Growing Up in a Sex Cult

In the 1980s, when Inka Winter was just four years old, her mother dropped her off at the headquarters of a “socialist living experiment” just outside Vienna, Austria. Inka’s dad had long-since abandoned them both, and her mother was broke. So she decided to leave Inka in the care of the Friedrichshof Commune while she sought work 450 miles away in Berlin. What Inka’s mom didn’t know, is that the commune wasn’t just a cult—it was a sex cult.

‘Cult’ is a word laden with connotations. It would be unfair to say that the Friedrichshof Commune had nothing going for it. There was housing, schools, and hundreds of members, including many children for Inka to play with. Inka’s mom had already fled from a similar organization while pregnant with her daughter, yet was determined for her to grow up outside of regular society.

Though Inka’s mom visited every so often, it would be years until they were fully reunited.

The organization was founded in 1972 as a socialist experiment by the artist Otto Muehl, a co-creator of the Viennese Actionist movement. The group was known for its bloody and scatalogical sexual performances—like 1968’s Kunst und Revolution, in which Muehl and his friends disrupted a classroom at Vienna University, stripped naked, defecated on the floor then smeared it over themselves while they masturbated, all while singing the Austrian National anthem. 

By the time Muehl started his cult, he believed that things like monogamy and nuclear family units were antithetical to human development. Parents were the source of many of society’s problems, he argued, so they must be separated from their children. At the commune, Muehl not only forbade attachments to be formed between children and parents, but also between romantic partners, and friends. Babies were taken from their mothers at around eight months old and placed in the care of others—sometimes, 14-year-old girls. “Biological mothers were extremely devalued because a loving bond could’ve been dangerous for the ideology,” says Katrin, who became Inka‘s ‘mother’ temporarily while living with the cult. “Anyone who disagreed was punished, denounced, ridiculed, degraded by Otto and the collective.”

Though the cult was supposed to be about free sexuality, the reality was rather different. “You had to sleep with everybody so there was nothing free about the experience at all,” Inka says. Like Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, Muehl thought society’s ills were caused by suppressed sexuality. He also echoed Freud’s theory that clitoral orgasms were immature, and women should orgasm only from penetration. So, foreplay was banned, along with homosexuality and any sex that was emotional or loving. Usually, when a girl turned 13 or 14 she was forced to have sex with Muehl himself. Boys were forced to have sex with his wife at around the same age. 

Nudity was commonplace and compulsory. Sexuality was free. Jealousy would be eradicated, Muehl claimed, if people’s experiences of love were untethered from monogamy, and shared out amongst a group.

You can see why this might be problematic for a child growing up. Inka, like the other kids, was given substitute parents. Muehl dictated that Katrin be her first surrogate mom, though Katrin wasn’t quite sure why, since she had little experience when it came to taking care of small children. However, with Inka desperate for a maternal figure, they soon bonded. 

Inka says that life in the cult “felt like you were floating in the ocean and didn’t know where to hold on. It was just chaos, very disorienting.” She found solace in day classes with other kids, often making short films. “Films were the only thing that had orientation,” Inka says. In the evening she’d see Katrin, who says Inka was “very scared” and “cried a lot” during her first few months. “I was young and naïve—unsure whether I should trust my feeling that [Inka was] suffering or the group ideology that the cult should actually be a blessing for every child,” Katrin remembers.

After a few months, the cult’s leadership noticed that Inka was growing close to Katrin and promptly separated them. Katrin was sent to another city. Inka got a new ‘mother,’ grew attached, and was separated again. The cycle repeated over and over. “I was sad all the time,” Inka says.

There was another strange ritual at Friedrichshof. Men didn’t have their own bedrooms, so were forced to seek out a woman to sleep with each night. If not, they’d have to slum it with the other spurned guys in a common room. Every night, different men would come into the room where Inka’s ‘mom’ slept, looking for sex while Inka tried to doze. “It was like living with a prostitute,” Inka says. “Just some guys coming in, fucking, and leaving.” Another former child in the cult says, “I never wanted to hug my mom. She was this sexual being to me.” 

Sometimes if a woman didn’t want to have sex, she could find a man who’d sleep in her room and pretend that they had. The pretending was necessary because every day the past night’s sex was reviewed during open group sessions. If a woman had refused sex the night before, men would call her frigid. Women would criticize men who couldn’t get it up. “It was an obligation to be potent and lustful,” says one of Inka’s childhood friends in the cult. 

One day, Inka was paired with a 25-year-old substitute father who played in the commune’s band. He was warm and sweet. She loved him. But she wasn’t the only one. Some of the teenage girls in the cult thought he was cute and wrote about him in their diaries. “Otto got jealous and sent him away,” Inka says. 

The grooming started early, when the kids were toddlers. Inka recalls being asked to touch naked adults as they paraded themselves: “The atmosphere of sex was there, always.” A friend of Inka’s remembers tongue-kissing adults and being ordered to feign sex with a pillow. It later came out that Muehl violently sexually abused children as young as five.

Every day in the cult, which was meant to be socialist, each member was assigned a numerical rank denoting their place in the hierarchy. Muehl and his wife were always numbers one and two. Members had to sit in chairs symbolizing their ranking, which created competition between the kids. “You couldn’t just play and be friends,” Inka says.

Years went by. Though Inka was surrounded by people, she felt alone. She turned 11 in the cult, meaning she had two years to go till she would be forced to have sex with its leader. Then something happened: Muehl was arrested for child rape, and in 1991, the commune dissolved. Inka joined her mother in Berlin. Almost immediately, she found herself staying at a lakeside boarding school that provided farming and woodworking courses in addition to a regular curriculum. She still wasn’t living with her mom, but she wasn’t living in a pedophile sex cult either.

The school, Inka says, saved her life. 

Fast forward a couple decades. Inka is in LA, an art-school graduate and costume designer going through multiple devastating breakups and postpartum depression following an abortion. She tries to jump-start her nonexistent sex drive by watching porn, but none of it works. So she decides to make her own sex-education style film: a satirical ad for a product called ‘Just Jizz.’ “Semen can act as a mood elevator or antidepressant,” a voice over intones, as a couple canoodle by a lake. Later the woman lays in a bathtub, her face covered in cum. “Semen has anti-aging effects,” the voiceover says. The film is accepted by Dan Savage’s Hump Fest—a festival for edgy, erotic shorts—and Inka flies to Portland, where she connects with Savage and the broader sex-positive community.

After sharing her dreams of making an erotic film, a couple agrees to be in Inka’s first porno flick.

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It’s 2017, a full quarter century since Inka was liberated from Muehl’s sex cult. She is on the set of her first porn film, trying not to have a panic attack: “In the cult, seeing people have sex was always very traumatizing for me.” But once she gets behind the camera, something shifts. “It was just this really loving experience,” she says. “I realize I am behind the camera, and I am in full control. And so any sex I see is sex that I have asked to see. … [This] is so totally different from my childhood experience that it doesn’t put me in the same sort of trauma situation.” She calls the film Undressed. When she shares the experience with Savage, he tells her she has been “reclaiming her sexuality.”

Later on, Inka set up her own company ForPlay Films to make ethical, feminist porn focused on chemistry, consent, and autonomy. As a female director, she’s a rarity in porn, and performers say the vibe on her sets is radically different. Inka lets them input on co-stars, scripts, and sex acts. The first time actress Nicole Kitt arrived on Inka’s set, she was asked, “What do you want to do? How do you want to do it?” Kitt says she’d never heard that before: “Porn is a boys’ club. You can naturally feel like falling into a role of submission, dealing with so many men with big egos.”

Before Inka cast Kitt in Ashford Manor—the award-winning, $150,000 dollar, four-episode, Bridgerton-inspired period-piece epic released in 2022—Kitt was sitting on the floor of her unfurnished Las Vegas apartment, scrolling her laptop, crying, contemplating leaving porn, and moving back to Oklahoma. She’d been struggling to get any bookings. “Inka calls me out of nowhere, and she’s like, ‘Hey, I really want you to audition for this part,’” Kitt says. Kitt was resistant, but finally relented. This will be my last hoorah, and then I’ll go home, she thought.

Ashford Manor changed Kitt’s life. “The movie not only reignited my career [she won Best Acting at this year’s XBIZ Awards], it also reignited my spirit.” Kitt realized that she loved acting, which she gets to do a lot of in the film. For her part, Inka was nominated for best directing at the AVN Awards, one of 19 total nominations for the film. 

Kitt now calls Inka “Mom.” She’s not the only performer who does so.

Recently, Inka says she has been making “holistic” porn incorporating ‘mirroring:’ a word for something kids do while interacting with their parents, mimicking their behavior. “What makes you grow into a sane and secure attached person is mirroring from your parents,” she says. It was something she was never able to do while growing up in the cult. “Sex in the cult was mandatory and prescriptive,” she says. “Mirroring in my films happens on set by considering and involving talent in decisions; by listening to them and giving them autonomy.”

Though she and her mom have reconciled after going to therapy together, the cult still haunts Inka. In 2022, works made by Muehl and other artists from Vienna Actionism were being sold for millions, with proceeds due to go to the legal entity comprised of former Friedrichshof Commune members. This artwork includes a series made from burnt pages of the diaries in which Muehl chronicled his abuse. 

While Inka and other child members believe they’re owed for their suffering, former adult cultists want the money to go into their pensions instead. “[The adults] chose to be there: we were there against our will,” Inka says. She and 65 others drafted a petition, seeking reparations; as of now, no money has been distributed.

Inka continues to advocate for the affected generation, and with her erotic films, wants to change the way society feels about sex—combating the pervasive influence porn exerts on sexuality and gender norms. “In the beginning, I felt like I was making porn in spite of my childhood. Now, I realize I’m also making porn because of my childhood.”

Follow Hallie Lieberman on X.

Inka Winter’s ForPlay Films can be found here.