The Book of Weird Sex E-Book

Chris Gordon

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 178

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Everything you ever wanted to know about sexual oddities from around the world - and through history - can be found in this witty and engaging volume. Read about the antics of the Egyptian Pharoah who was a serial castrator (his collection totaling over 13,000); about the ancient Syrian queen who created 'a multitude of eunuchs' through her jealousy; about the paramedic who regularly fattened her dog up with hearty meals of adolescents' testicles; and about the scissor-happy wife who cut off her husband's prize asset and threw it out of the window, only to have a duck pick it up in its bill and waddle off with it - Did you know? In medieval times one of the few grounds for divorce was sexual incompetence, which had to be demonstrated before a court. In Romania men can be refused entry into the Orthodox priesthood if their members 'don't reach the minimum length set down in the rules'. Dr John Harvey Kellogg proclaimed his first breakfast cereal product as an antidote to masturbation.

Leseprobe

THE BOOK OF WEIRD SEX

CHRIS GORDON

CONTENTS

Title Page

CHAPTER ONE – Penile Problems

Dealing with Penis Envy

Now You See It; Now You Don’t

How Big Should It Be?

Impotence is Not Bliss

The Unkindest Cut of All

Hard Penis Envy

The Pain of Frustration

Having a Fling

Having It Off

Up the Spout

Sticking It Back Together Again

CHAPTER TWO – Sexual Preferences

Aronson’s Law

Gentlemen Shouldn’t Prefer Blondes

Bossard’s Law

Factors in Choosing a Mate

Olfactory Attractiveness

The Real Function of the Boobs

Breasts, Leg or…

CHAPTER THREE – Excess and Aberration

Springs of Love

A Whole Lot of Rotten Going On

Shagged Out

Ophidicism

Podoerotomania

Aural Sex

Axillary Sex

Odd Urges

Operational Treasure Trove

CHAPTER FOUR – Controls

Control of Prostitution

Big Brother is Watching You

Self-Control

Modesty

Cooling Off

Mating Controls in Mid-Wales

The Lord Chamberlain’s Sensibilities

Censorious Behaviour

CHAPTER FIVE – Beauty and Sex

Menacing Make-Up

The Measurement of Beauty

Greater Love Hath No Man

CHAPTER SIX – Sex and Old Age

Still At It After All These Years

Getting It On Getting On

Hot Latin Passion

Pensioners Suck

CHAPTER SEVEN – Sex in History

Providing Satisfaction

Hard as Nails

Wife-Sale

The Tahitian Feast of Venus

The Chuck Office

Roman Orgy

Naughty Tricks

Penalty for Unfaithfulness

Dead Boring

A Big Bang

Orientals Orally Engaged

Orientals Otherwise Engaged

Harum-Scarum

CHAPTER EIGHT – Professional Practices

The Malignancy of Masturbation

An Orgone Accumulator Makes You Feel Greater

Sex Experts

Basic Birds and Bees

Respectable Frottage

CHAPTER NINE – Political Sex

Silly Season

The Coolidge Effect

Sexy Politicians

Straighten Him Out!

Sexual Politics

Corrective Party

Baring It All

CHAPTER TEN – Animal Sex

Racoon Sex

Ovine Lesbianism – Or Not?

Female Animal Orgasm

Spotted Hyenas

Gorilla Sex

Making Love to a Hat

The Use of Mammals in Chatting-Up Techniques

CHAPTER ELEVEN – Contraception

Strange Contraceptives

History of Condoms

Anti-Condom Crusade

Kondomeris

CHAPTER TWELVE – Dress and Sex

Cross-Dressing

Uses of a Merkin

Uses of a Wig

Clothing Laws

Nudity Laws

CHAPTER THIRTEEN – Aphrodisaic

Champagne Slippers

Loads of Bull

Sexual Etymology

Sexy Foods

CHAPTER FOURTEEN – Sex and the Law

Randy Birdmen

They Start Young These Days

Rape Doggy Fashion

Sexploitation?

Sex on Trial

Sex Suits

Sex Laws

Osculatory Laws

Tourist Trap

CHAPTER FIFTEEN – Venereal Disease – The Low-Down

Famous Sufferers

Origins

Syphilis as a Good Thing

Treatment

Unusual Transmission

Scale of Infection

Xenophobia and Syphilis

The Tuskegee Study

Nasal Problems

VD in War

CHAPTER SIXTEEN – Sexual Miscellany

Persistence Sometimes Pays

Sexual Dominance

Naughty Names

‘Dum Erubescit, Salva Res Est’

The Second Coming

Blackout Babies

Lay Lines

Machihembras

Guerilla Sex

Advertising Standards

Cycling Together

Romantic Gifts

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

Penile Problems

Penises tend to be a binary phenomenon: you either have one or you don’t. Although hardened urologists might be heard declaiming, ‘It’s just a pipe’, most men prize their pudendum, and indeed – if volumes of email spam are anything to judge by – there would seem to be an unsatisfied market for making their precious possessions bigger. Reasons for losing the ‘precious’ range from punitive to accidental, operative to religious – although religions that are big on castration tend to be self-limiting.

Dealing with Penis Envy

The Egyptian Pharaoh, Menephta, recorded his great victory of 1300 BC over the troublesome Libyans in battle on a monument at Karnak. In celebration, he cut off the penises of his foes, and returned with a haul of 13,240. Ouch. As that great Egyptologist, Leonard Cottrell, wrote: ‘The Ancient Egyptians were probably the most humane people of the ancient east…’

The ancient Syrian Queen, Semiramis, was so jealous of her most accomplished lovers that she ordered the removal of their testicles: that way, no other woman would be able to share the experience. She is said by Marcellinus, a Roman historian, to have created ‘multitudes of eunuchs’.

The scissor-happy enraged wife is the nightmare of many a man. In 1975, Antonio Lama of Naples had his nose cut off by his jealous wife, Amalia. That must be bad enough. A Thai lady went rather further in cutting off her hubby’s penis and throwing it out of the window. The poor chap also had to suffer the ignominy of a duck picking up the severed member in its bill, and waddling off with it somewhere. There are, of course, cases of self-inflicted injury – Juan Varela from Honduras removed his own testicles with the aid of a machete because his wife refused to have intercourse with him. He regretted it soon after and took them off to a Health Centre to see if anything could be done.

In Renaissance France castration was advised as a prophylactic against a range of ailments. Some towns had women who specialised in the operation. One such paramedic had so many adolescent customers that she was accustomed to fattening up her dog with hearty meals of excised testicles.

Now You See It; Now You Don’t

A Nigerian herbal doctor, Mr. Aba Owerri, would chummily walk up to people, and shake their hands. But then, suddenly, he would throw himself to the ground and scream that his penis had vanished. His victims, already taken aback, would then be mugged by Owerri’s crooked colleagues. Owerri was caught by the police, and paraded around the town with his genitals in full view to prove his intact state. Not only was he intact, but functional. He had sired 114 children, half of whom were his accomplices in his robberies.

How Big Should It Be?

The creature with the largest penis in comparison to body size is the flea.

Sixty-five per cent of men in the USA are happy with their penile size. Of those dissatisfied, twelve per cent would like a smaller appendage; fifty-two per cent would like it bigger; fifty-three per cent would like it longer; and, forty per cent would want it wider. American women are easier to please – eighty-six per cent were happy with their partner’s penis size. Of those dissatisfied, forty-four per cent would like it bigger; forty-eight per cent would like it longer; twenty-three per cent would like it wider; and, twenty-two per cent would like it smaller.

Anthony Smith, the zoologist whose claim to fame is to have discovered the world’s first blind loach, traces what he considers the myth of large negro penile size to Blumenbach, an anthropologist of 200 years ago who came across the specimen of ‘an Aetheopian with a remarkable genitory apparatus’ and who supposed that this phenomenon might be ‘constant and peculiar to the nation’. Smith holds views different to those expressed by a French army doctor – Louis Jacolliot – who devoted 28 years to the anthropometry of genitals of ‘semi-civilised’ peoples. After nearly three decades of comparative measurement he declaimed that, ‘The Negro of Senegal possesses the largest genital organ of all the races of mankind’. Sir Richard Burton, the translator of The Arabian Nights opined, ‘Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts… Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionately during erection; consequently, the deed of kind takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman’s enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his womenfolk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them’.

Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, have made careful measurements of the average length of the erect adult penis. This turns out to be 12.8cm. (5 inches) – rather shorter than is commonly believed. They undertook this research because of an increasing concern that men were turning up too frequently demanding surgical penis augmentation. The reasons for such augmentation may not always be to do with sexual appeal: in Romania men can be refused entry into the Orthodox priesthood if their members ‘don’t reach the minimum length set down in the rules’.

Impotence is Not Bliss

Before the French Revolution, sexual impotence was the only allowable grounds for divorce. This gave rise to much legal wrangling before clerical courts – and, indeed to prurient curiosity almost to the extent of voyeurism on the part of the Church authorities. The trials involved physical examination of genitals; public attempts to prove erectile capability; sometimes to prove the capacity to ejaculate; and, even a version of trial by combat in which the maligned husband was expected to demonstrate his ability to have successful sex with his wife before witnesses.

Examinations to prove erectile capacity involved the man undergoing ‘libidinous provocation’ by midwives. Boucher d’Argis went so far as to warn the matrons to ‘…Take great care not to exceed their mission’. The authorities were quite tolerant of initial failure; the slighted husband might be allowed five or six separate ‘tries’. It was usually not enough just to achieve an erection – its tenseness, hardness, and durability were the source of much expert disputation.

Jacques Francois Michel’s trial lasted as long as five years and the poor man was subjected to almost interminable examinations. His solicitor, Maitre Simon, told of one early morning visitation by examiners: Michel was able to show them only the metaphorical ‘embers of a fire which had been lit and gone out…’ M. Simon continued, ‘M. Michel, who, when the experts presented themselves at the street door, was in the state of the most accomplished erection… having, however, no servant at home to open for them, he was obliged to leave his bed, to descend from the room and to cross a courtyard in his shirt and breeches to admit the experts… At the end of the month of August, the mornings do begin to be chill. The disturbance caused by the presence of four experts must be added to this consideration… The experts recognized this, and did leave M. Michel the space of some minutes to return to his bed and recover a little his spirits but Nature did not see fit to remount to that zenith which it had reached earlier…’

‘Trials by congress’ were even more harrowing affairs. Experts in attendance would examine both parties naked ‘…from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet and in all parts of their bodies…to find if there be anything upon their person as might assist or harm the congress.’ Then, the experts would examine ‘… The state of the privy parts, by such means to establish the difference betwixt their extent of expansion and distension before and after the congress, and if intromission hath occurred or no.’ Then the couple retired to bed, surrounded by watchful matrons.

Often, disputes would arise between the bedsheets, ‘the husband complaining that his partner will not permit him to perform and does hinder intromission, his wife the while denying the charge and claiming that he would put his finger therein and dilate and open her by such means alone…’ After an hour or two, the experts are called in ‘to discover if she be more dilated than on the last inspection before her retiring to bed, and whether intromission has occurred.’

One man, De Bray, was subjected to three trials in a row. During his attempts at congress with his wife, Mademoiselle de Corbie, she shamelessly belittled him, and gave vent ‘to an infinity of scandalous and injurious expressions for to anger him and distract him from his undertaking’. The expert witnesses reported, ‘… Having seen and touched his member, that it was big, stiff, red and long, and that it was in place and in good order to perform the said congress’. But, poor De Bray lost his case because his ejaculation was ‘too aqueous and serous’ and was deposited around the edges, rather than in the requisite orifice. The geographical distribution of his ejaculation failed to attain a canonical stamp of approval.

One renowned case was that of the Baron d’Argenton who had married Magdeleine de la Chastre. Their wedding night was apparently consummated – as attested to by the bloodstained bedsheets displayed to interested bystanders. And for four years they lived a life of apparent conjugal bliss – until, that is, Magdeleine’s mother took against him, and accused him of impotence.

The Baron was physically examined by an ecclesiastical court, which received a report that the Baron ‘… Had no visible cullions, but as if a purse without sovereigns, the which did withdraw inside his person when he turned over, in such fashion that he had nothing left him but his member, and even this being far smaller than is customary among men’.

The Baron protested hotly, claiming that his testicles were ‘hid within’. He even demanded ‘trial by congress’. It was all to no avail. Despite appeals as far as to the Pope himself, d’Argenton was convictedof impotence. The Baron died on 3rd February, 1604. His subsequent post-mortem engendered particular public interest, and surprise: ‘His two cullions, that nature had concealed from view, showed themselves, and, upon being anatomised, were found to be in all respects similar to those of other men.’ The authorities declared his potency posthumously – pretty cold comfort for the Baron. D’Argenton was not the only corpse to be dissected in the cause of sexual curiosity.

‘Frigidity through evil spell’ was also sometimes accepted as a believable cause of impotence. The Abbé Thiers gave examples of a list of commonly employed methods of avoiding such spells, including to, ‘Piss through the keyhole of the Church in which your marriage rites were held. Some hold that for this method to have all the success that is desired, one must piss into this hole on three or four mornings in succession.’

It was not only in France that impotence was one of the rare grounds for divorce: the register of the diocese of York reports on the trial of a man named John ‘inspected’ by a number of women in 1433. One witness ‘…Exposed her naked breasts, and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John, and stirred him up so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should then and there prove and render himself a man. And, she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long…remaining without any increase or decrease.’ Seven women tried and failed to turn John on, and the divorce was granted.

In 1707, Dr. Joseph Browne recommended bathing in spa water to remedy ‘Weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Oeconomy’. However, as a warning to those who wish to follow this advice, the author once quaffed a draught of the chalybeate (iron-containing) spring in the old spa resort of Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales, only to be later perturbed by the official analyses of the water showing traces of bromide!

The Unkindest Cut of All

One way for a lad of humble stock to rise and assure himself of a good living in olden days was to present himself to the church authorities minus his testicles: if he had been castrated then his soprano voice would never break and he would be prized as a castrato singer. To create a castrato a string was tied around the testicles which were then cut off. This not only ensured the right pitch of voice, but also left the singer capable of a sustained erection and sometimes they were even prized as indefatigable lovers. It is appropriate that the Greek god, Priapus, became the patron saint of castrati – priapism is the state of persisting erection without sexual excitement. Although the Church technically forbade castration, the ruse was that the boy would be said to have suffered from an accident – attacked by vicious dogs, or savagely beaten up by his peers, for instance. From singing in church castrati would often progress to the operatic stage where they were particularly in demand. Some of Handel’s operas were specially written for castrati. Delighted opera audiences would echo with the words: ‘Viva il coltello!’ – ‘Up with the knife!’ at the end of fine performances.

It seems it was not only their voices that entranced their audiences. Sometimes improbable and sensational love affairs arose. Giovanni Francesco Grossi, for instance, an Italian castrato, engaged in a wild fling with a Modenese Countess. Her enraged family sent her to a convent, but Grossi continued to pursue her and even boasted about his exploits. In the end, her family had to pay to have him assassinated in order to quell the scandal. Some castrati even contrived to marry, although the Church officially forbade it. One castrato, Loreto Vittori, became a priest.

Another famous castrato, Farinelli, was reputed to be able to sing 250 notes on one breath. He sang before Philip V of Spain and succeeded in lifting the King out of his prolonged melancholy. Philip’s Queen was so impressed that she paid Farinelli a handsome salary in order to sing to the King every night. Farinelli’s star rose. He undertook service for the government and became a Minister of the Admiralty and a grandee of Spain.

This barbarous practice of castration did not die out until this century. The last soprano castrato was Alessandro Moreschi, who sang in the choir of the Sistine Chapel. He died in 1922 – late enough for his voice to have been recorded – and with him departed a tainted tradition of the Church.

Hard Penis Envy

Andrew Thomas, an apprentice carpenter, aged twenty from Builth Wells, a sleepy Welsh town on the banks of the River Wye, took great exception to a part of a nude statue of the male river god, Cepmissus. Feeling it was ‘vulgar and obscene’ he wielded a pick-axe to chop off the offending pudendum. Thomas had to pay £600 compensation to Jones the sculptor.

The Pain of Frustration

A doctor from Inverness reported the case of a young man who had endured an unfulfilling night out with his lady friend. Needing to release his frustration, he had recourse to a handy milk bottle. His male member duly became engorged inside the neck of the bottle. Extracting it aided by a knob of butter was to no avail. He then had the bright idea of pouring boiling water onto the bottle – circular lips of jars or bottles do expand with heat. The boiling water burnt his penis, and in desperation he smashed the bottle. ‘He presented,’ said the doctor, ‘with a bleeding, scalded member, complete with bottle neck still in place, which we had to remove along with all the splintered glass.’

Cabrolius reports the case of a man who overdosed himself on the aphrodisiac, cantharides. As a result he made love to his wife 87 times in one night with copious emissions. He was then said to be ‘exhausted’ and ‘death soon terminated this erotic crisis’.

Having a Fling

A medical student by the name of Tony Tupper excised a penis from a corpse in the dissection room during a hospital rag week. He then paraded on Westminster Bridge with this decomposing appendage dangling from his flies. This caused a certain commotion. A police sergeant approached to arrest him for this exposure, but before the authorities could pounce, Mr. Tupper plucked the organ from his trousers and sent it flying into the Thames with the words: ‘There goes your fucking evidence’. The policeman and three startled tourists promptly fainted.

Having It Off

Sexual intercourse can be a traumatic time for a male squid since his penis may well break off: the same thing happens to the bees fertilising their queen – only worse. Having lost their male member they die from the wound.

The noviciate priests of Cybele in Syria ceremonially castrated themselves with a sword on ‘The Day of Blood’. Thereafter, they would dash through the streets until they were exhausted; then, they would fling their severed organs through the nearest window – no doubt to the surprise of the occupants. Frazer reports in his seminal work, The Golden Bough, that male spectators would sometimes get caught up in some kind of imitative hysteria: ‘For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot.’

Often, the attendants at Roman baths were eunuchs. According to Juvenal, these attendants were particularly prized as lovers – perhaps because of their sustained performances, and because of there being no risk of pregnancy. Juvenal tells us: ‘The biggest thrill is one who was fully grown, a lusty black-quilled male, before the surgeons went to work on his groin. Let the testicles ripen and drop, fill out till they hang like two pound weights, then what the surgeon chops will hurt nobody’s trade but the barber’s.’

Chinese eunuchs, by contrast, paid particular attention to the preservation of their ‘precious’, as they termed it. Eunuchs would store the precious, ‘in common pint measures hermetically closed, and placed on a high shelf’. This was important, because if they were desirous of promotion, they had to present their pickled genitals, duly bottled and labelled, to the chief eunuch for inspection. If the precious had been lost or misplaced, however, it was sometimes possible to borrow or hire an alternative set. Castration was carried out by a family of hereditary surgeons near the gate of the Imperial City: candidates were drugged on opium and their genitals