Jugum penis? What the hell is that, you ask? New Scientist explains: “this device was intended as a treatment for ‘nocturnal incontinence’ and to prevent masturbation. It was designed to deter nighttime emissions by causing enough pain to waken the sleeper if an erection threatened.” Jugum penis, according to an 1866 medical lexicon, literally means “yoke of the penis” — presse-urèthre in French. There are a number of fascinating search results for “jugum penis” among the hundred-year-old books now available from Google Books. For example, there is the case history of a thirteen-year-old boy who apparently was wetting his bed from the age of four onward. In this case, the attending physician did not employ the jugum penis “because it strangulated the glans [of the penis] so much that it could not be endured for the necessary length of time.” Instead he whipped up his own contraption:

I selected a bougie of a size large enough to fill his urethra, from which I cut about two and a half, or three inches. Having placed that on the outside of the under part of the penis on a line parallel to the canal, with its point projecting a short way beyond the glans to avoid as much as possible any pain from pressure, I passed straps of adhesive plaster around, (first at the point of the penis, and afterwards continuing strap after strap the length of the piece of bougie,) and pulled them so tight as to press the bougie close in upon the urethra, so that no space was left by which urine could pass. This was done at ten o’clock at night, and at three o’clock he called me out of bed, having a great desire to pass urine. I removed the straps, &c. and when he had emptied his bladder, I applied others in the same manner. The next desire for this evacuation was about seven o’clock, and the next again at eleven o’clock in the forenoon. After each evacuation the pressure was renewed without any unpleasant symptom, and in three days he was cured of incontinence of urine. How far such treatment might answer the purpose of cleanliness and convenience, in paralysis, I have as yet had no experience, but when a case of that kind comes under my care, I shall not hesitate in giving it a trial.

The image of this adult man getting up in the middle of the night to release an adolescent boy’s penis from some bondage contraption is mind-boggling. It certainly makes you grateful for modern medicine — and it also makes you realize that what was the nightmare of yesterday’s adolescents is the wet dream of today’s perverts. Nowadays a jugum penis would be a desirable part of many a subculture dedicated to chastity devices and genital bondage. Doubtless there are folks who would actually consider buying this decorative print of a jugum penis.

And lest you ladies feel like premodern industry had nothing to offer you but bustles, have a look at this eighteenth century glass female urinal — “designed to resemble an erect penis with testicles.” What was the assumption behind the creation of that gadget?

Most people probably read this and think, “Aha! Well, of course he was cheating. Why else would he react so violently to the thought of his wife smelling his penis?” True enough. But then again, if beating up your wife amounts to a confession, why bother? Why not just come out with the truth? It’s easier and doesn’t land your ass in jail for assault and battery. There must be a less obvious reason he didn’t want his penis sniffed up. Maybe it smelled like another man’s rectum. Or the tongue of a dog. Or maybe it smelled like a cadaver.

If you’re a savvy cheater, you avoid all these problems by washing your penis before returning home to your spouse. How hard is it to find a restroom somewhere? Or to buy some baby wipes? Or a bottle of Purell?

On another note, it’s odd to think about people’s “private” parts entering into the public sphere. Andy Warhol famously said that everybody would have their fifteen minutes of fame. Sometimes, though, the fame comes not to a person but a body part — an eye, a leg, a tit, a dick. Seriously, there’s a whole parade of detached penises that just drift through the news on a daily basis. Like this guy: “She said she saw the man’s penis outside of his pants as he was urinating…. Officers saw a large puddle on top of the stairwell where the woman said she observed the man urinating.” Or this guy: “He ranked the pain during urination and erection an eight out of ten. The suppurating wound had a ‘foul odor,’ a necrotic smell, the death of living tissue. The lesion was ‘now draining pus’ and was ‘more macerated at the glans,’ or penis head.” Or the guy who threw pictures of his penis at a schoolgirl, or the guy whose penis was nearly severed by “the propeller blade of a concrete mixer,” or the guy who killed his wife because she suggested he should get an enlargement.

Every day the news offers a wave of stories about penises, vaginas, breasts, asses, mouths. It’s like a subset of celebrity culture, the nether parts corresponding to the procession of pretty faces that dominate the covers of glossy magazines. Who are the people behind these organs? How do they feel about fifteen minutes of infamy attaching to their crotch? Do they gather news clippings into an album? “Sure, I was in the newspaper one day because I scored the game-winning touchdown in a high-school football game… Oh, and here, look at this. I was in the paper this time when my wife wanted to smell my penis, so I flipped out and kicked the shit out of her…”

New View Campaign were passing out some pretty good pins at their protest. Who wouldn’t want to adorn his or her backpack with a Love Your Vulva pin? Yes, love your vulva, why not?

Of course, there are a lot of different ways of expressing that love. For some, it may involve a hands-off attitude. Keep it natural. For others, their love might take a more hands-on form. They go after their vulva with the enthusiasm that dieters bring to a Richard Simmons show. The conundrum is that the folks in the “keep it natural” camp think they have a right to tell the people in the other camp what to do with their vulval love. They presume that they’re better informed and that the “sculpt my labia” types don’t understand the risk they’re running. This position is worthwhile so long as it confines itself to educational aims and doesn’t tilt over into moralizing. After all, there is nothing inherently wrong with performing aesthetic surgery on the genitalia. People do whackier things.

(For example, have you seen the Spankwire video yet? Here is a reaction video on YouTube. You can find there the link to the Spankwire thing. Note that the YouTube video is Safe For Work but the Spankwire thing is not. And really, don’t watch the Spankwire thing unless you’re up for something violent.)

If you bothered to watch the Spankwire video, the prospect of genital surgery won’t seem so awful. At least it happens in an office with a doctor who presumably knows what he is doing. In fact, one doctor quoted in the article talks about how competitive the field is becoming. Is there any doubt that “designer vaginas” and cosmetic genital surgery will continue to prosper in the future? There will be all sorts of funky things people do to their crotches. Maye one day they’ll even invent a vagina that looks like a penis, and vice versa.

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

There is an old song that begins “Hitler has only got one ball” and asserts that “the other is on the kitchen wall.” Evidently the first line was true. The other ball, though, was probably left somewhere in the dirt during the Battle of the Somme. This information is neither new nor particularly relevant. It only serves to continue freakifying a guy whose freak profile really doesn’t need to be raised any further.

Nowadays we may have celebrity sex tapes, but the sex lives of historical figures have always been of great interest. People have been speculating about Hitler’s sexuality since he became a public figure. By all accounts, the Führer was perv. The women in his life had a tendency to try killing themselves after being involved with him. Many have argued — and several entire books have been dedicated to arguing — that Hitler was secretly homosexual. If the Nazis arrested homosexuals, the argument goes, it was because the Nazis were trying to find and suppress compromising information about their own homosexuality.

Even more to the point, Hitler and his one ball were apparently into scat. A 1943 Office of Strategic Services report labeled him an “impotent coprophile”:

Some [of Hitler's associates] believe that he is a chronic masturbator. Some believe that he derives his sexual pleasure through voyeurism. Many believe that he is completely impotent. Others, and these are perhaps in the majority, that he is homosexual. It is probably true that he is impotent but he is certainiy not homosexual in the ordinary sense of the term. His perversion has quite a different nature which few have guessed. He is an extreme masochist who derives sexual pleasure from having a woman squat over him while she urinates or defecates on his face.

It is not difficult to begin making links between Hitler’s mutilated testes, his coprophilia, and his anti-semitism, as many psychologists have done. Hopefully, though, these links say less about Hitler than about the desire of psychologists to group hatred and perversion in a single category of negativity. After all, not every coprophile is a bigot. And given that most perversions are now less perverse than they were a generation ago, many people would doubtless find a golden shower less disgusting than anti-semitism. On YouTube there are countless reaction videos showing people watching 2 Girls, 1 Cup. But there aren’t any videos showing those simultaneously fascinated-but-appalled reactions to ethnic cleansing.

For today PervScan was debating between two stories. The first concerned the woman whose 34ZZZ breasts were removed by doctors because they were causing her too much pain. The story is not so novel but the article happened to feature two pictures, one of the lady’s chest prior to surgery and another during surgery. You don’t see that in the newspaper every day.

A second possibility, submitted by the indefatigable “Chris Finch“, concerns a new book titled The Testicle Cookbook: Cooking With Balls. Evidently the tome offers a variety of ways to cook up yummy meat dishes using the nuts of stallions, ostriches, bulls, pigs and turkeys. Testicles, of course, are thought by some cultures to have aphrodisiac properties when eaten. But really there is nothing perverse about cooking testicles, unless you happen to be this guy.

So in the stead of an extended analysis of either of these stories, how about this — the other day there was a person walking through Union Square here in New York wearing a t-shirt that said: “I run like I fuck.” I run like I fuck? What does that mean? I fuck with a limp? I get out of breath? I sprint to the finish? Some googling suggests the phrase might come from a fanfic called Gaedhal’s Queer Theories series. Evidently the whole line is “I run like I fuck. With my whole body.” After the spectacle of amputated breasts and fricasseed testicles, such wholism might even constitute a happy ending.

You can find the full text of the article “A Woman’s History of Vaginal Orgasm is Discernible from Her Walk” at the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Dr Petra Boynton, a noted sexologist, has written a substantial critique of the research on her blog. She points out, among other things, that the researchers may harbor a subtle bias, since one member of the team has previously published research claiming that “penis-vagina intercourse is 400% ‘better’ than other forms of sex and heterosexual sex is superior.” Surely any sharp-minded reader would like to know the criteria by which genital intercourse is deemed superior to, say, oral or anal. (Ok, Chris Finch, we know you like anal, we know…)

But let’s assume for a second that this research is one hundred percent accurate. Suppose you really can extrapolate from a woman’s walk whether or not she is capable of full-bore vaginal orgasms. What, then, are you supposed to do with this information? How is it meaningful or actionable? Should men spurn dates with women who don’t sport a hip-swinging strut? Would women begin to practice and imitate such gaits, the same as some now stuff their bras or get breast implants to enhance their appeal (er, to conform to the notion of appealingness that they inherit from the zeitgeist)? It’s all so ridiculous. Besides, relatively few guys would care if their female partners were capable of vaginal orgasms. Unfortunately, it’s their own orgasms they usually care most about.

Here is the picture of the poor little tyke with his extra penis. While the thing may be unsettling to behold, it raises all sorts of fantastic sexual possibilities. Presuming the penis could get erect — it just needs blood, right? And it must have blood supply or it would atrophy and fall off — it would mean the kid (when he grows up) could fuck people by backing into them. Or he could flash people while running away from them. Or he could ejaculate forwards and backwards at the same time. Given some of the possibilities, it can’t be long before devotees of body modification try to grow themselves a dorsal dick.

Seriously, though, the baby’s strange case of fetus in fetu raises an interesting point about perversion. Why is something like this an abnormality, perhaps even a monstrosity, and not a perversion? What is it that distinguishes the two? And if a body modder did find some way to graft a penis to his spine, would that be perverse? If so, how come it’s not perverse when a baby is born with one and it is perverse when an adult chooses one?

You can view several pictures from the operation at UCSD’s web site. No, you can’t see Ms. Schlamadinger’s vag. Of course, she should be commended for her bravery not only in undergoing the procedure but in being so open about it. Medically, it’s a wonderful development. Surgeons are finally learning that the human body is not a cadaver such as the ones they dissect in school. It’s a living thing, and it recuperates much better if you don’t create new wounds to remove or repair malfunctioning organs.

That being said, it’s hard not to deny that there is something about this surgery that speaks to the homunculus in the pervert’s brain. When a genital enters into a procedure, it sexualizes the operation somehow. The appendix gets tied to the vagina, and vice versa. Random permutations float through your brain. You imagine somebody masturbating an appendix. You wonder how the procedure would work for men. (Maybe in the future there will be an appendix-killing pill sort of like the abortion pill. Then a guy could just piss out his malignant organ.) You ask yourself what would happen if the patient is a virgin. Would the surgeons break her hymen to extract the appendix? How would she feel about that? And while the NOTES procedure serves to minimize pain, its proximity to the clitoris makes you wonder if it could possibly serve to introduce pleasure into the surgery. Could a woman climax from having an organ pulled out her vagina? “Doctor,” she might moan, “not so fast. Shove it back in a second. Right. Now pull it back out again. And in again. And out. And oooohhh….”

(Thanks to Geek Space for the link.)

Here is an abstract of the actual research article, “Measurement of the Thickness of the Urethrovaginal Space in Women with or without Vaginal Orgasm.” You can read the whole thing if you want to pay for it. The New Scientist article is full of fascinating information, though, and you may be content just to read that. There is a particularly good bit toward the end about increasing the size of the g spot by working it like a muscle. And don’t miss that sidebar about female ejaculation in Rwanda.

However interesting all that is, it’s clearly not perverse. What may be perverse is the fact that researchers are still, in 2008, trying to nail down the female anatomy. Think about it. People have been dissecting cadavers for hundreds of years. Scientists have been imaging brains, nerves, bones, and cells for a century. You can buy textbooks on the morphology, anatomy, histology, and chemistry of the body. There are detailed accounts of how the eye sees and the ear hears. But how a woman orgasms? It’s practically the final frontier of the human organism. If researchers can figure out that and the elusive issue of how the seemingly non-physical mind interacts with the physical brain, there won’t be any mysteries left. We’ll understand “our bodies, ourselves.”

This is all especially ironic given that we live in the Information Age. It’s apparent that we don’t have all the information we think we have. Someday in the future there may be sexual beings who possess a scarily complete knowledge of the workings of the body. “I can play you the way Mozart played a piano,” your lover will say. And when they look back at our sex manuals, our aphrodisiac cookbooks, our internet porn, they’ll laugh at how we ever dared to call ourselves anything other than an extension of the dark ages.

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

This is a rarity wrapped in a miracle — to be born with two penes is rare enough, but to have them both “fully functional” is miraculous. Of course, the article does not specify quite what “fully functional” means. When the guy urinates, does liquid come from each penis? When he ejaculates, does he spew from each penis? If so, does it double his pleasure? You can only assume that it doesn’t, since he wants to have a member removed.

The whole story has a fairy tale air about it. You can imagine an evil genie granting a guy a wish, and when he wishes for multiple orgasms the genie endows him with an extra penis. It’s a way of fulfilling the wish literally but at the same time imparting some unasked-for moral lesson — teaching the guy not to be greedy, perhaps.

At any rate, from the vantage point of perversity, there is absolutely nothing perverse about having two penes. It’s like being a hermaphrodite — it’s an abnormality, not a perversion. Then again, if the titles of this and other articles about the case are to be considered — are you sure you want to remove that? — it isn’t perverse to have two organs but it may well be perverse to want to remove one.