Читать книгу Is It In Yet? The Big Book of Sexual Failures - Mark Leigh - Страница 11

There’s nothing wrong with masturbation, providing it’s done in the comfort and privacy of your own home and not, as some of these incidents took place, in a public library, on a golf course, in a police van, a supermarket or the public gallery of a magistrates’ court…

In March 1993 an elementary-school teacher and three other men were spotted on a golf-course fairway in North Little Rock, Arkansas, holding something other than golf clubs. They stood in a circle, masturbating and didn’t even stop when approached by a police officer. He let them continue while he went to get back-up and, when he returned later with his partner to make the arrest, they were still doing it.

In April 2004 Toronto Police officers received a call about a suspicious incident at Agincourt Library. They found a man sitting in front of his laptop, masturbating with one hand and holding a cucumber with the other. The man – Fredrick Tennyson Davis, forty-nine – was charged with an indecent act. Constable David Hopkinson commented, ‘He was not using the cucumber to pleasure himself, as far as I’m aware. It was held in his other hand – multi-tasking.’ Hopkinson also added that he doubted whether David posed any danger to the library’s staff or patrons, saying, ‘I don’t think he had any free hands to make any threat.’

In March 2008 a Polish building contractor was caught by a security guard in an intimate moment with a Henry vacuum cleaner in the Great Ormond Street Hospital staff canteen. The guard is reported to have told the man to ‘clean himself and the hoover,’ before asking him to leave, then reporting the incident. When later questioned by his employers, the contractor said that vacuuming in his underpants was ‘a common practice in Poland.’ He has since been fired.

In July 2014 nineteen-year-old Parvinder Aullakh was charged with outraging public decency after being seen masturbating in a public place. The place he chose, however, wasn’t the most discreet of places, being frequented by police and members of the legal profession: the public gallery at Hammersmith Magistrates Court in West London. A court official stated that ‘the teenager was escorted from court by police but continued with his actions.’ He was sentenced on 7 April 2015.

Derek Bennett, twenty-six, was arrested in June 2014 after shoppers in an Oklahoma branch of Walmart reported him to be masturbating. Two customers saw him nonchalantly strolling up and down aisles with his penis out and reported him to security. Bennett ran out when police arrived but was soon caught. According to a local TV station, he immediately admitted to exposing himself, but said he was genuinely surprised he’d been spotted.

During a routine check-up in November 1991, Dr d’Avis of Illinois asked his patient for consent to check for haemorrhoids. The patient agreed but, during the rectal examination, the patient happened to glance round to see the doctor performing the examination with one hand and masturbating with the other. The case went to court and Dr d’Avis was convicted of assault and put on one year’s probation.

A thirty-four-year-old primary-school teacher was convicted in September 2007 following an incident in Clydebank, Scotland. He’d parked outside a local high school and was seen leering at students. What made his actions worse was the fact that, at the same time, he was observed pleasuring himself with an electric vibrator plugged into his car’s cigarette lighter.

When Charles Veltman was arrested for possession of tools for the commission of a crime, police also found that he was carrying a home-made vibrator. Veltman admitted that he had planned to rob an electrical store because he’d run out of batteries.

Alone in her parents’ Jacuzzi on a day in September 1999, Gemma Humphries was curious to see if she could arouse herself by directing the air jets towards her lady parts. Her search for a thrill left her in hospital with acute abdominal pain from air trapped in her abdomen – and the embarrassment of explaining how she suffered this injury.

Polish housewife Joanna Kozlowska felt really horny and, with no vibrator to satisfy herself, improvised with a handheld food mixer, using the vibrations to bring her to orgasm. All would have been well had she not decided to use the makeshift sex aid in the bath. Joanna didn’t die from the shock but it was strong enough to send her to hospital. She later blamed her husband for the accident, saying it was his fault for not tending to her needs.

A man from Lund in southern Sweden was arrested for masturbating in a public place. An obvious creature of habit, to the horror of the officers escorting him, he started masturbating again in the police van on the forty-minute drive to the police station.

The warden of a Mexican jail, Raul Díaz, got his kicks by masturbating while spying on prisoners enjoying conjugal visits. He did this over a long period undetected, until the time when he tripped on a roof skylight and fell through the roof on to a couple in the throes of passion. La Cronica newspaper reported that the warden died after hitting the concrete floor – and that a pair of binoculars and a pornographic magazine were found on his body.

Masturbation is still outlawed in French Guiana. The law notes that this physical act ‘is recognised as a common cause of insanity’.

A thirty-five-year-old man complaining of a pain in his bladder was found to have three small squirrel vertebrae in there. It was later discovered that the patient had practiced urethral masturbation using the bones of a squirrel tail. Poking objects into your penis for sexual stimulation is not that unusual and there are medical reports of other odd objects being removed from men’s bladders: a long wax taper, needles, hairpins, plant stems and a sprig of wheat, to name but a few.

Nicola Paginton – a seemingly healthy thirty-year-old children’s nanny from Cirencester – was found dead in her bed in July 2010 after she missed a few days at work and her employer and a friend broke into her home to search for her. According to newspaper reports, she was found semi-naked, with a vibrator by her side and a porn film playing on her laptop. The pathologist stated that the cause of death – a heart attack – was ‘probably brought on by her state of arousal.’

An American woman who was starting her own business was working sixteen-hour days and had no time for any male company, let alone a boyfriend. Instead, she relied on a mains-powered vibrator for sexual stimulation. One night she fell asleep with the sex aid still running inside her, the motor getting hotter and hotter… and hotter. Eventually, she woke up in severe pain and with second-degree burns to her inner thigh and one side of her vagina.

In his 1922 book Rovering To Success, Lord Baden-Powell – founder of the Boy Scout movement – warned young boys on the dangers of masturbation, claiming, ‘It cheats semen [of] getting its full chance of making up the strong manly man you would otherwise be.’ It’s not certain whether he practised what he preached, as Baden-Powell is reported to have liked looking at photos of nude schoolboys with a schoolmaster friend, who was a keen amateur photographer of his pupils.

In November 2012 police were called to a Florida Starbucks after receiving reports of a woman openly masturbating in the coffee shop. A police spokesman commented, ‘No one could ever say for sure what she was doing, and I’m pretty sure the video didn’t show anything definitive but her hands went into her pants when she was wigging out.’ The accused, twenty-nine-year-old, Jennifer Piranian, told officers she wasn’t well due to ‘an infection or spider bite.’

A woman who was admitted to a Leningrad hospital with glass splinters in her vagina finally confessed to doctors that she had been masturbating with a cylinder-shaped light bulb that broke when she was using it. The girl usually used a warm bulb in a lamp to increase her pleasure. Fortunately for her, in this case, she hadn’t switched it on.

A phone-sex operator in Florida won a large settlement after filing for worker’s compensation, claiming she had suffered repetitive-strain injuries in both hands. This was the result of giving herself as many as seven orgasms a day while talking to clients.

In the 1880s castration was sometimes prescribed as a cure for serious masturbators. A contemporary account about one American patient claimed that, after the operation, he was ‘cheerful and happy’ and had, at last, ‘the prospect of good health and a life of usefulness.’

Poet Edward Lear blamed his epileptic fits on his overzealous fondness for masturbation.

In many prisons, gardening duty is popular among inmates. Not because it gives them a chance to work outdoors but because many of them use the opportunity to collect worms, which they put into a jam jar. Back in their cells, each prisoner slightly warms the jar on a radiator and inserts his penis into the jar, using it as a masturbatory device.

In the 1890s some authorities believed that women could be aroused by riding bicycles. The Georgia Journal of Medicine and Surgery claimed that ‘the pedalling machine’ could cause ‘undesirable gynaecological effects, especially when the body is thrown forward, causing the clothing to press against the clitoris, thereby eliciting and arousing feelings hitherto unknown and unrealised by the young maiden.’

For similar reasons, in France, the Académie de Medicine protested against the sewing machine.

The Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality Journal of July 1991 contains a story of an unmarried factory worker and self-confessed ‘bit of a loner’ who had taken to masturbating against the canvas-belt drive of a piece of machinery where he worked. One day a momentary lapse of concentration caused his scrotum to be caught between the drive belt and the pulley wheel. The man was knocked unconscious as he was drawn into the machinery and, when he awoke, discovered his left testicle missing. To close the wound, he used the most convenient thing to hand – an industrial staple gun.

The author of the article, Dr Gavin Matthews, who examined the man, stated that the testicle was never found and said, ‘I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-gratification.’

As a deterrent against masturbation, Chinese authorities used to recommend ‘Hard study of the works of Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao.’

In 1897 Dr John Harvey Kellogg invented the cornflakes that share his name as an ‘anti-masturbation food’. Kellogg was a fervent crusader against the perils of masturbation and believed a meat-free breakfast would reduce the prevalence of this heinous act. If this failed to have the desired effect, he recommended sewing up boys’ foreskins with silver wire.

Spectators at Toronto’s baseball stadium found it difficult to keep their eye on the ball during a Blue Jays–Seattle Mariners game in the early 1990s. They were distracted by one of the guests staying at the Skydome Hotel, which is visible from inside the stadium. This particular guest apparently thought the windows were made of one-way glass and several thousand fans saw him standing at the window of his room, masturbating while he watched the game.

Commenting on the great view the hotel affords over the stadium, the manager commented, ‘There isn’t a more exciting way to watch a baseball game but, for some people, it’s more exciting than for others.’

British birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes didn’t know what masturbation was until she was twenty-nine.

To discourage masturbation among boys and young men in the Victorian era, there were a whole host of ingenious inventions available that were a cross between chastity belts and torture devices. Many were featured in the contemporary best-selling catalogue Spermatorrhea. This included genital cages and penis rings lined with spikes and even an intricate device that rang a bell located in the parents’ room when their son had an erection.

An 1897 book, What A Young Boy Should Know, stated that masturbation ‘causes idiocy and even death’ and cited examples of boys being put in straitjackets or having their hands tied to rings in the wall in order to discourage this heinous act.

In ancient times, men would masturbate on the altars in pagan churches. Depositing semen was seen as the ultimate gift to the gods.

Also in the distant past, Jewish rabbis forbade men from holding their penises during urination, in case it encouraged them to masturbate.

A thirty-three-year-old Swansea woman went shopping to her local Asda supermarket wearing her new Ann Summers ‘Passion Pants’, which contained a 2.5-inch ‘vibrating bullet’ inside them. Such was the intensity of the pleasure that the happy shopper fainted and banged her head on a display, knocking herself out in the process. The reason for her accident became apparent when paramedics detected the still-buzzing panties on arrival and disabled them, returning them discreetly to their grateful owner after she’d recovered.

In 1992 newspapers reported that an unnamed thirty-two-year-old woman became convinced that Donald Duck was in love with her, via signals beamed to her from her neighbour’s satellite dish.

The neighbour found her standing near the dish, masturbating, convinced that Donald was simultaneously making love to her.