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

by cuddly toys, holding a wooden spoon in one hand.

      A Tokyo mugger had a strange MO… he’d threaten people and make them hand over their contact lenses. After he was arrested, police discovered his fetish. His home contained 154 pairs of contact lenses and glasses.

      Thousands of people die each year from autoerotic asphyxiation: the act of masturbating while robbing the brain of oxygen to create a feeling of ecstatic euphoria. Those seeking this ‘high’ may strangle themselves with cords, ropes, scarves or ties, or suffocate themselves by sealing their heads in plastic bags – but deaths occur when they go too far and fail to stop the asphyxiation. Two of the highest-profile victims have been INXS singer Michael Hutchence and actor David Carradine.

      Closer to home, one of the best-known reports concerned Conservative MP for Eastleigh Stephen Milligan, who is believed to have died while pleasuring himself during a ‘solo-bondage and self-strangulation sex act.’ News reports state that, in 1994, his housekeeper found his body at his Chiswick home tied to a kitchen chair, naked apart from stockings and suspenders, with a plastic bag over his head and an orange in his mouth (although some reports say it was actually a satsuma).

      The Trobiand islanders – part of the nation of Papua New Guinea – practise something called mitakuku, whereby, during lovemaking, they bite off their partner’s eyebrows at the moment of climax.

      A Tokyo newspaper reported the story of a local resident who had a huge fetish for women’s socks; so much so, in fact, that, when he saw a woman in the street wearing socks inappropriately – i.e. down around her ankles – he assaulted her by rubbing spit in her hair.

      The Associated Press reported the story of a New Jersey man who robbed twelve urologists’ offices in revenge for them refusing to give him a prostate examination. The court heard that the man didn’t need the procedure but just got pleasure from having the inspection.

      A mugger, who was later caught by New York police, admitted stealing glasses from people in the street because he’d get sexually aroused wearing them in bed.

      The American Journal of Forensic Medicine & Pathology reported the bizarre case of a sixty-year-old man found dead in his apartment, wrapped in fourteen different blankets with a plastic bag full of semen attached to his penis. Investigators discovered that the blankets had been taped to him and postulated that he’d laid them out with double-sided tape attached and had rolled into them, one by one, until he was cocooned in the middle, as a way to get his sexual thrills. Unfortunately, he’d suffocated in the process.

      A man named only as S.L., from Arizona, revealed in a letter to Forum magazine that he could only make love to a woman if she had a limp. ‘Not amputees or any weird stuff,’ he explained. ‘They just have to be slightly lame.’ He went on to explain that he was in love with a girl who’d sprained her ankle playing tennis but that, after she recovered, he couldn’t get an erection. Even putting on a limp for him had no effect. Four women reported that a man had fondled and, in some cases, sucked their hair, while they were watching Sleepless in Seattle in a movie theatre in Grosse Point Woods, Michigan. All they could tell police was that he looked like Kenny Rogers.

      Sex therapist Dr Robert Chartham reported on a man who would only make love to his wife if his feet were submerged in cold water. Their usual position for sex was with him sitting on the edge of the bath with his feet in the water and his wife facing him, straddling his lap.

      A Los Angeles man known only by his nickname of Leonardo da Toenail was caught in 1981 after a number of complaints from young women at the University of Southern California. Leonardo had a very odd modus operandi and would target only those wearing open-toed footwear. Posing as a student, he would go into the university’s library and sit opposite his target, take his books out and begin studying. He would then pretend to drop a pen and, while reaching under the table to pick it up, would surreptitiously paint the nail on the girl’s big toe. If she didn’t realise, he’d drop something else on the floor and paint the other one. When arrested, police found he was carrying sixteen bottles of nail varnish. However, he wasn’t charged with any offence, since his victims felt foolish testifying against him.

      Keith Everett, twenty-nine, went by the nickname of Jack the Crimper after his bizarre habit of creeping up on unsuspecting women and shampooing their hair for as long as he could before running off. In 1985 he was jailed for washing the hair of ten women in this way.

      Thirty-three-year-old Jerome Wright of New York had a fetish about women’s bottoms. Nothing too unusual about that, you may think, until you realise that the way he got his kicks was by firing a blow dart at them. He confessed to targeting the buttocks of at least fifty-five well-dressed women at the city’s Pennsylvania station in the summer of 1990, firing a large pin at them through a drinking straw. He explained to police that fat women were his favourite targets, as their butts were easier to hit.

      Someone else with an odd bottom fetish was thirty-two-year-old Terence Goodhew of London, who would creep up on girls waiting at bus stops in West Ham and try and set fire to their bottoms. When arrested in 1982, he refuted the police allegations and just told them, ‘I’m careless with matches.’

      Loli-can – or The Lolita Complex – is the name for the Japanese fetish that began in 1993, where men happily paid up to $60 for a pair of vacuum-packed used panties that once belonged to a schoolgirl, accompanied by a photo of her wearing them. Eager to cash in on this craze, one enterprising company even offered panties via street-vending machines in Tokyo.

      A year later, the obsession had moved on and the craze was for schoolgirl saliva offered in a 50-ml bottle. Freshness was guaranteed; the saliva was refrigerated and certified as not being more than seven days old.

      The Roman Emperor Domitian got his sexual kicks by slowly plucking out the pubic hair of his lovers, one by one.

      Michael Kenyon, otherwise known as ‘the enema bandit’, unleashed a reign of terror on the residents of Urbana, Illinois at intervals between 1966 and 1975. Described as an ‘obsessive enema lover’, Kenyon would break into homes and administer enemas to his victims under gunpoint but was eventually arrested in connection with a number of armed robberies in suburban Chicago. It was during questioning that officers became aware that he was the enema bandit. He served six years in prison and was paroled in 1981 and was immortalised by Frank Zappa in his song ‘Illinois Enema Bandit’, recorded live in December 1976.

      A policeman was jailed for six months for replacing