Is It In Yet? The Big Book of Sexual Failures. Mark Leigh

      In 2013 a couple in the Chinese city of Wuhan decided to have sex against the glass window of their apartment. So energetic was the act that the window gave way, sending the couple to their death on the pavement below while still locked together.

      A church official who presented himself to his local ER told staff on duty that his accident had occurred when we was hanging curtains at home. He decided to do this naked but, in the process, slipped off this ladder and fell right on to a potato…

      Church organist Ian Kemp, forty-eight, from Teeside was found dead, naked, sealed in a large plastic bag with his legs bound at the shins by parcel tape and his wrists tied together with a silver chain. A vacuum cleaner had removed all the air from the bag. A spokesman for the Hardwick Baptist Church said Mr Kemp was a ‘self-taught amateur’, although it was not clear whether this comment referred to his organ playing or his apparent deviant tendencies.

      Renowned American jazz trumpeter Jo ‘Pootie’ Newman was very fond of the ladies and, at the age of sixty-six, had surgery for a penile implant so he could maintain an erection. Unfortunately, the operation was unsuccessful and, on several occasions, a build-up of excess pressure caused the implant to explode and cause internal bleeding. One such incident occurred in a crowded restaurant. Mr Newman tragically died three years later from a blood clot on the brain.

      In 2001 a man visited the emergency room of a small rural hospital in Ohio, presenting an injured penis. The doctor examining him saw that, although it wasn’t bleeding, there was an ‘appalling mid-shaft gash going at least halfway through.’ The patient explained that he’d sustained the injury because he’d ‘tried to make a horse do something she didn’t want to do’ and was bitten in the process.

      A man presented himself to a Chicago hospital ER in July 2014 with his own hand super-glued to his penis: the result of a rather comical accident. It seems the patient was repairing a bedside lamp earlier that day and left the tube of glue next to it. That night he and his wife decided to have sex and he reached for what he thought was a tube of lubricant… you know what happened next.

      Doctor Matthew Valente, who dealt with the case, commented, ‘There wasn’t just a small amount of glue. It wasn’t just one finger. It was, in fact, his entire palm and all his fingers, which were tightly affixed to his genitals.’

      Fortunately, the glue was dissolved with minimal damage to both hand and penis.

      A man became suspicious that something was not quite right when he heard a vacuum cleaner running continuously in the trailer home next to his. On entering the premises, he found his fifty-seven-year-old male neighbour dead, naked and slumped over a vacuum cleaner, which had been fitted with a powered carpet-cleaning attachment. Rather than get his pleasure from the sucking power from the device, the victim had been pressing his body against the motor. It was found that the areas of his body that had been in direct contact with the motor showed burn marks and that his testicles and buttocks had been tightly bound by a woman’s tights. If that sight wasn’t odd enough, the following items were found on the dining table: jars of lubricant, a glass of urine and a wooden table leg covered in faecal matter. It was determined that the victim had died from a heart attack.

      General Sani Abacha was Nigeria’s military head of state from 1993–98 who led one of the most brutal regimes the country had ever experienced. It was known that he had a number of concubines and, on the night of 8 June 1998, he commented to a few of his aides that he was ‘in the mood for having a long sexual experience.’ A number of women were brought to his room about midnight but, by the morning, Abacha was dead; thought to be a victim of that most deadly of combinations: a Viagra-fuelled orgy and a weak heart.

      The body of Terrence Simmonds, a forty-nine-year-old from Oxford, was discovered in a home-made cocoon made of plastic bin liners. In what seemed to be a solo sex game, he’d used a vacuum cleaner to suck some of the air out of the bags but had failed to turn it off. After all the air had been drawn out, he’d suffocated.

      A forensic journal titled ‘Bizarre Impalement Fatalities: Where is the Implement?’ published by the University of Münster, Germany included a case of a man who liked to insert one leg of an upturned wooden stool up his anus for sexual stimulation. One day he lost his balance and fell on to it, driving the leg all the way up to his diaphragm and rupturing his bladder and liver in the process. Before their examination, coroners were, at first, mystified as to the cause of death; there was no apparent murder weapon and there were no external injuries. Later it was discovered that, just before he died, the man had managed to remove himself from the furniture and his wife had hidden the stool.

      A fifty-three-year-old Chinese man known only as Lu was found dead, naked in a chicken coop at his home. Police found the computer in his bedroom still playing porn and determined that, aroused by the porn, he went into the coop to masturbate. A combination of the cold temperature outside and his elevated heart rate from masturbation led to a fatal heart attack (the reason why he decided to masturbate in the chicken coop remains unknown).

      A young man and his girlfriend were staying at his grandmother’s and getting increasingly frustrated because they never had time alone. Eventually, the grandmother left the house to go shopping and the couple decided the time was right to have some fun. When looking for lubricant, they found the grandmother’s nitroglycerin paste, prescribed for her angina, and decided it would do the job. It didn’t. The paste caused their blood pressures to plummet and the grandmother returned to what was probably not the most treasured memory she has of the youngsters: unconscious and naked in her basement.

      During sex, a New Zealand woman in her mid-forties was given a passionate love bite on her neck by her husband and found her left arm temporarily paralysed. Doctors found that the intense suction of the bite had caused bruising and a blood clot in an artery, which, in turn, had caused the woman to have a minor stroke.

      An Australian woman was having very energetic sex in her hotel room when the vibrations from the bed rocking caused the ceiling light fitting to work loose and fall on her head, injuring her face and mouth. Instead of complaining to the hotel management, the woman tried, unsuccessfully, to sue her employers for physical and psychological damage. Her rationale was that the intercourse-related incident took place during a business trip.

      In 2009 an unidentified Maryland couple were engaging in foreplay but the dildo they were using just wasn’t stimulating enough. They decided they needed something a bit more vigorous, so their solution was to attach it to the blade of an electric saw, hoping the rapid in/out movement of the saw blade (and, therefore, the dildo) would have the desired effect.

      You can guess what happened… The saw blade cut through the plastic dildo and the woman was rushed to hospital because