I attended a class on how to tie someone up once. For sexy times! This was roughly five years ago, and at the time, I thought it was the weirdest iteration of having sex imaginable, roping up a partner or two. In the years since, I’ve discovered I was wrong. Very recently, I happened upon a story from almost ten years ago, about the largest orgy in recorded history. Imagine 250 Japanese couples methodically going at it all at once in a large white, padded room. You have to hand it to them for the spectacle.
Seeing 500 people enjoying carnal embrace made me think. There are probably a whole lot of weird sex records and facts out there, and we can use said tidbits as inspiration. If half a thousand people can feel comfortable enough with themselves and their potential partners to enjoy the company of a cavern of like-minded copulators, then anything is possible.
After staring wide-eyed at many, many very happy individuals, I checked around the ol’ Internet for the titillating and educational, to get a glimpse as to what more we can know about this mysterious thing called copulation.
According to a website called Ink Tank, who published a beautiful list of sex facts, penguins only dig an orgasm once a year. So as fun as penguins seem, with their sled-torpedo bodies and all, their lives are far more bitter than ours. If you’re a human who only gets a few orgasms every once in a while, just think, at least I’m not a penguin. In contrast to aquatic tuxedo birds, a human can have insane amounts of sex. The site also notes that Lisa Sparks, a world record holder and pornographic performer, had sex with 919 men in 24 hours. The human body is an amazing, elastic, thing.
The sexy technology company LELO wrote their own list of the weirdest sex records ever, my favorite being the statistic of longest orgasms for both men and women. Apparently, the most orgasms experienced in an hour has been recorded at 134 for women, and 16 for men. That’s mind bogglingly intense, but it sure does teach us that we can, in fact, go the distance. And speaking of distance, the same site reported that Horst Schultz holds the record for longest jet of semen, at six entire meters. Our bio-fertilizing mini cannons sure pack wallop.
Not only does the male member have range, it sometimes has heft. According to one of many lists of ridiculous sex records–I’m citing a TopTenz list of unsexy records–the longest penis belongs to a man named Jonah Falcon, measuring in at 8 inches flaccid and 13.5 whilst standing at attention. That sounds like a match for Tatyana Kozhevnikova, who has the strongest vagina on record; she’s able to lift thirty pounds at least, making her lady bits mighty Herculean.
One documented utility regarding sex I really enjoy is borrowed from Body+Soul’s fascinating collection of strange sex facts. According to them, arousal in the body increases its ability to endure pain, and orgasm releases hormones to raise that endurance even higher. Sex pretty much makes us super beings for a short time, so if you ever want to fight crime, build a booty signal, as well as the one for if you wish you were Batman. Know how athletes aren’t supposed to have sex before a big sporting match? What if all athletes were aroused throughout the entirety of any given game? Every kinesthesiologist is probably rolling their eyes at me, but it sounds entertaining at least.
There’s an infinite myriad of weird and bizarre, and even epic, things about sex we know and still have to discover. But innovation in sex means getting into the nitty-gritty of some taboo business. Lisa Sparks proved that the human body can successfully manage a whole lot of booty, but mainstream culture probably doesn’t have the best image of her. Those Japanese folks, by organizing a synchronized, somehow ostensibly monogamous orgy, demolished previously held notions of what constitutes private and public (or something). And Jonah Falcon’s decision to stay clear of pornography–read the Rolling Stone interview with him for how the penis can be its own existential crisis–is kind of teaching us that sex is not the only facet of our existence that defines us.
I remember telling one of the bondage students that I was perfectly happy being vanilla. She chastised me a little, saying I should broaden my horizons. I had nothing to say at the time, but now it occurs to me that she was responding to a world that sneers at sexual innovation and progress. If you follow sex technology, it’s astounding what sex can do and how we can manipulate a most pleasurable experience. And the human body alone is pretty impressive. Could it be that all this bizarre stuff should be regarded as not weird at all? It would make for more interesting coitus on the mass and personal scale.
