Asphyxiation/masturbation techniques aimed at creating the ultimate orgasm were too dangerous to try, even with other people present to help if things went wrong, Australia's leading sexologist warned today.
Doctor Dick, a regular Bug columnist, was commenting on the paper's world exclusive report that suggests INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence may have died from sexual misadventure and not suicide as first feared.
"Men, especially, forget that there are inherent dangers in striving for an orgasm that can be ten, or even a hundred times, more powerful than normal," Doctor Dick said. "They can easily black out and fall victim to the physical method they are using to bring them to the point of unconsciousness at which these very powerful ejaculations can be achieved.
"Even then, that's the least of their problems!"
He said sexologists' files worldwide were filled with accounts of such fatalities.
"Perhaps the most famous case is the travelling salesman who died instantly when he came all over Room 523 in the Orlando, Florida, motel where he was overnighting," Dr Dick said. "Unfortunately he was in Room 323 at the time.
"There's the celebrated case of the English backbencher who got his mistress to hold a plastic bag over his head while he masturbated in his favourite girl guide outfit. The force of the ejaculation was such that he voided both testicles and seven metres of intestine before finally managing to get his career under control. He was elevated to the Major Government's outer ministry the next day and now works in the chorus line of a Les Girls outfit in Soho."
Doctor Dick said women were in just as much danger.
"In one Canadian case, a bored housewife was sitting naked on her loungeroom carpet with her pantihose tied tightly around her throat and using a vibrator on her genitals when she suffered an earth-shattering orgasm. When her husband came home from work that night, every room in the house had bare wooden floors and the wife had the worst carpet burns the local hospital had ever encountered."
Doctor Dick said that, while not strictly in the asphyxiation/masturbation category, the death of President Kennedy in the early 1960s provided another tragic example of the dangers of trying to play God by enhancing natural sexual pleasure.
"We all know Kennedy was sex-mad, but what is little known is that he craved dangerous sex. He really got off on having casual sex in places where the risk of being caught was high. He'd have sex with hookers in the White House and get his Secret Service agents to knock on the door pretending to be Jackie.
"It's widely accepted in sex therapist circles that when Kennedy's cavalcade was first fired on from the book depository in Dallas, Texas, Kennedy lost it completely. The second shot that shattered his head was not from the grassy knoll, as many believe, but from the grasped knob."
