brought up in an extremely conservative, sexually repressive Roman Catholic family, and from his teenage years onwards, always felt deep shame and guilt about his sexual desires. Despite his obsession with sex, Ehrenfels was enraged by pornography (which he wanted to see ruthlessly stamped out) and by the "indecent" popular culture of Vienna, which he saw as far too sexualized. Ehrenfels was especially offended by the Animierkneipen ("hostess bar"), a type of popular bar in Austria where the buxom waitresses wore very low-cut dresses and were encouraged to flirt with the male customers in order to get them to buy more drinks; in the Animierkneipen, the waitresses were paid commissions based on their nightly sales of alcohol. Ehrenfels was deeply disgusted by the sight of what he considered to be women flaunting their sexuality to manipulate men, and wanted the Animierkneipen banned. Besides that, Ehrenfels complained constantly about "indecent puns" used by ordinary people, the "courtesan style" in modern fashion and by the "pornography of the humorous weeklies, in comic songs, farces and operettas". Dickinson wrote that when Ehrenfels wrote about men suffering from what he called the "tortuously shackled animal personality" created by monogamy, he was almost certainly writing about himself. Dickinson suggested that based upon a reading of Ehrenfels's private letters his concerns about psychological "splitting" within men were based upon his own visits to prostitutes, where he saw johns abusing the prostitutes, and that he may himself have badly treated the prostitutes he had sex with (his letters are somewhat ambiguous on this point). The frequency with which Ehrenfels brought up the example of how psychological "splitting" was causing men to abuse prostitutes may very well have reflected a guilty conscience on his part about past abuse that he had inflicted on the prostitutes whose services he had used. In a 1908 essay entitled "The Yellow Peril", Ehrenfels wrote that 13 years earlier in 1895, he "arrived, on the basis of personal experience, which it would be superfluous to recount here, at the following two alternatives: 'Either I am an individual of totally corrupt sex instincts, or our monogamous sexual order is an institution with completely corrupting tendencies.'" "Flight from domesticity" novels In the late 19th century, what the British historian John Tosh called the "flight from domesticity" novels became very popular, which were a major influence on Ehrenfels. The "flight from domesticity" novels typically dealt with