David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

Advantages : Allows freedom of movement for women, control for premature ejaculators, caressing of female by male. Most often results in orgasm for women. Good when the man is tired.

Disadvantage : Too acrobatic for some women.

Chances for conception : Not good.

From Ovid, a poet of ancient Rome: ‘Of love’s thousand ways, a simple way and with the least labour, this is: to lie on the right side, and half supine withal.’

Advantage : Allows manipulation of clitoris, freedom of movement for man and woman. Good for tired or convalescent people, and premature ejaculators, as well as pregnant women.

Disadvantage : Does not allow easy entry.

Chances for conception : Okay.

Frequently used by 15 per cent of married women. Favoured by primates and early Greeks. Rejected by many Americans because of its ‘animal origins’ and lack of face-to-face intimacy.

Advantages : Allows manual stimulation of clitoris. Exciting for men who are turned on by female buttocks. Good for pregnant women, males with small penises, women with large vaginas.

Disadvantages : Does not allow easy entry or face-to-face intimacy. Penis tends to fall out.

Chances for conception : Good.

According to Kinsey, learned by many while ‘making out’ in back seats of cars.

Advantages : Allows clitoral contact with male body, free movement, intimacy. Good for male who wants to hold off orgasm, pregnant women.

Disadvantage : Does not allow vigorous thrusting. Sometimes tiring. Penetration may be too deep.

Chances for conception : Poor.

Has echoes of a ‘quickie’ against an alley wall with a prostitute, therefore exciting. Indian lotus position: each stands on one leg, wraps other around partner.

Advantage : Allows caressing. Exciting, can flow from dancing, taking shower.

Disadvantage : Does not allow much thrusting. Entry difficult, particularly when one partner is taller than the other. Tiring. Not good for pregnant women.

Chances for conception : Poor.

After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the only survivors, Lot and his two virgin daughters, lived in a cave. One night the daughters plied their father with wine, and the elder daughter seduced Lot in order to ‘preserve the seed of [their] father’. The following night they got him drunk again, and the younger daughter took her turn. Lot apparently had no memory of the events, although nine months later his daughters gave birth to two sons, Moab and Ben-ammi. (Gen. 19:30–38)

Abraham and Sarah had the same father but different mothers. Sarah married her half-brother in Ur, and they remained together until she died, at the age of 127. (Gen. 20:12)

Abraham’s brother, Nahor, married his niece, the daughter of his dead brother Haran and the sister of Lot. (Gen. 11:27, 29)

Amram married his father’s sister, and Aunt Jochebed bore him two sons, Aaron and Moses. (Exod. 6:20)

Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar and was murdered in revenge two years later by Tamar’s full brother Absalom. (II Sam. 13:2, 14, 28–29)

When the exiled former emperor of France died of stomach cancer on May 5, 1821, on the remote island of St Helena, a postmortem was held. According to Dr C. MacLaurin, ‘his reproductive organs were small and apparently atrophied. He is said to have been impotent for some time before he died’. A priest in attendance obtained Napoleon’s penis. After a secret odyssey of 150 years, the severed penis turned up at Christie’s Fine Art Auctioneers in London around 1971. The one-inch penis, resembling a tiny sea horse, an attendant said, was described by the auction house as ‘a small dried-up object’. It was put on sale for £13,300, then withdrawn from bidding. Shortly afterward, the emperor’s sex organ (along with bits of his hair and beard) was offered for sale in Flayderman’s Mail Order Catalogue. There were no buyers. In 1977 Napoleon’s penis was sold to an American urologist for about $3,800. Today Napoleon’s body rests in the crypt at the Invalides, Paris — sans penis.

In 1968, in the St Denis section of Paris, an elderly White Russian female émigré, a former maid in czarist St Petersburg and later a follower and lover of the Russian holy man Rasputin, kept a polished wooden box, 18 in. by 6 in. in size, atop her bedroom bureau. Inside the box lay Rasputin’s penis. It ‘looked like a blackened, overripe banana, about a foot long, and resting on a velvet cloth’, reported Rasputin biographer Patte Barham. In life this penis, wrote Rasputin’s daughter Maria, measured ‘a good 13 inches when fully erect’. According to Maria’s account, in 1916, when Prince Felix Yussupov and his fellow assassins attacked Rasputin, Yussupov first raped him, and then fired a bullet into his head, wounding him. As Rasputin fell, another young nobleman pulled out a dagger and ‘castrated Grigori Rasputin, flinging the severed penis across the room’. One of Yussupov’s servants, a relative of Rasputin’s lover, recovered the penis and turned the severed organ over to the maid. She in turn fled to Paris with it.

One of the controversial legends of the twentieth century concerns the disposition of bank robber and badman John Dillinger’s private parts. When Dillinger was shot to death by the FBI in front of a Chicago cinema in 1934, his corpse was taken to the morgue for dissection by forensic pathologists. The gangster’s penis — reported as 14 in. flaccid, 20 in. erect — was supposedly amputated by an overenthusiastic pathologist. After that, many people heard that the penis had been seen (always by someone else) preserved in a showcase at the Smithsonian Institution. Since the publication of The Book of Lists 1 , the authors have received a great number of letters asking if the story of Dillinger’s pickled penis is true. The editors called the Smithsonian to prove the story myth or fact and museum curators denied any knowledge of such an exhibit. Tour guides at the museum believe that years ago, many people mistakenly entered the building next door to the Smithsonian thinking it was part of the same complex; it was, however, a different museum altogether — the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology — and it housed gruesome displays of diseased and oversized body parts, including penises and testes, as well as pictures of victims of gunshot wounds. It was here some visitors claimed they had seen Dillinger’s giant penis. The collection has since been moved to the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre, but its operators also deny that Dillinger’s organ has ever been one of its displays.

Kichizo, a well-known Tokyo gangster, and his mistress, a young Japanese geisha named Abe Sada, were involved in a long, passionate sadomasochistic love affair. He enjoyed having her try to strangle him with a sash cord as she mounted him. Kichizo could make love to Abe Sada only at intervals, because he was married and had children. She hated their separations and suggested they run away or commit suicide together. On the night of May 18, 1936, fearing he was going to leave her forever, she started to play their strangling game, then really strangled him to death. Taking a butcher knife, she cut off Kichizo’s penis and testicles, wrapped them in his jacket, and placed the bundle in a loincloth she tied around her kimono. Abe Sada fled her geisha house, but the police eventually caught her and confiscated the penis. She was tried for her crime, found guilty and sentenced to jail. She languished in prison for eight years, all through WWII, until the American army of occupation moved into Tokyo. The Americans released all Japanese political prisoners — including Abe Sada, by mistake. In 1947 an ‘aging but vivacious’ Abe Sada owned a bar near Tokyo’s Sumida River. A sensational film, In the Realm of the Senses , was made about the affair, which made dear Abe and dead Kichizo — and his penis — legend in Japan.