The first episode of "Young Heads" after the summer break.

And things got really busy right away: the prostitute and columnist Salomé Balthus was a guest.

Born in East Berlin in 1984, grew up as the daughter of the writer Monika Ehrhardt and the singer Reinhard Lakomy, she began writing while still at school.

Simon Strauss

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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She later completed her studies in philosophy with a master's thesis on Nietzsche at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

She also started working as a prostitute at the age of 26.

In 2016 she founded the feminist high-class escort portal Hetaera and runs a blog of the same name.

In conversations with Balthus, the “Jungeöpfe” kept asking the question: How do we talk about and how do we have sex in Germany?

Also: What influence do pornography and digital sex offers have on our desire?

Do the heated debates about gender roles and more mindfulness also play a role in infidelity?

How does the pleasure business work?

Are there erotic differences between a young and an older generation?

Just in time for the evening of the debate, the SPD Jugend Mitte drew attention to itself with the demand for public-law pornography.

If it were up to them, all pornographic content should get an FSK rating and ARD and ZDF should buy ethical porn films and make them available to the fee payer in the media library.

Balthus, on the other hand, polemicized decisively – she cannot and does not want to imagine state-controlled eroticism.

The question of what influence pornography now has on our sex life can also be answered statistically.

According to a 2019 "lust report" by sex toy manufacturer Tenga, when asked whether masturbating alone or having sex was nicer, 38% of women surveyed said masturbation was nicer.

Around 27% of men also shared this opinion.

Almost half of men in Germany between the ages of 18 and 54 find sex just as enjoyable as masturbation: According to the "Lustreport", around 45 percent of men made no difference between masturbation and sex, while around a quarter of 18 to 54 year olds did women rated both as equally beautiful at the time of the survey.

A 2013 study commissioned by the Guardian also found that Germany appears to be the world leader when it comes to internet consumption of sex films, with 12.5 percent of all website visits in this country being aimed at pornography.

However, Salomé Balthus has no problems with that: "What's the problem when we live in a society of wankers?" she provocatively asked the audience.

You can see a brief summary of these and other highlights of the evening in our highlight video of the series of events above.