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It’s a wet cold day in Paris. You’ve been to the Louvre. You’ve been to the Quai d’Orsay. You’re looking for something new, something fresh. How about a thousand penises?

The Paris Museum of Eroticism is just down the road from Bar Nooky in the once louche district of Pigalle. Put together by antique-dealer Alain Plumey and French teacher Jo Khalifa, whose personal erotic art collections grew so large they decided to open them to the public, the museum opened in 1998. As Plumey says:

"The quarter had stopped being sexy. We’re getting it back there."

This is no tawdry dive. The seven-storey museum has white marble floors, gold banisters and silky spot lighting.

"Start from the bottom and work your way up," said the woman at the ticket desk, without a hint of innuendo.

On the bottom two floors there are plenty of bottoms, amongst the 2,000 erotic objects, ranging from sacred Indonesian phalluses to Indian Karma Sutra watercolours and pottery from Peru made by Mochica Indians who apparently ‘had an inexhaustible erotic imagination’. They liked making clay penises.

Surprisingly, at least to me, 55 per cent of the museum’s visitors are female. This might have something to do with the impressive number of penises on display, but also because of the atmosphere of the museum. It’s classy, more American Beauty than Debbie does Dallas.

Continuing to the ground floor I had a scary encounter with a Nepalese divine vulva, and admired the enormously phallic Malagasy tomb statues which apparently embellish a man’s reputation in the afterlife, before discovering my favourite exhibit - carved wooden Thai nut-crackers, in which the nut is placed between the thighs of a sultry maiden.

As I looked - oh how I looked - I felt reassured rather than disturbed. If there’s one thing that unites us all, the museum tells us, it’s sex. We all do it, and we all like it. So the world turns. On my way out I met the museums two curators carrying a large blue flying vagina.

Alain Plumey proceeded to explain how people’s erotic tastes differed according to nationality:

"The English like latex and spanking, the Germans like toilets, the French like lingerie and the Americans like big breasts." But they’ll all like the Erotic Museum.

• More from Jim Keeble

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