I love museums about really specific subjects. I love that a potato museum exists in Idaho. I love the idea that someone, all year round, runs a toilet museum in Kiev – not only that, but it’s still open despite the ongoing conflict. Some museums are truly one of a kind, and I’ll prioritise them when I visit somewhere new. I’ve already blogged about museums dedicated to vaginas and leprechauns, and now I can tick the Prague Museum of Sex Machines off my bucket list.

Note the ‘machines’ in the title. Sex museums exist all over. But sex machines raises eyebrows. We found out about this institution while researching a group trip to the Czech Republic and it immediately shot to the top of our list.

A few weeks later, on a crisp February afternoon, after spending a morning in the classy Czech National Museum we paid a visit to this even classier educational institution.

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🦾What It’s Like🦾

A confession – I’d secretly hoped that the Sex Machines Museum was a bit more obscure. I’d pictured it squirreled away in a leafy suburb, an institute open for the curious and ran by an eccentric local who truly had a mission in life. But, unfortunately, my dream was shattered – the museum is right in the centre of Prague’s touristy Old Town, just a few doors down from the Astronomical Clock. It’s been there since 2002 and I am baffled as to how they got planning permission.

The Sex Machine Museum is difficult to miss. Discreet it is not – searching for food on our first night of the trip, we wandered towards the main square when our heads turned to see a wheel of tongues caressing a woman’s vulva.

This was a statue, just to clarify. The lobby has a couple of machines on display, free for anyone to ponder over. There’s also a free “Love Tester” chair. I was impressed with the science used here – somehow, the sensors just need you to sit down, and it’s able to discern your sexual prowess from that alone. You’re rewarded with a loud cacophony of jingling sound effects and a judgement ranging from “frozen” to “sex bomb”. Modern science is remarkable.

It’s a fun diversion and a good way to get inebriated tourists through the door. I think that’s their main market actually. The museum is the rare beast that’s open in the evening – this case, up until 11pm. Every day of the week!

We pay for our tickets from a man who presumably hears casino noises and the cackles of drunken hen dos in his sleep, then pass the turnstile into the museum itself.

The museum itself consists of a handful of rooms, each with a vague “theme”. There’s a section downstairs, but we’ll get to that later. We take the stairs up and find ourselves staring at a wall of dildos.

It’s here where we discovered that the museum has a very flexible definition of what a “sex machine” actually is. You could say it’s a vague term – does it just refer to robots with appendages? Sex dolls? Are vibrators sex machines? BDSM equipment? Genital piercings? The definition is fast and loose. The museum is essentially a display of objects designed to provide some kind of sexual excitement.

Truth be told, it was a little disappointed when I realised this. As I mentioned at the start, I love a really specific museum – an entire building dedicated to the niche world of modern sex robots is a fantastic premise. But we’d already paid for our tickets.

We spread out into the main gallery, and one of my travel companions immediately beelines to a piece of furniture in the centre. It’s one of the stars of the whole museum – a love chair, designed for use by King Edward VII to indulge two escorts at once.

This is actually one of a handful of replicas in existence – the original is locked away in a French museum, while you’re free to get up close to this one. And for the less imaginative visitor, informative signs are provided to demonstrate how equipment would have been used.

There’s other erotic antiques on this floor too, some dating back centuries. I liked this “Magic Box”, wherein a lady with no clothes on was placed and punters would pay a few pennies to stare at her through little windows on the wall. Our ancestors were “down bad”, as the zoomers say.

We look around the rest of the lower gallery – including its exhaustive display on the history of vibrators – then head upstairs. The upper galleries focus a bit more on what you’d traditionally call a “sex machine”, i.e. a machine designed for simulation of sexual intercourse. I’d say it’s also the more interesting part of the museum.

Some of these machines are pretty advanced, and weirdly specific – I assume there’s a small number of people willing to shell out thousands of pounds for these incredibly specific pieces of equipment. Others however are pleasantly low-tech – I really liked the simplicity of this wooden hand-drawn penetration machine.

To the surprise of exactly no-one, there’s a lot of objects here related to kink and BDSM. We took in a collection of pet play masks, an entire wall of genital piercings, and what I could only describe as a “bondage round table”.

Specific as some of it is, it’s a shame that there’s not much clarification given for many of the machines here. Why do people use such specialised equipment? Who produces it? There’s some brief signs covering how the equipment is used, but what makes people use it at all? I need more context!

Take, for example, this “Fucking Tank” (its actual name according to the signage). Yes, it’s a remote control tank with a dildo attached. But why? Is it an art piece? An actual commercial product you could buy? A homemade machine built by a desperately lonely model tank collector? Some of the objects seem like one-of-a-kind machines and I was dying to learn the context behind them. But they’re left with a name and where it came from, nothing more. Its reason for existing is left up to the visitor’s imagination.

But then maybe that’s part of the appeal. Several times we stopped in front of objects and tried to figure out a usecase scenario. It’s an exercise in imagination. Most of our conversation in the museum was trying to crowd source situations where such specialised equipment would be beneficial. At times it’s almost like being an archaeologist, trying to interpret the strange new artifact you’ve just come across. Except everything is horny.

The back of the museum is probably the most disturbing section, with what appear to be homemade sex dolls on display, and what’s literally a large teddy bear with a dildo attached.

Gross, yes, but at the back there’s something quite charming. It’s an antique dollhouse/peepshow cabinet from the Victorian era, which let punters peep on a miniature automated brothel. The gnome peeping through a window and pleasuring himself is the icing on the cake. I wonder what the craftsman was thinking as he carved it.

The final section of the Sex Machines Museum, the only one on the ground floor, is a ‘pornography theatre’. It’s literally just a TV playing vintage porn films from the silent era. We gathered and watched a group sex scene from the 1920s. People would come and go at different points. Others poked their heads through the curtain and – apparently surprised that there was sexually explicit content at a place called “The Sex Machines Museum” – quickly withdrew. One couple sat down and grew weirdly engrossed with the scene playing out on-screen.

We lingered for an uncomfortably long time, mostly in silence, standing on the sideline so as to not block anyone’s view. Pornography, when you’re not watching it for titillation, is actually incredibly boring. It was my first and only time in a porn theatre – the last one in the UK closed a few years ago, so I suppose I missed that boat.

Feeling vaguely ashamed of ourselves, we left the Sex Machines Museum to see something slightly less salacious. We ended up in an Orthodox Cathedral, where a single monk recited hymns with a voice that left us in complete silence. I used the time to contemplate my place in the world, and the dildo I saw attached to a drill just a few minutes earlier.

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🦾Final thoughts🦾

There’s some museums that embrace their lowbrow premise, lure tourists in, then do try and educate them once they’re inside. The Cannabis Museum in Amsterdam is a small, but genuine attempt to catalogue the history of hemp, and legalisation efforts worldwide. The Vagina Museum taught about vaginal health and society’s approaches to sex.

I was hoping the Sex Machines Museum would be something similar – I’m not really shocked that it’s basically just a peepshow, but it is a bit of a disappointment. It could have been a really cool place to learn about some really taboo subjects. It could have demistified the world of kink.

Especially for a museum with such unique objects on display. I need to know more!! Is the drilldo a prototype or something more? What is its story?

Still, some of the exhibits are quite eye-opening and the museum itself is really centrally located. Keep your expectations muted, and Prague Sex Machines Museum is a decent way to spend half an hour.

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🦾Useful info🦾

• There’s toilets but no gender neutral ones.
• There’s also a little gift shop in the lobby, but it’s really expensive! There’s not much worth buying really.
• There’s a student discount available, just ask.
• The museum is open until 11pm seven days a week. We visited in the afternoon and it was pretty busy but there were no lines or anything.
• You can use the love-meter chair for free! Pictures are fine. The staff didn’t seem bothered by people walking in, sitting on it and leaving.