David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Their romance began after Andrews heard that movie director Edwards had described her as ‘so sweet she probably has violets between her legs’. Amused by this remark, she sent him a bunch of violets and a note. They soon began dating and were married in 1969.

Avant-garde playwright Beckett had been stabbed by a pimp and was discovered bleeding in the street by Deschevaux-Dumesnil. She found help and visited him in the hospital. After his release, they moved in together, married and were together 28 years, until his death in 1989.

Brown, the future editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker , was a 22-year-old Oxford co-ed when she decided to meet Evans, the 47-year-old editor of the venerable Times of London. Brown camped outside Evans’s door and refused to move until he agreed to see her. Four years later, Evans divorced his wife and married Brown.

On her first day in Nashville in 1964, Parton took a suitcase of dirty clothes to a launderette. Dean drove by and honked his truck’s horn at the pretty blonde. Parton cheerfully waved back, and he stopped. They chatted, began dating, and fell in love. After Dean got out of the army two years later, he and Parton married.

Asparagus contains a diuretic that increases the amount of urine excreted and excites the urinary passages. The vegetable is rich in potassium, phosphorus, and calcium — all necessary for maintenance of a high energy level. However, it also contains aspartic acid, which neutralises excess amounts of ammonia in one’s body and may cause apathy and sexual uninterest.

In addition to being nutritious (30% protein), caviar has been considered an aphrodisiac because of its obvious place in the reproductive process. All fish and their by-products have been linked to the myth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love who was born from the foam of the sea.

Eel, like most fish, is rich in phosphorus and has an excitant effect on the bladder. In addition to its general associations with the aphrodisiac effect of fish, it has probably been favoured as an aphrodisiac because of its phallic appearance.

Both Eastern and Western cultures have long regarded garlic as an aphrodisiac. The Greeks and Romans sang its praises and oriental lovers claimed to be towers of strength because of eating it.

The Chinese call ginseng the ‘elixir of life’ and have used it for more than 5,000 years. Although medical opinion is sharply divided as to its merits, Russian experiments claim that ginseng increases sexual energy and has a general healing and rejuvenating influence on the body.

Mars, who make M&Ms, have consistently denied that green M&Ms have any effect on the libido. Nobody is sure how the rumour started, but in 1996 Mars ran an ad in which comedian Dennis Miller asks a female green M&M, ‘Is it true what they say about the green ones?’

Honey is highly nutritious and rich in minerals, amino acids, enzymes and B-complex vitamins. Galen, Ovid and Sheikh Nefzawi, author of The Perfumed Garden , believed that honey has outstanding aphrodisiac powers.

The lobster has been described as an amatory excitant by many writers, including Henry Fielding in Tom Jones . In addition, it shares the Aphrodite-derived power attributed to all seafood.

Oysters are one of the most renowned aphrodisiac foods. Like other seafoods, they are rich in phosphorus. Although they are not a high source of energy, oysters are easily digestible. Among the eminent lovers who have vouched for oysters was Casanova, who called them ‘a spur to the spirit and to love’.

‘Venus owns this tree… the fruit provokes lust…’ wrote herbalist Nicholas Culpeper. The Chinese considered the fruit’s sweet juices symbolic of the effluvia of the vagina, and both the Chinese and Arabs regard its deep fur-edged cleft as symbolic of the female genitalia. A ‘peach house’ was once a common English slang term for a brothel.

TOMATOES

When they were first brought from South America to Europe, tomatoes were thought to be the forbidden fruit of Eden. They were also celebrated as a sexual stimulant and nicknamed ‘love apples’.

Truffles, the expensive underground fungi, are similar to oysters in that they are composed mostly of water and are rich in protein. Rabelais, Casanova, George Sand, Sade, Napoleon and Mme Pompadour are a few of the many notables who have praised the truffle’s aphrodisiac powers. An ancient French proverb warns: ‘Those who wish to lead virtuous lives should abstain from truffles.’

Gershon Legman, an American who wrote about sex, calculated that there are more than 4 million possible ways for men and women to have sexual intercourse with each other. Most of these ‘postures’, as he called them, are probably variations on the six main positions that Alfred C. Kinsey used as categories in the questionnaires on sexual habits which were the basis for his Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953.

The Kama Sutra , a Hindu love manual written sometime between AD300 and 540, lists many imaginative and acrobatic variations on these positions — for example, the Bamboo Cleft, the Crab, the Wild Boar; some Kama Sutra experts suggest that people try out difficult positions in the water first. Chinese pillow books, written more than 400 years ago, show more feasible positions with titles like ‘Two Dragons Exhausted by Battle’ and name the parts of the body equally poetically — the penis is called the ‘jade stem’ and the clitoris, the ‘pearl on the jade step’.

According to these sources, interpretations of ancient art, and anthropological studies, humans have changed their preference rankings of sexual positions — the ‘missionary’ (man-on-top) position, overwhelmingly the number-one choice of the Americans Kinsey studied, was not that high on the lists of ancient Greeks and Romans, primitive tribes, or many other groups.

The advantages and disadvantages of each position are taken from Albert Ellis’s The Art and Science of Love and from Human Sexual Inadequacy by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson.

To many people this is the only position considered biologically ‘natural’, though other primates use the rear-entry position almost exclusively. Called the ‘missionary’ position because it was introduced to native converts — who liked to make fun of it — by Christian missionaries who regarded other positions as sinful.

Advantage : Allows face-to-face intimacy, deep thrusting by male, pace setting by male.

Disadvantage : Does not allow good control for the premature ejaculator, or freedom of movement for the woman.

Chances for conception : Good.

Shown in ancient art as most common position in Ur, Greece, Rome, Peru, India, China and Japan. Roman poet Martial portrayed Hector and Andromache in this position. Generally avoided by those at lower educational levels, according to Kinsey, because it seems to make the man less masculine, the woman less feminine.