5 Crazy Dangers of Sex You Had No Idea Existed
Sex is right up there with finding a great parking spot or popping bubble wrap. Pretty good stuff ... when it goes right. But it doesn't always go right. As if accidental pregnancy, infections, or post-coital awkwardness weren't bad enough, there's a whole host of bizarre sex-related afflictions most people don't even know to worry about. So let's fix that, shall we?
Your Next Orgasm Could Give You Amnesia
Sex can be a mind-blowing experience ... literally.
There's a condition called "transient global amnesia," which is a spell of memory loss that can manifest and disappear within the space of a few short hours. We don't know the precise cause, but we do know that it's usually brought on by strenuous mental or physical activity.
Oh yeah, you know where we're going with this.
In one recent case, a 54-year-old woman checked into the hospital after suffering a bout of the sexiest memory loss this side of a soap opera. She couldn't remember anything that had happened since the, uh, incident. The amnesiac spell was so short that she'd recovered most of her memory by the time she'd gotten to the hospital, so we can't rule out the possibility that she just wanted to brag to someone about the sex.
The literature is full of cases like this, including two separate 70-ish-year-old men who experienced TGA after doing the geriatric mambo. This diagnosis was helped by the fact that neither of them could remember the current president (which might sound like a bonus these days, until you consider someone had to tell them). They both regained full memory-building faculties within around 12 hours, and their respective medical journal write-ups noted that both continued enjoying a long and happy sex life. Man, you know the lovin' is good when it destroys your mind and you still go right back to it.
Phantom Penises Are Real(ly Disturbing)
You might have heard about "phantom pain," the medical condition wherein amputees not only "feel" their missing limbs and extremities, but are still capable of experiencing pain through them. As it turns out, there's a similar phenomenon amongst people who've had their penises removed, but instead of pain, they get pleasure ... followed by an overwhelming sense of sadness when they realize their dong was dead all along. It's like living an extremely sad remake of The Sixth Sense every day. In your pants.
This phenomenon (which we'll refrain from dubbing "ghost dick," because this is a classy website) has been appearing in medical textbooks for as long as dongs have been dropping off. In the 1700s, one man derived so much pleasure from his stump that he could still crank it. Later, a 1950s medical journal described an elderly man whose penis was "accidentally traumatized and amputated" and who had an occasional "painless but always erect penile ghost whose appearances were neither provoked nor provokable by sexual phantasies." As seen in the following documentary:
You Can Catch An STD From A Sex Doll
We'll just get straight to it: In 1996, Ellen Kleist and Harald Moi won an Ig Nobel Prize for a paper titled Transmission of gonorrhea through an inflatable doll.
It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. They were approached by a boat skipper who, despite having spent several lonely months at sea, arrived on dry land sporting a new case of gonorrhea that he couldn't have gotten before he left. Unless they could figure it out, they were going to have to declare this the world's first virgin sexually transmitted infection, leading to some very awkward meetings at the Vatican.
When the skipper was questioned about his last sexual contact -- not just with people but with anything -- he confessed to an innocuous encounter with an inflatable sex doll ... someone else's sex doll. He visited an engineer in his cabin to alert him to some engine troubles, and while there, had himself a good time with the engineer's sex doll, which was lying on the bed. What the skipper didn't know (although it's unclear whether this knowledge would've stopped him), was that 1) the engineer had contracted himself a nasty case of gonorrhea before leaving port, and 2) the engineer had been using the doll mere moments earlier, and didn't bother to wash it.
Where's transient global amnesia when you need it?
Hickeys Might Cause Strokes (And Even Death)
They might seem innocuous, like a move you'd master in remedial sex classes, but hickeys have been linked to at least two strokes (of the non-sexy kind). The consequences of power hickeys are very serious. The first resulted in the hospitalization of a 44-year-old New Zealand woman, while the second resulted in the death of a teenager in Mexico City. This isn't a well-explored area of research, but it's thought that if a hicker applies enough pressure, it causes a clot in the blood vessels of the hickee, which then travels to their heart/brain.
You Can Accidentally Train Yourself To Orgasm From Nothing
We present for your attention the real case of a 63-year-old man who accidentally got himself hooked to prostate orgasms and, through the sexual transitive property, taught himself to get off on just existing.
It all started, as many stories do, when the man bought a butt plug to massage his prostate following an infection. Over time, the combination of the butt plug and his regular dosage of Cialis (which was prescribed to treat the infections) started to give him godlike orgasms. Next thing he knew, he was wearing a condom all day because he didn't want the interior of his house to resemble a house painter's radio. Soon he became so addicted to this sensation that he was able to climax merely by putting the condom on -- or by laying down, which he did so often that it gave him neck problems. His brain was so hardwired to orgasm that every aspect of his life vaguely associated with getting off had become a trigger to let loose. As seen in the following documentary:
Not only was the dude probably spending hundreds of dollars on condoms and new sheets, but his habits were starting to affect his life. He'd spend hours laying around the house getting off, which impacted his ability to host Christian canasta games (not that he did before, but he definitely couldn't now).
The man was eventually able to deprogram himself and stop the never-ending cycle of self-pleasure. If you were wondering, the paper written about him describes how, after returning to regular sex, he "became multiorgasmic with ... up to 10 orgasms before the final ejaculation." So ... maybe you've got some light reading to do tonight.
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For more, check out 17 Horrifying Ways Sex Can Go Terribly Wrong and Creepy, Out-Of-The-Box Sex Studies That Were Maybe Illegal.
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