Gangrenous Penis

SOUTH AFRICA – Three Transkei boys have been admitted to Mthatha’s Nelson Mandela Academic Hospital with gangrenous penises following illegal circumcisions, says yhe Eastern Cape health department.
The health department’s spokesman Sizwe Kupelo said the boys, from the Ngqeleni area, would receive specialist care in a bid to avoid amputation.
They were part of a group of six originally taken to Libode’s St Barnabas Hospital.
Kupelo said a 20-year-old man was arrested in the Libode area on Wednesday morning after he circumcised six other under-age youths.
Health department officials were on Wednesday afternoon preparing to rescue eight youths from an illegal circumcision school in the Ngqeleni area following information that they were ill.
Kupelo said it had emerged that a 14-year-old arrested last week for performing illegal circumcisions on his age-mates, was responsible for previous botched operations that had already resulted in nine penis amputations.
The youth, who had been released from custody, was being dealt with under the newly-implemented Child Care Act.
He is scheduled to appear before a traditional council on Thursday.
from Times Live

UNITED KINGDOM – Cops swooped on a furniture store after shocked shoppers reported this bizarre case of indecent exposure.
Store owner Jason Hadlow was slapped with a fine of £80 for displaying a 4ft stone penis in his shop window.
A member of the public complained after spotting the offending appendage which was displayed in his shop, Simply Dutch, near Bedale, North Yorkshire.
The firm, which bills itself as “the most interesting store in the North”, recently stocked a new range of garden furniture, including the £200 hand-carved sandstone willy.
Following the complaint, police removed the ornament and fined Mr Hadlow for “displaying an item liable to cause harassment, alarm and distress”.
Mr Hadlow must pay the fine by Friday to release it from Northallerton police station, or face possible court action.
The entrepreneur who lives in Yarm, near Stockton, Teesside, is so far refusing to back down, saying the willy is in keeping with the store’s quirky ethos.
He has even started a ‘Free Willy’ campaign in store and on networking website Facebook.
Mr Hadlow said: “It’s true what they say, the world is a crazy place and I am sure the local constabulary has better things to do with their time.
“It is just another example of overzealous policing. When they told me, I didn’t think they were being serious.
“We might have had one or two complaints about it, but most customers loved it as they know the type of things we stock.
“In the past we have had naked stone strippers, Roman and Greek-style statues and all sorts of other weird and wonderful pieces of furniture in the window which haven’t caused such a stir.
“So I am a little shocked to say the least, that an £80 ransom is being demanded for the phallus’ return.”
A police spokesman said: “The owner is displaying a penis in the window to attract publicity.
“A member of the public complained to police about the statue.
“He is committing an offence under the Public Order Act 1986.”
from The Sun UK

TRUCKEE, CALIFORNIA — Town officials are asking media giant Music Television to not air footage filmed last Saturday in downtown Truckee that apparently depicts people dancing around a large penis-shaped snow sculpture.
An MTV production crew based out of Los Angeles built the sculpture sometime between 2 and 3 p.m. Saturday, March 6, in front of the train depot in downtown Truckee at 10100 Donner Pass Road, said Truckee Police Capt. Harwood Mitchell.
“We’re following up with the crew … it is the town’s desire to see they delete all that film from their segment or at minimal delete or obscure anything that would identify the Town of Truckee,” Mitchell said. “We’re working with them for an amenable solution for both sides.
“We’re very disappointed and certainly did not condone it.”
Numerous calls to MTV were not returned for this story.
Town Manager Tony Lashbrook said MTV approached the town to acquire a permit for filming and said the crew was specifically asked if the sculpture would be distasteful, graphic or pornographic.
“It turns out they were less than truthful in answering direct questions from at least two town officials,” Lashbrook said.
As for public feedback regarding Saturday’s display, Lashbrook went on to say: “We didn’t get a lot of calls but we got enough. People were pretty appalled and I don’t blame them.”
One of those people was Truckee resident Darla Ford, who witnessed the display. She took a photograph and e-mailed it to the Sierra Sun.
“We were so appalled that something like this could take place in our town. Parents were rushing their children away from it so they would not have to explain why grown men wearing fur were drinking the white fluid and dancing in it too,” she said in the e-mail. “It was disgusting! Is this a new image for our town? Who issued a permit for this to take place? How did this happen? This is right in front of our Chamber of Commerce and California Visitor Center.”
Mitchell said the sculpture was covered during construction, and Lashbrook said it was taken down upon request sometime after 4 p.m. Saturday.
from The Sierra Sun

For the first time, researchers have shown that erectile dysfunction is a strong predictor of the likelihood that men will die of heartdisease.
Men who suffer from the problem, which some consider more an emotional than a physical issue, are twice as likely to succumb to cardiovascular disease or heart attacks as those who do not have the problem, German researchers reported Monday in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Assn.
Researchers have known for years that there is a link between erectile dysfunction, commonly abbreviated as ED, and heart disease, said Dr. Sahil Parikh, an interventional cardiologist from University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland who was not involved in the study. “But now there is pretty clear evidence that there is a substantially increased risk of heart attack and death when patients have erectile dysfunction.”
The results are probably not too surprising, added Dr. Robert Kloner, a cardiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, “because arteries in the penis are smaller, so atherosclerosis shows up there sooner,” perhaps three to four years before the onset of cardiovascular disease.
The take-home message, both experts said, is that when a patient seeks treatment for ED, typically from a general practitioner, he should be given a full physical work-up to look for heart disease and referred to a cardiologist.
“When they are treated aggressively early, we can prevent heart attacks and stroke and they can have many years added to their lives,” Parikh said.
Existing guidelines for treating men with ED from the Princeton Consensus Conference already state that “a man with ED and no cardiac symptoms is a cardiac (or vascular) patient until proven otherwise.” Kloner, a coauthor of those guidelines, said that when the guidelines are updated this year, they will probably carry a stronger recommendation that a patient presenting with ED get a cardiovascular examination.
Dr. Michael Bohm, a cardiologist at Germany’s Saarland University, and his colleagues studied 1,519 men from 13 countries who were involved in a study of two drugs to treat cardiovascular disease. The men were also queried about their ED at the beginning of the study, two years into it and at the end at five years. A full 55% of the men had ED at the beginning of the trial, nearly double the normal incidence of about 30% in the population at large.
The team reported that, in the five years of follow-up, men with ED were 1.9 times as likely to die from heart disease, twice as likely to have a heart attack, 1.2 times as likely to be hospitalized for heart failure and 1.1 times more likely to have a stroke. The risks increased with the severity of the ED.
Disappointingly, the two drugs tested in the study, ramipril and telmisartan, did not improve the course of the ED.
That’s not surprising, said Dr. Peter Pelikan, a cardiologist at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, “because it takes years and years and years to get any resorption of cholesterol” that would reduce blockage of the penile arteries. “The study was too small and too short to see that.”
Many men with ED see a general practitioner or a urologist to get treatment and are prescribed drugs like Viagra or Cialis, Bohm said in a statement. “The drug works and the patient doesn’t show up any more. These men are being treated for ED, but not the underlying cardiovascular disease. A whole segment of men is being placed at risk.”
from The Los Angeles Times

Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage.
At age 55, men have an average of 15 years of sexual activity ahead of them, while women average just 10, according to a new survey of middle-age and older Americans.
“Overall, men were more likely than women to be sexually active, to report a good quality sex life, and to be interested and thinking about sex on a regular basis,” lead researcher Stacy Tessler Lindau, director of the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine at the University of Chicago, told LiveScience.
Few studies have examined the connection between sexual health and aging. To do so, Lindau and her team used data from two nationally representative surveys of 3,000 25- to 74-year-olds and another 3,000 57- to 86-year-olds. The respondents answered questions about their general health as well as their sexual activity, sexual satisfaction and desire.
Much of the news was good. In middle age, two-thirds of women and men report good quality sex. The researchers also found people in good or excellent health were almost twice as likely to be interested in sex compared with those in poor or fair health. Good or excellent health at age 55 added five to seven years to men’s sexual life expectancy and three to six years to women’s.
But the study also uncovered a sexual gender gap. For 30-year-old men, they can expect 35 years more of sexual activity and 45 years more of life. Thirty-year-old women can expect 31 more years of sexual activity, but 50 more years of life. That means men will spend 78 percent of life after 30 having sex, compared with just 61 percent for women.
The gap increases with age. At 75 and older, 40 percent of men were sexually active compared with just 17 percent of women. The disparity is driven largely by the fact that women tend to outlive their male partners, Lindau said. In women and men with partners, the gap disappears.
Other findings open up new questions. Among women in late life who were having sex, only half called the sex good. In comparison, almost two-thirds of men aged 75 and up found their sex lives satisfying. That finding troubles Lindau.
“Only half of the women in this age group who are sexually active say that they have a good sex life,” she said. “Why is this, and what can be done to maximize not just sexual function, but quality of sex life?”
Part of the answer may be pharmacological. Men who responded to the sexual health questions in 2005 and 2006 reported a significantly increased interest in sex compared with men who took the survey 10 years earlier. Women didn’t show a change. That might not be a coincidence, Lindau said.
“Over time, we’ve seen the introduction of really effective treatments for male erectile dysfunction, which is one of the most common problems for men as they get older,” she said. “For women we haven’t seen the same.”
The study gives researchers a new understanding of who might benefit from policies to address later-life sexual health, Lindau said.
But, she said, there are still huge gaps in that understanding. Because almost all of the survey respondents identified as heterosexual, researchers know almost nothing about the sexual health of older gay, lesbian and bisexual individuals. Those populations are particularly vulnerable, Lindau said, because they may keep problems from their doctors for fear of discrimination or judgment.
“We really need that data,” Lindau said.
from Live Science

NEW YORK – Although studies in Africa have shown that circumcision can lower the spread of HIV among heterosexuals, it may not do much to prevent infections among gay and bisexual men in Western countries, a new study suggests.
A number of studies in African nations have found that circumcised heterosexual men were up to 60 percent less likely than uncircumcised men to contract HIV during the study periods.
But it is unclear whether circumcision could have an impact on HIV transmission in the U.S. or other Western countries, where much of the transmission is among men who have sex with men. There has so far been no good evidence that circumcision lowers HIV risk among these men.
In the new study, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) looked at HIV infection rates among nearly 4,900 men in the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands who took part in a clinical trial of an HIV vaccine.
They found that circumcised and uncircumcised men showed no difference in the risk of HIV infection over three years.
Moreover, while having unprotected sex with an HIV-positive partner increased a man’s risk of infection, there was no evidence that circumcision altered that risk.
The findings, reported in the journal AIDS, come as the CDC is developing new recommendations on circumcision for reducing HIV transmission. The agency says it is considering whether to recommend circumcision for heterosexual men at elevated risk of HIV, and whether there is enough evidence to make any recommendations for men who have sex with men.
With regards to infant circumcision, the CDC says on its Web site, “many options are still being considered in this process, including simply recommending that health-care providers educate parents about the potential benefits and risks to ensure that parents have the information they need to make an informed decision.”
Circumcision is thought to protect men from HIV infection because foreskin tissue appears particularly susceptible to the virus, and may serve as an entry point for it.
But circumcision may not make much difference in transmission among men in Western countries for a number of reasons, according to Deborah A. Gust and her colleagues at the CDC.
One factor could be the fact that many HIV-positive people in developed countries are on powerful HIV drugs that reduce the chances of transmission, and may outweigh any effects of circumcision. In addition, Gust and her colleagues point out, circumcision would not affect HIV risk from receptive anal sex — and that, again, could outweigh any protective effect of circumcision during insertive sex.
The findings are based on data from 4,889 men who took part in an HIV vaccine trial begun in 1998; 86 percent had been circumcised. During the three-year study, 7 percent of the men became HIV-positive.
When the researchers accounted for other factors — including demographics, and HIV risk factors like drug use and having unprotected sex — circumcision showed no effect on the odds of HIV transmission.
Still, Gust and her colleagues point to some limitations of their study, including the relatively small number of uncircumcised men overall and the small number of uncircumcised men who became HIV-positive during the study — 43.
They say that future studies, with larger samples of uncircumcised men, should continue to look at the question of circumcision and HIV transmission among men who have sex with men.
The researchers also note, however, that other CDC scientists have concluded, based on their own studies, that circumcision would likely have only a “limited” impact on HIV transmission in the U.S.
from Reuters

Penis Tree

TEMPE, ARIZONA – In one Tempe neighborhood, people are talking about an awfully big ‘carving’ turning a lot of heads.
“That’s disgusting,” said one woman.
“I think it’s funny,” said another.
What they’re buzzing about is an 8-foot-tall penis carving that stands tall enough to be seen in the backyard of a home.
It wasn’t erected, but instead carved out of a tree in the backyard of a home. Artistic expression? A fertility statue? The homeowner says no to both.
“Just ah kind of practical joke my friends played on me,” said homeowner Adam Starr.
The carving was once a pine tree that Starr needed cut down. He said he asked some friends to help him out, but a mix of alcohol and chainsaws created the above result.
“I came back and they left me a little surprise,” said Starr. “Yeah I came home and it was actually night and they had a light fixed on it shining.”
He planned on cutting the tree down last weekend, but said his house got broken into and forced him to back away from that plan.
The city of Tempe has told him the stump must come down by Wednesday. Starr said it will come down even before that, by this weekend.
He said he’s putting it up on eBay and plans to donate the proceeds to charity.
“If you have nerves enough, I’d like you to take a picture of it and put it on TV so everyone in the Valley can see it,” said a man across the street.
ABC15 News

U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday said a Cobb County man sentenced to death may need a new hearing because jurors sent lewd gifts to the trial judge and courthouse bailiff.
In a 5-4 ruling, the high court directed the federal appeals court to decide whether Marcus Wellons received a fair trial in light of the fact the jurors who condemned him to death sent chocolate shaped like a penis to Cobb County Superior Court Judge Mary Staley and chocolate in the shape of female breasts to the bailiff.
The gifts were sent either during the jury’s sentencing deliberations or immediately after the 1993 trial, the decision said.
“From beginning to end, judicial proceedings conducted for the purpose of deciding whether a defendant shall be put to death must be conducted with dignity and respect,” the unsigned decision said. “The disturbing facts of this case raise serious questions concerning the conduct of the trial.”
Wellons was sentenced to death for raping and strangling 15-year-old India Roberts, a Campbell High School sophomore, in 1989.
Wellons’ lawyer, Beth Wells, said she and Wellons were elated with the court’s ruling. Wells said she is hopeful the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will carefully consider the issue.
“It’s just so inappropriate in a death-penalty case for something like this to have happened,” Wells said. “We’ve always felt, at the very least, the court should look at it and review it carefully.”
The court’s majority said neither Wellons nor any court had determined “exactly what went on at this capital trial or what prompted such ‘gifts.’”
Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented, noting Wellons has already outlived his victim by 20 years.
Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, also dissented, saying the 11th Circuit already considered the issue and had allowed Wellons’ lawyers to contact all the jurors and relevant court personnel. However, Alito said he agreed with the majority that “the strange and tasteless gifts that were given to the trial judge and the bailiff are facially troubling.”
from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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UNITED KINGDOM – A man who went to casualty with his penis stuck in a steel pipe had to be cut free by firefighters using a metal grinder.
Medics at Southampton General Hospital could not get the man’s penis out of the stainless steel pipe because the restricted blood flow had caused it to become aroused.
So they called in Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service.
They turned up with a special equipment unit from St Mary’s station in Southampton and seven firefighters to help in what a spokesman said was a ”delicate operation”.
The firefighters used the four-and-a-half-inch grinder to cut the pipe from around the man’s penis and it took about 30 minutes.
The patient was given an anaesthetic and his penis was left bruised and swollen but otherwise unharmed.
The anxious man aged about 40 gave hospital staff no explanation about how the pipe got stuck after he turned up on Tuesday morning.
A Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service spokesman said: ”Initially the crew did not have the appropriate cutting equipment to free the man.
”It was a very delicate operation that required a very steady hand and the crew was worried about things getting too hot during the cutting.
”It’s certainly an unusual call-out and I’m sure the man won’t be getting into that situation again.”
from The Telegraph UK

Female ducks have evolved an intriguing way to avoid becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males.
More details of this evolutionary battle of the sexes fought at the level of genitalia are described by Yale researchers in the December 23 issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“In species where forced copulation is common, males have evolved longer penises, but females have coevolved convoluted vaginas with dead-end cul-de-sacs and spirals in the opposite direction of the male penis,” said Patricia L.R. Brennan, lead author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher in the Yale Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “This coevolution results from conflict between the sexes over who is going to control fertilization.”
The research builds upon a 2007 Yale study that first described the strange morphology of a duck’s sexual organs. While most birds have no phalluses, ducks turn out to have relatively large, flexible penises—up to 8 inches — tucked inside their bodies. During sex, male ducks extend, or evert, their phalluses inside the female. Brennan and her Yale colleagues used high-speed video to document the erection of the duck penis for the first time and found the whole process takes less than half a second—an act the Yale team described as “explosive.”
Such large phalluses are supposed to give males a reproductive advantage when there is much forced mating. However, the Yale team hypothesized that females could make copulation difficult for the males with their complex genitalia. And, they wondered, do the convoluted vaginas of some waterfowl help those females exclude forced copulation?
To test the hypothesis, Brennan and colleagues examined duck penis eversion in a set of glass tubes with different shapes. A straight tube or a tube that spirals in the same counter-clockwise direction as the male penis doesn’t slow down the eversion process. But glass tubes that mimic the female vaginal shapes with a clockwise spiral or a sharp bend can completely stop the penis from everting. These results suggest females have evolved anatomical mechanisms to impede forced copulation, and provide new insights into the evolutionary consequences of sexual conflict over reproduction, say the scientists.
The anatomical evolutionary race to control reproduction is one of the more dramatic examples of sexual conflict in nature.
“Although we predict that sexual conflict should be ubiquitous, finding a system where the ‘arms race’ between the sexes is so dramatic is exceedingly rare. Ducks are providing us with an incredible opportunity to understand the evolutionary consequences of conflict,” said Brennan.
from Press Release

AUSTRALIA – A former sex educator who paid teenage boys to inject medication into his penis will serve more jail time after Queensland Attorney-General Cameron Dick sought a harsher sentence on appeal.
In November 2008, retired Maryborough primary school teacher, sex educator and child carer David Leslie Wharton, 68, was sentenced to three years’ prison, suspended after six months, after pleading guilty to crimes he committed 20 years previously.
At the time, the court heard that he groomed a 14-year-old boy into stripping off and exercising for him in 1988 and 1989.
In a written Court of Appeal judgment delivered today, papers said the more clothes the boy removed, the more the teacher would pay him.
“The respondent then massaged the boy and fondled his genitals,” documents said.
In September 2009, Wharton pleaded guilty to numerous charges of indecent treatment of a child, relating to offences which occurred during camping trips between December 2004 and July 2008.
For these offences he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, to be suspended after 114 days.
Court papers said Wharton started supplying the boys with alcohol during the trips and in 2005 he began a “dare book”, listing prizes to be awarded for sexual activities.
As a result, one of the boys injected erectile dysfunction medication into the man’s penis on four separate occasions.
Three of those times, while Wharton was on bail for the crimes he committed in 1988 and 1989, he paid the boy $10.
In court today, Wharton’s legal aid lawyer, Mark Green, argued for the suspended sentence to remain the same, as one of the victims had later confronted Wharton and his wife and held them at gunpoint, before firing off a shot.
“There is also leniency given when an offender suffers some retribution at the hands of the victim,” Mr Green said.
However, in a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeal ordered Wharton serve a total of 14 months actual imprisonment time for all offences.
He has already served a total of nine and a half months and will now have to serve a further four and a half months.
from The Herald Sun
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WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA – A woman claims her boss made a habit of exposing himself and twisting his scrotum into animal shapes, including “the goat” and a flying bat. She says that after she complained, Thadeus Pryor fired her on a pretext.
Lia Vanella sued Thadeus Pryor, World Wide Child Care, and Children of America Inc. in Palm Beach County Court.
Vanella, a former account manager for Children of America, lists 103 examples of Pryor’s alleged harassment. Among other things, she says he called her a “pig whore,” mooned his employees at company outings, told her “you turn me on. … look at my dick,” and made other vile comments.
Vanella claims Pryor liked to play a vulgar game popularized by the movie “Waiting,” in which men unexpectedly reveal their genitalia to co-workers.
She says the obscene shenanigans were commonplace at her office. She claims Pryor often flashed her and manipulated his testicles to give the appearance of “the bat, brain, and goat.”
Vanella says she was fired on accusations of stealing a computer, but the real reason was that she rebuffed Pryor’s sexual advances.
Pryor’s attorney, Steven Siegel, said Vanella’s claims are outlandish. Siegel said his client denies the allegations, but declined to comment further on the case.
Vanella’s suit is the only sexual harassment claim filed against Pryor in Palm Beach County, where Children of America’s headquarters is based.
Pryor, a former kickboxing champion turned entrepreneur, is president and CEO of Children of America, a child-care chain with 23 centers across the Northeast, according to its Web site.
From 1982 to 1987, Pryor won a series of World Karate and Kick-Boxing Association super-middleweight titles, according to his Web site.
He recently moved into low-budget action movie production through his company World Films, his Web site states. His critically bashed thriller, “The Last Sentinel,” was picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2007.
Vanella seeks damages for emotional distress, civil assault, negligence and defamation. She is represented by William Julien of Boca Raton.
from Courthouse News Service
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The Flying Bat

The Sausage Sandwich

NEW YORK -  A Queens judge Friday slapped Brigitte Harris with the toughest sentence possible for killing and dismembering her father to avenge years of sexual abuse.
Supreme Court Justice Arthur Cooperman sentenced Harris to five to 15 years for the suffocation slaying of Eric Goodridge in her Rockaway apartment on July 28, 2007.
Harris admitted plotting to sever her father’s penis with a scalpel by researching the case of Lorena and John Bobbitt. She wanted to prevent Goodridge, 55, from returning to his native Liberia with his granddaughters, she said.
“I never intended to kill him, and I’m sorry for his family’s loss,” she told Cooperman.
Cooperman acknowledged the findings of mental health professionals who agreed Goodridge repeatedly sexually abused his daughter from age 3, but he cautioned against victims taking the law into their own hands.
“Sometimes the crime itself warrants punishment,” Cooperman said.
The judge also chided jurors for giving in to sympathies for Harris in reaching a second-degree manslaughter verdict that was inconsistent with the facts.
Four jurors attended Friday’s sentencing and, in letters, urged Cooperman to set Harris free so she could seek psychiatric care. Harris attorney Arthur Aidala said were it not for the jury, Harris, 29, would probably be spending the rest of her life behind bars.
“They handcuffed the judge from committing an injustice,” Aidala said.
“Brigitte has shown no remorse,” countered Harris’ aunt, Comfort Lawrence.
from The New York Daily News
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How the penis works

Whether they refer to them as their “crown jewels”, or their “private part”, or whether they prefer not to talk about them at all, most men know precious little about their reproductive organs – the penis and its associated bits and bobs. The majority of us would probably feel more at home under the hood of a car than in front of a diagram of the anatomy of the male privates.
The general plumbing in your groin turns out to be much less complicated than you might have expected and the basics are really quite easy to grasp.
The basic layout
The penis consists of three main parts: the base, where it is attached to your lower abdomen, the shaft, which forms the elongate bit and the head, which is also referred to as the glans. Although it is abundantly supplied with nerve endings, it may come as a surprise that the human penis doesn’t contain any bones. Not so much a “boner” then after all…
The shaft contains two elongate, cylindrical tubes, known as the corpora cavernosa, which consist of spongy tissue and run the length of either side of the penis. During an erection, the corpora, which are encased in a tough sheet called the tunica, fill with blood and expand.
A third cylinder of tissue, the corpus spongiosum, runs through the shaft between the two corpora cavernosa. It contains the urethra, the tiny tube through which both urine and semen are expelled from the body. Towards the tip of the penis, the corpus spongiosum expands to form the helmet-shaped glans, which is covered by the foreskin in uncircumcised boys and men.
The urinary tract
One of the two main functions of the penis is to rid the body of urine. You can think of urine as the body’s liquid waste product, which is filtered out of the blood by the kidneys. Two tubes, called ureters, deliver it from the kidneys to the bladder, where it is stored until it is expelled from the body via the urethra, which connects the bladder to the penis.
The sperm factory
The testes or testicles – balls to you and me – manufacture the male sex hormone testosterone, which is responsible for so-called secondary male sex characteristics, including facial and pubic hair, muscle development and thickened vocal chords.
The testes are also an amazing production facility that pumps out sperm (i.e. male reproductive cells) in vast numbers. About 100 million each and every day from the time you’re a teenager into old age. They contain a mass of tiny, coiled tubes that are lined with sperm-producing cells.
The testes are housed in the scrotum, which, while not the most attractive part of the male anatomy, is very effective at keeping them at a cool and steady 35-36 degrees C, one to two degrees below the rest of the body. In case you’ve ever wondered, one of them usually hangs a little lower than the other. No need for alarm. It’s perfectly normal.
Freshly made sperm travels from each testis to a coiled tube on its outer surface known as the epididymis. Here, like good wine in an oak cask, the sperm cells mature for about 20 days to six weeks.
During an orgasm, mature sperm cells – some 400 million of the little buggers – are rapidly expelled from the epididymis through a long duct called the vas deferens. The two vasa deferentia (yes, that’s the plural form of vas deferens) from the testicles are connected to the urethra (remember, that’s the tube that runs through the penis and also caries urine to the outside) through which the sperm is ejaculated.
The prostate gland & Co.
Before it reaches the outside world, however, the sperm is first mixed with fluids from the prostate gland and the seminal vesicles, creating that sticky concoction known to all of us as semen.
The prostate is a walnut-sized gland located just below the bladder and in front of the rectum. Its contribution to the semen, approximately 15 to 30% by volume, is a thin, milky liquid that improves the survival and motility (i.e. the ability to move spontaneously) of the sperm cells.
The seminal vesicles are two 5 to 7 centimetre long, elongated, sac-like glands positioned just above the prostate that secret a fluid which makes up about 60% of the semen, provides energy and nutrition for the sperm cells and aids them in the process of fertilisation.
Cleaning the pipes
If you’ve been reading this carefully, you’ll have noticed that the urethra forms the passageway through which both urine and semen are excreted from the body. There’s no need to worry, though. When the penis is erect, a tiny valve closes the urethra off from the bladder, making it impossible for urine to mix with semen. This also explains why it is rather difficult to urinate with a hard-on!
In addition, during sexual arousal and just before ejaculation, two pea-sized glands at the base of the penis, called the bulbourethral or Cowper’s glands, inject a little bit of fluid into the urethra that flushes out and neutralises any remaining urine and also helps with lubrication.
from Health 24

Bobbit Worm

UNITED KINGDOM – A giant worm that eats penises and feeds them to its offspring has been found at a public aquarium in the UK.
Staff at The Deep in Hull recently discovered a 1m/39″ specimen while moving rocks in one of the aquarium’s exhibits.
The species, Eunice aphroditois, is a large predatory polychaete worm that can reach up to 3m/10′ in length, though most are around a meter long. It typically feeds on live fish.
Known as the Bobbit worm, after the infamous Lorena Bobbit who chopped off her husband’s penis in a domestic dispute, females of the species bite off the penis of their male partner and feed it to their young.
The species is found mainly in Indo Pacific waters and is nocturnal, being most often recorded by divers on night dives on the rubble zones surrounding coral reefs.
During the night the Bobbit worm lies in wait with its powerful jaws open waiting for unsuspecting prey to swim or walk past.
It is equipped with special antennae that act as sensory organs to allow it to detect movement of ats nearby organisms in almost total darkness.
Once it has caught its prey, it retreback into the substrate to consume the victim.
Aquarist Seb Prajsnar told Practical Fishkeeping: “I had just put my hands in one of our quarantine tanks and was just lifting a rock when out shot a massive worm which seemed to have appeared from nowhere!
“I’ve never seen anything like it – It looked like something straight out of a science fiction movie! I shouted out to my colleagues who came to see for themselves. We identified this alien-like creature as a Bobbit worm, famous for its incredible jaws, which are twice its body width.”
The Bobbit worm is among the longest worms in the world and there are reports of them growing up to three metres in length. The Bobbit tends to be nocturnal, lying in ambush in sand and rocks, like a living bear trap. It then snaps shut its deadly jaws on its unsuspecting prey!”
The aquarium is now keeping the worm in its own aquarium.
from Practical Fishkeeping
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