This is Improbable Too

by Marc Abrahams

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Half a penis, half a penis, onwards (duck permitting) • Fingers, sex and ultimatums • Historic sex video: The inside story • Her dirty image problem • Outcomes of eye comes • When his length was excessive • Aggressive nipple assumptions • The British/Argentinian protuberance disagreement • Long words and naughty words • Budongoan chimp johnson-cleaning • Questioning the Menstrual Joy Questionnaire • Sexual conquests of artists • Reproduction of reproduction parts • Immoral thoughts on the side • Informatics for official fake prostitutes

  Under the knife

  About once per decade, the medical profession takes a careful look back at Thailand’s plethora of penile amputations. The first great reckoning appeared in a 1983 issue of the American Journal of Surgery. ‘Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam’, by Kasian Bhanganada and six fellow physicians at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok, introduces the subject: ‘It became fashionable in the decade after 1970 for the humiliated Thai wife to wait until her [philandering] husband fell asleep so that she could quickly sever his penis with a kitchen knife. A traditional Thai home is elevated on pilings and the windows are open to allow for ventilation. The area under the house is the home of the family pigs, chickens, and ducks. Thus, it is quite usual that an amputated penis is tossed out of an open window, where it may be captured by a duck.’

  The report explains, for readers in other countries: ‘The Thai saying, “I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat”, is therefore a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society.’

  The bulk of the paper reports how the doctors and their colleagues learned, over the course of attempting eighteen reimplantations, how to improve the necessary surgical techniques. Unambiguous photographs supplement the text.

  ‘Interestingly’, the physicians remark at the very end, ‘none of our patients filed a criminal complaint against their attackers.’

  An article called ‘Factors Associated with Penile Amputation in Thailand’, published in 1998 in the journal Nursing Connections, explores the reasons behind that. Gregory Bechtel and Cecilia Tiller, from the Medical College of Georgia (in Atlanta), gathered data from three couples who had been part of the epidemic. The couples, by then divorced, discussed their experience calmly. Bechtel and Tiller report that in each case, three things had happened during the week prior to dismemberment: (1) a financial crisis; (2) ‘ingestion of drugs or alcohol by the husband immediately prior to the event’; and (3) ‘public humiliation of the wife owing to the presence of a second “wife” or concubine’.

  In 2008, the Journal of Urology carried a retrospective by Drs Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes of the Washington University in St. Louis, called ‘The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s’. Ferguson and Brandes conclude that: ‘Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic. The vast majority of worldwide reports of penile replantation, to this day, are a result of what became a trendy form of retribution in a country in which fidelity is a strongly appreciated value.’

  In 2013, Bhanganada, Chayavatana, Pongnumkul, Tonmukayakul, Sakolsatayadorn, Komaratat and Wilde were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in public health, which they graciously accepted.

  Bhanganada, Kasian, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratat and Henry Wilde (1983). ‘Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam’. American Journal of Surgery 146 (3): 376–82.

  Bechtel, Gregory A., and Cecilia M. Tiller (1998). ‘Factors Associated with Penile Amputation in Thailand’. Nursing Connections 11 (2): 46–51.

  Ferguson, Genoa G., and Steven B. Brandes (2008). ‘The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970’s’. Journal of Urology 179 (4): 312.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) Moderates the Impact of Sexual Cues on Men’s Decisions in Ultimatum Games’

  by Bram Van den Bergh and Siegfried Dewitte (published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2006)

  The wild frontiers in medicine

  Dr Pek van Andel’s MRI sex video has thrust its way into an argument that periodically convulses the public and the courts. The video shows the first moving images of a couple’s sex organs while those organs were in use. It gives graphic new life to a question as old as sin: what is pornography?

  As used by Dr van Andel and his team, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner lets us probe anew, and deeply, this legal and philosophical chestnut.

  ‌Midsagittal image of anatomy taken during experiment 12

  Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a 1964 US Supreme Court decision that defining which materials are pornographic is hard, but recognizing them is easy. Quoth the justice: ‘I know it when I see it.’

  Laypersons watching the van Andel video have a tougher time. During the short time it’s been on the Internet, more than 2.5 million people have taken a look. Many, unaccustomed to seeing medical imagery of internal organs, struggled to make sense of the unfamiliar shapes and motions. Their comments about what they saw, posted on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVAdCKaU3vY), make this clear. For every excited ‘Agggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!’ there is a baffled ‘???’.

  Some people expressed confusion. One wrote: ‘Took me a while to figure it out. I thought the man’s torso was his penis.’

  Another hazarded that: ‘The dark spots on either side of the “line” (their skin) are the bladders. The spines are at the outside edges. As best as I can tell it’s the womb being bounced around so much.’

  A third explained: ‘It’s obviously missionary. Anyone can see the spines of the man and woman are on the outsides, which shows they are facing each other.’

  A number of people do find stimulation, and perhaps even satisfaction, as expressed in this remark: ‘It kind of loses something with just the white noise audio … Having said that, I still need a cigarette now.’

  Van Andel made this (possibly) salacious video in the late 1990s, but kept pretty quiet about it for a decade.

  He instigated and orchestrated the entire project at a hospital in Groningen, The Netherlands. He and three colleagues published a monograph in 1999, in the British Medical Journal. (Two co-authors, Ida Sabelis and Eduard Mooyaart, themselves engaged in intercourse in the MRI tube. Several other couples also contributed their all to the project.)

  Called ‘Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal’, the study includes two copies of an MRI midsagittal image of ‘the anatomy of sexual intercourse’. In the second copy, labels and hand-drawn outlines identify the bits that are of medical significance: (‘P=penis, Ur=urethra, Pe=perineum, U=uterus, S=symphysis, B=bladder, I=intestine, L5=lumbar 5, Sc=scrotum’).

  Unknown to almost everyone, Dr van Andel asked the MRI technician to gather all the static images and assemble them together into a motion picture. The result: twenty-first century’s greatest challenge to easy assumptions about porn.

  For their illuminating report, van Andel, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Eduard Mooyaart and Ida Sabelis were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine.

  Schultz, Willibrord Weijmar, Pek van Andel, Ida Sabelis and Eduard Mooyaart (1999). ‘Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals during Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal’. British Medical Journal 319 (18 December): 1596–1600.

  Don’t look

  Dr Judith A. Reisman wants you to avoid looking at dirty pictures. Reisman wants you to look at her explanation of the horrible things dirty pictures can do to your brain, nervous system and civil rights. To make it easy for you to know what she is talking about, the good doctor has included some nice, dirty pictures in her report. To make it easy for you to read the report, she has put it on her website. You and your children can partake at www.drjudithreisman.org.

  From ‘The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind
& Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech’

  The web site is rife with tributes to Reisman, beginning with one from Dr Laura Schlessinger, who says: ‘Dr. Reisman has produced a scholarly and devastating study revealing the ugly and frighteningly dangerous pseudo-scientific assault on our children’s innocence.’ Schlessinger is herself renowned both for crusading against dirty pictures, and for the naked photographs of herself that are spread all over the Internet.

  Reisman is president of the Institute for Media Education, in Granite Bay, California. She is sought worldwide, she says, ‘to speak, lecture, testify, and counsel individuals, organizations, professionals and governments regarding sex education and fraudulent sex scientists’. She has specifically dedicated herself to ‘exposing Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s fraudulent sex science research’ in works such as Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People; Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences (now in its fourth edition); and, most recently, Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America.

  To do her work, Reisman has had to endure looking at a considerable amount of pornography. She describes some of it in her 1986 book Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. The book was subsidized with a grant from the US Department of Justice.

  She later wrote a study called ‘The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech’. It carries a subtitle that is either warning or advertising, or perhaps both: ‘Some Graphic Images from Mainstream Pornography’. The paper includes lots of pornography, alternating with dry technical drawings from neurobiology textbooks.

  There is something for everyone, and lots of it. On page twenty-one, a detailed graphic depicting which brain regions have high concentrations of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. A few pages later, a photo of a ‘MEMORANDUM TO DR. JUDITH REISMAN FROM ANONYMOUS’, for which this item is typical: ‘Playboy, August 1975 – The bedroom, incestuous sadism exploited with the suggestion that we will be turned on by viewing a “hot” series of Jane (slightly exposed breasts and genitalia) in similar poses.’

  A few of the porno pictures have white or black rectangles superimposed over the good bits. The neurobiology textbook diagrams are unretouched, as far as I could determine.

  ‘The reason such a paper as this is necessary’, Reisman writes, ‘is due to the international inundation of sexual and sadosexual images and their direct, often fatal effect upon the conduct of millions of receivers of those images.’

  Indeed. The paper is a morally bracing poke in the eye – just what the doctor (Dr Reisman) ordered. The lusty enjoyment with which it was written will not be lost on the reader.

  Reisman, Judith A. (1990). Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People. Lafayette, LA: Huntington House.

  — (1998). Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences: The Red Queen & the Grand Scheme. Arlington, VA: Institute for Media Education.

  — (2010). Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America. Washington, DC: WND Books.

  — (1986). Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler. Lafayette, LA: Huntington House.

  — (2003). ‘The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech’. Working paper, Institute for Media Education.

  When sex can be an eye-opener

  ‘Can Chlamydial Conjunctivitis Result from Direct Ejaculation into the Eye?’ ask Doctors Simon Rackstraw, N.D. Viswalingam and Beng T. Goh of the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. That question forms the title of a study they published in 2007 in the International Journal of STD and AIDS. In it, Rackstraw, Viswalingam and Goh describe the plights of four patients, and disclose the detective work involved in diagnosing and treating these unfortunate sufferers.

  Conjunctivitis, whether of the variety caused by the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia or by some other, probably less colourful irritant, also goes by the name ‘pink eye’. It’s a catchall description for inflammation of the conjunctiva, the membranes that line both the eyelid and the surface of the eye itself.

  The doctors finger the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis as the likely culprit in as many as 9 percent of the severe conjunctivitis cases seen by casualty departments. They imply that most doctors would blindly – and perhaps wrongly – assume that manual transmission was involved: that patients had rubbed their own eyes with their own hands after those hands had come in contact with infected genital fluids, either their own or those of a spouse or a paramour.

  One patient complained of ‘a sore, red, sticky right eye; and a four-day history of stickiness in the left eye’. The others gave variations on the same theme.

  The mechanical aspect of their tales, too, had a dull sameness.

  One woman said that ‘symptoms in her right eye started a week following sexual intercourse with a known male partner who had ejaculated into the eye’. Another explained that her ‘partner had ejaculated into her right eye, following which she developed eye symptoms two weeks later’. A third ‘recalled the eye symptoms starting two days after [her partner] ejaculated directly into her right eye’. The fourth patient, a man, ‘had a casual encounter four months previously and recalled this partner ejaculating into his eye during oral sex’. The Sherlock Holmesian ‘big clue’, the study relates, was that ‘none of the patients were found to have chlamydia detected within the genital tract on testing, but all gave a history of a recent sexual partner having ejaculated into the affected eye’. But the story remains incomplete, because ‘Unfortunately, in these cases we were unable to test the sexual partners to see if they had chlamydia.’

  Nonetheless, the four cases were eye-openers. Each patient, when questioned, coughed up that unexpected nugget of information. Each maintained, one way or another, that ‘chlamydial conjunctivitis occurred following ejaculation of semen directly into the affected patients [sic] eye’.

  The doctors reached a sort of conclusion, undoubtedly meant to guide the thoughts of any medical personnel who might have limited understanding as to the ways one can contract conjunctivitis. ‘It is likely’, they write, ‘that this mode of transmission is underestimated as a history of ejaculation into the conjunctiva is not normally asked for’.

  Rackstraw, Simon, N.D. Viswalingam and Beng T. Goh (2006). ‘Can Chlamydial Conjunctivitis Result from Direct Ejaculation into the Eye?’. International Journal of STD and AIDS 17 (9): 639–41.

  In brief

  ‘Fracture Penis: A Case More Heard about than Seen in General Surgical Practice’

  by Manash Ranjan Sahoo, Anil Kumar Nayak, Tapan Kumar Nayak and S. Anand (published in BMJ Case Reports, 2013)

  The authors, at SCB Medical College, Cuttack, Odisha, India, begin their report in compelling fashion: ‘A 36-year-old man presented to the emergency department with a history of trauma to genitalia during intercourse. The patient reported the forceful collision between his penis and the bed and audible clicking sound with swollen penis thereafter.’

  May we recommend

  ‘A Penis-shortening Device Described by the 13th Century Poet Rumi’

  by C.W. Moeliker (published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2007)

  Playboy peer review

  Personal peer review – peering at data with one’s own eyes – is deemed crucial to some kinds of investigation. This eyeballed scrutiny figures in the war against indecent images of children. A study called ‘Tanner Stage 4 Breast Development in Adults: Forensic Implications’ looks at the very different things different experts saw when they all peered at the same female nipples.

  Many websites with pictures of unclad persons feature a statement specifying that all those photographed are over eighteen. In some court cases, expert physicians testify as to the possible age of the people in some of those photos. The new study and other research demonstrates that such experts can be – and often are – wrong.


  Many of those experts boast that they use a particular standard to judge the sexual maturity of a female body. That standard, called the Tanner Stages of Development or the Tanner Scale, was devised in the late 1960s by James M. Tanner and W.A. Marshall at the University of London’s Institute of Child Health. It describes, in detail, how 192 white British girls’ breasts and pubic hair changed in appearance as they became women.

  Dr Arlan L. Rosenbloom, together with three colleagues at the University of Florida College of Medicine, undertook an experiment of sorts, relying solely on the Tanner Scale to suss out the ages of some women in photographs. They write: ‘Inspired by the report of Italian and German investigators who used images from legitimate pornographic websites (to be sure that the subjects were women over 18 years of age), we examined 547 images with breast exposure from an anthology of the monthly centrefold illustrations in Playboy magazine from December 1953 to December 2007 that did not include more than one picture of any single model.’ The team found that any doctor who relies on the Tanner Scale to judge such photos could mistakenly decide that about a quarter of them are too young to appear in such photographs.

  In another study, in the International Journal of Legal Medicine, Rosenbloom documents in detail the ‘high degree of inaccuracy’ of medical expert testimony on this subject.

  So, there is the problem that different doctors interpret (and misinterpret) the Tanner breast-development scale very (sometimes very, very) differently.

  But there is a bigger problem: the scale does not measure age. It measures progression through ‘apparent’ signs of sexual development. Those appearances, and the ages at which they appear, can vary widely between individuals – which was part of the reason Tanner made the scale. Tanner himself wrote, in 1997, ‘the Tanner Scales were not designed to be used for estimating chronological age, forensically or otherwise’.