(Thanks to Peter for the link.)

Parents always admonish their children not to put their hands or arms out the window of a moving vehicle. The moment children become teens, however, they inevitably start doing the thing that had always been forbidden. You see them driving down the road, ten teens to a car, hanging out of windows and sunroofs, clinging to luggage racks, sometimes even holding a bumper while rolling along on a skateboard. Most of the time, they get away with it. But for every thousand teens who throw off their seatbelts and poke their asses out the window of a car, there’s one unlucky soul whom fate decides to fuck over.

Such was the young Australian man. He was riding along in a Nissan utility. He saw two girls at a car wash. He thought they were hot. He probably shouted, “Hey.” He waved. Then he probably screamed. A Toyota Hi-Lux twin-cab vehicle nearly sheared off his arm. Surgeons finished the job. In twenty years the guy might be able to laugh about it, but for now he must be pretty miserable. The disproportion between cause and effect only makes it worse. If you lose an arm, say, fighting in a war, you can always convince yourself that the stub hanging off your shoulder is a public sign of your heroism. But what’s this guy have to show? A stump that blares “teen lust!” There is nothing too consoling in that, though perhaps the guy can at least solace himself with the fact that he wasn’t trying to urinate out the window.

There are probably a lot of property owners laughing and saying, “Got what he deserved, the bastard. He’s lucky it was a puppy and not a guard dog.” After all, when a guy needs to take a leak, he thinks nothing of it. But when a property owner finds people urinating on his gardenias, it can get pretty annoying.

It must have been a terrible moment for Mr. Veasna. He has to pee. He wanders over to the fence. He’s probably chuckling about some joke or conversation. He whips it out. He feels only the slightest self-consciousness about exposing himself, since he’s drunk. He relieves himself. It feels good. And then suddenly it feels bad. Very bad. In some small but still sober part of his brain, he thinks, “What’s happening to me? A kidney stone? Wait… Holy fuck! This can’t be happening to me. Heel, dog. Heel, heel.” Then he finds himself writhing on his back, his bloody meat flopping around. His buddies think he’s joking around. They’re laughing. Then they see the blood and get very serious. At this point only the puppy is enjoying himself. He’s wagging his tail.

Funny thing is, can you imagine if the tables were turned? Suppose a dog went to squirt on a fence, a man leapt out of nowhere and took the dog’s penis in his teeth, thus mutilating the animal. You think the news stories would call the man playful?

A successful businessman, aged 44 years, developed a painful sore about 8 mm in diameter on the glans penis. Biopsy revealed carcinoma and he underwent penile amputation along with radical dissection of the inguinal lymph nodes bilaterally… The amputation was total, that is there was no stump projecting anterior to the pubis. The patient voided via a perineal urethrostomy. The testiticles were retained and bladder control was preserved.

At the age of 64 years, 20 years later, while under care for cerebral transient ischemic attacks the patient casually mentioned that since the operation and despite the absence of his male organ, phantom erections regularly occurred especially with erotic stimulation, for example, “seeing a pretty young woman.” The phantom seemed to be of normal size, configuration and alignment, and was accompanied by a normal sexual feeling. So real was the experience that even after 20 years, the subject was still periodically obliged to check on the situation, tactually and visually. Particularly surprising to him was the exact reproduction on each occasion of the original painful sore, at the same site on the glans, accompanied by the same type and severity of pain as before the operation. The pain was apparently not severe. Restrictive undergarments were not an impediment. The patient was unaware of a phantom in the non-erect state.

The patient died from prostatic carcinoma seven years later, aged 71 years.

If you think the sight of a man with balls but no penis is disturbing, imagine what it must have been like to experience phantom erections — for twenty god-damn years. That goes way beyond the proverbial “itch you can’t scratch.” The feelings were so realistic that the man sometimes felt the need to inspect himself, and yet there was apparently little he could do except play air guitar.

The author of the case study notes that the patient “was not asked about the occurence of ejaculation.” The fact that the man had to urinate via a perineal urethrostomy — a procedure whose top Google results, alarmingly enough, all point to veterinary surgery — leaves you wondering how he could have conceivably ejaculated. Perhaps he may have been able to massage his prostate enough to cause an ejaculation. But where would the seminal fluid have erupted from his body? In an animal, a perineal urethrostomy involves removing the penis and creating a new urinary opening — a “more female-like” orifice. Could the guy have fingered his ass and leaked cum from an artificial vagina near his balls? Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

Look, you hate to belittle anyone who has died. Certainly there are grieving family and friends somewhere, and they’ve had the bad fortune to have their grief mixed up with embarrassment at the guy’s motive for hanging himself. You don’t want to be insensitive to these people because, after all, karma is a boomerang and you never know when being a jerk will come back to haunt you.

But hair tonic? A guy was “self-injecting” hair tonic into his penis? Did he really consider this a logical thing to do? “Let’s see, rubbing this stuff on your hair makes it thicker. Maybe if I rub it on my penis, that will get thicker too… Hm, feels good, but my penis is the same size. I know! I’ll put the tonic on the inside. That will make my dick bloat up like a stomach after too many beers. Let’s see, where can I get a hypodermic needle?”

Only to a mind that is both desperate and ignorant can this seem like a logical thought process. After all, everybody knows that, if you really want a bigger dick, the thing to inject in it is not hair tonic but gasoline. This endows you with a burning monster cock that makes your woman all hot and bothered. Why, your shlong swells to the size of a fire hose. When you ejaculate, flames shoot out your penis and light up your woman’s eyes. It’s really something!

Or maybe you should just be happy with what you’ve got. If you’re really worried about your ability to pleasure your partner, you could always try your tongue. That’s never too small.

You won’t often see PervScan say this, but this profile of an auto-amputator is a must-read. Please go read it… Ok, confess: how many of you blanched when reading the descriptions of David severing his own fingers and toes? Or when you imagined opening his freezer for an ice cube, only to find his toes on ice? Or when you listened to him contemplate removing a leg? You know he would do it, right?

PervScan has only written at length about apotemnophilia once before. A commenter took exception with the piece, claiming it confused sexual perversion with body integrity identity disorder. It is true that, whatever you want to call this fetish, it occupies a no man’s land between perversion and pathology. If you look at it from the outside, it certainly seems pathological. If you look at it from the inside — well, maybe that’s not possible, but if you take David’s statements at face value — then there is definitely pleasure involved in the activity. David “admits that he finds amputation sexually arousing.” It is unclear whether this means that he is aroused by other amputees, his own amputations, or both. But since he identifies amputation with sexual arousal, can it be assumed that this is a perversion?

This is a difficult question and makes you wonder not just about his fetish but about perversion in general. Many perversions have dubious relationships with sex or sexual pleasure anyway. For example, because it has become a cliché, people automatically assume that foot fetishism is sexual. And yet if you look closely at it, you see that a guy sucking someone’s toes is not engaged in an obviously sexual activity. He probably won’t climax or cause climax that way. There is a gap between his activity and a properly sexual activity, and yet that does not cause anyone to deny that his fetish is somehow sexual.

Presumably the same is true for a guy such as David, the auto-amputator. There is a gap between what he does and the pleasure he receives. To an outsider, it is difficult to understand how some spark leaps across that gap. However, he claims that it does — he claims that he attains some mysterious satiation from self-mutilation — so it is difficult to deny that he does. How do we know?

If you’re inclined to view this as a disorder, you’ll think that David’s pleasure conceals some other form of pathology or unhappiness. You might note how his fetish began with the dissolution of his long-term marriage. Were there not mental anxieties which he appeased by giving them physical form? It’s the same psychology underlying any number of self-destructive behaviors. Adolescent girls cut themselves or make themselves puke for the same reasons.

So does David indulge in an extreme perversion or does he suffer from an egregious disorder? Have a look at his picture before you decide. When you look at those hands, you automatically think, “Wow. How’s he jerk off — with his thumbs?” Or maybe he doesn’t masturbate at all, and that could well explain why he talks about his hopes for meeting someone who will “put up with [his] nonconformity.” Hopefully he will meet that special someone, because putting a happy ending on this story would somehow go a long way toward resolving the uncomfortable questions that David’s fetish raises.

It used to be that men were told, “Do it and you’ll go blind.” Evidently this guy flipped the admonition around. It was no longer about masturbation but about sex. And if he bothered to threaten his wife before enucleating her, he must have said, “Don’t do it and you’ll go blind.”

According to another article, the couple started fighting “when Mohamed accused her of exchanging a glance with another man and in an outbreak of anger he tore her eyes out.” That explains why he went for her eyes. Evidently Mr. Hadfi had a very twisted notion of eye-for-an-eye justice. The thing that’s hard to understand is how you can care enough about someone to want sex with them one minute and then mutilate them the next. That’s jealousy for you. And that’s savagery for you too.

Once you’ve flipped from lust to anger, what happens then? Does the sex urge go away once you’ve pulled out somebody’s eyeballs? Or do you still feel horny — and find yourself tempted by those brand new orifices? Did Mr. Hadfi fuck his wife in the eye sockets? Did he use the eyes as ben-wa balls?

At some point in their lives, most people have received an unwanted sexual advance — perhaps even from someone of the same gender, as in this story. Fortunately, the bulk of these awkward moments are resolved with a few words. “Put your mangy old cock back in your pants” is usually enough to let someone know where you stand. If not, a knee in the groin or a finger in the eye can be an effective follow-up.

Imagine, then, how utterly insane it must be for things to spiral out of control in the way described in this story. Two friends meet at a house. One guy thinks he’s just hanging out. The other guy takes “hanging out” a bit too literally and pulls out his wee-wee. BAM! Suddenly these two friends are assaulting each other with dumbbells and knives, and one guy ends up with his John Henry just “thrown around.” Jesus fuck! The whole nightmare probably took no more than ten minutes to unfold, but so much happens — dumbbells bludgeoning, knife castrating, dumbbells bludgeoning, victim being tied to the door — that you can’t even process it all. If you were going to make a film of it, you’d do this scene in slow motion, draw it out so that your brain can process the events. But then the audio would be in slow motion too and everything would sound like those recordings of whales underwater.

What can you say? Violent crimes happen all the time. People get shot, stabbed — but however awful these may be, they seem to happen in an instant. The bullet pierces, the knife stabs, then it’s over, somebody please call an ambulance. In this story, though, things just seemed to carry on, stumble from pain to horror to trauma. If this was a film, it would have been made by amateurs, people who didn’t know their craft well enough to execute a clean wound.

Here is a picture of Ms. Dawson. Here is a picture of her from a previous arrest for “resisting a public officer, intoxication and disruptive behavior, and assault on a government employee.” She looks like she fell asleep with her face in a ceiling fan. According to mycrimespace.com, Ms. Dawson has a MySpace page under the name andys_angel_eyes. The picture there could show Ms. Dawson, but it’s hard to say for sure. There is no definitive proof it’s her account, though it’s amusing to note that the default song playing on the page is “Crazy Bitch.”

Crazy bitch indeed. Her story has been burning its way through the blogosphere for one simple reason. It’s not because she attempted to castrate somebody. That happens more frequently than you’d want to know (if you’re male). It’s because she attempted to castrate him using her bare hands. Another account of the incident specified that she was trying to “pull a man’s genitals off.” According to a urologist, this would actually be difficult to achieve: “‘I’ve never heard of it,’ [the urologist] said, explaining that the testes are attached deep into the pelvis. ‘It’s pretty much impossible to do.’” Of course, that doesn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.

Setting aside the obvious jokes about hand jobs and pulling off, you can’t help but wonder two things. First, what caused the whole ruckus? Evidently they had a drunken argument, but why did she go for the ‘nads? Second, Ms. Dawson couldn’t have gotten such a formidable grip through a pair of trousers. Did she tear his pants off? Or had the guy exposed his penis in some manner? The story would make sense if he had attempted to rape her and she had reacted in this way. But if that were the case, then wouldn’t he have been charged with assault? Surely she wouldn’t have been charged with “malicious” castration if she’d only been defending herself.

In any event, it certainly must have made for a sordid Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Past was able to scare old Ebenezer Scrooge with just images of death. Imagine what a pervier ghost, one able to put the dick in Dickens, could have wrought with mutilation?

The world’s population is almost seven billion. It’s difficult to say how many people have lived and died in “recorded medical history,” but suffice to say that it is a very large number. Poor Ms. Edington is only the third person in recorded history to suffer from gas gangrene, a particularly nasty flesh-wasting bacterial infection, in the breast region. Imagine that — of some ten billion or more people, you’re only the third to get hit with this awful freak anomaly. If you were contemplating buying a lottery ticket, you probably wouldn’t bother if you realized your odds were only about one in three or four billion. And yet here is this poor girl, mutilated by the unlucky mutilating eqivalent of a miracle. Damn.

No doubt this will inspire a flood of muckraking news articles that warn of the dangers of piercings and other body modifications. And it’s true that, if you’re thinking about making yourself more beautiful by means of a wound, it’s always better to use a licensed professional. But all the same, let’s not get hysterical. Ms. Edington is the victim of some serious bad luck. Nothing more than that.

There probably isn’t much you can say to reassure a young woman who has gone from accoutring her breasts to reconstructing them. It’s a cruel fate. But maybe she can interest the film director David Cronenberg in her story. There is something very Cronenbergian about the image of breasts afflicted with a mysterious flesh-wasting ailment. It would be a perfect case for the Institute of Neo-Venereal Diseases, a fabrication of Cronenberg’s early film Crimes of the Future. You can imagine the director imparting a metaphysical element to the affliction, as though the deteriorating chest were a physical incarnation of an inner depravity. It might not provide much consolation to poor Ms. Edington, but a royalty check would assist with the surgery bills.

What is it about the anus that’s so damn funny? Lightning can do some freaky things. A few years ago there was a story in the news about two guys playing football on a New Jersey beach. A lightning bolt came careening out of a clear blue sky and killed one of the guys. Nobody laughed. So why is it funny when another poor soul experiences a similarly freakish accident? Is it funny just because the lightning exited her anus? Would it have been any more or less droll if it had gone out her ear instead? It sure makes you wonder. We think with our brains and love with our hearts, so perhaps we snigger with our rectums.

Once the pervier minds finish their belly laugh, however, they’ll be sure to contemplate the obvious question: what if the woman hadn’t been brushing her teeth but had been bending over the sink getting some anal from her lover? Would the spark have gone out her ass and up the man’s cock? Would he have liked it?

After you study the weird panorama of human sexuality for a while, you come to believe that there is a fetish for everything and you wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there are people who harbor a sexual fetish for lightning. There’s a great passage in 120 Days of Sodom in which a libertine attaches a victim “to a lightning rod during a thunderstorm and awaits a fortuitous stroke.” Probably it’s not the lightning itself but the victim’s torment that this libertine enjoys, but Sade doesn’t really specify. It leaves open the possibility that a lightning fetish could be at play.

If you think this is incredible, consider the number of people who die in autoerotic asphyxiation mishaps. Some small percentage of hangings are sex acts gone awry. Could the same also be said of those killed by lightning?