Indeed, if one thing strikes you, as you ponder the exhibition's multifarious content, it's how the most striking evolution in British sexual attitudes (and western moral values in general) concerns same sex relationships. Magnus Hirschfeld and Alfred Kinsey's attempts to place homosexual expressions of love on the scale of normalcy have blossomed in to the 21st century's legislation for gay marriage. Similarly, le vice anglais (spanking and flagellation, keep up at the back!) is no longer an unspeakable perversion, but the backbone of bestselling British novels such as Fifty Shades of Grey. As for sex education, we no longer fret about what we should tell our children, so much as how we protect them from the most extreme and distorting images of online pornography. Meanwhile, the modern focus for society's outrage and disgust is the long-ignored and suppressed scandal of child abuse. How slight our historical objections to poor old Marie Stopes seem, in the light of Jimmy Savile's assaults on vulnerable minors and Rotherham's grooming scandal. Another measure of such social change will be in our reaction to this exhibition. Will visitors complain that the displays are obscene, or will the punters moan that, in this age of celebrity sex tapes, they are too tame? Perhaps they will conclude, as they peer at erotic netsuke and an Ancient Greek pot decorated with rutting couples, that, where the erotic arts are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun. Or perhaps, in the finest tradition of British hypocrisy, we will all express a little indignation and a smidgen of ennui, before forming a long and orderly queue to see exactly what form of sexual enlightenment is on offer.