Few people are more creative than horny men and if you’ve searched around online for the more… unusual ways people get off, like we’ve had to do EXTENSIVELY in researching this article… only for that reason…, you may have stumbled across allusions to a bizarre sexual practice known as “gerbil-stuffing”. But has anyone not named Richard Gere ever actually done this?

Before we answer that, the practice, as it’s described on websites we’re not going to link because we care about your romantic relationships and don’t want your search history and ad recommendations to get as spicy as ours are now, involves taking a small rodent (usually a gerbil) and unceremoniously shoving the live and wriggling rodent into your butthole. To facilitate the stuffing of the gerbil, various sources suggest that a cardboard tube is sometimes used to “coax” the gerbil into its smelly new home.

At this point, you might be asking yourself… “Oh God, why?!?!?”

Well, to begin with, let’s just say an awful lot of spicy things people do behind closed doors can have the same question fairly leveled at them, and nobody seems too bothered about many of those. But as for this one, the idea behind doing this is that the writhing rodent will stimulate the sensitive butthole area in unpredictable and pleasurable ways. One can only hope their little claws are trimmed first…

Unbelievably it’s additionally claimed that seasoned practitioners of gerbil-stuffing will coat the unfortunate animal with cocaine… because why not we guess?… While oft described as a practice popular with especially adventurous gay men, rumors abound about gerbil-stuffing being popular with all kinds of people who have buttholes.

For the sake of accuracy we should note that our description is the PG version of how gerbil-stuffing is said to work… so, because we hate ourselves, here’s a needlessly graphic uncensored description courtesy of sex columnist Dan Savage and, well, let’s just say it’s not for the feint of heart… unless you’re into that sort of thing… We here at TodayIFoundOut don’t judge… Actually, if we’re being honest… in this case we’re going to judge a little because Mother of God, that poor gerbil… What’s wrong with you people?!?!:

“It works like this: Hold a gerbil in your left hand. Using pliers with your right hand, rip off the gerbil’s lower jaw. With the blunt side of the pliers, knock out the teeth in its upper jaw. Pull all four of its legs off. Leave the tail. Set aside. Take a paper towel roll, grease it up, and insert it into your rectum. Tie a string to the gerbil’s tail. Nudge the gerbil into the outside end of the paper towel roll. If for no other reason than to get away from the person who knocked its teeth out, the gerbil leglessly scampers up the wet paper towel roll. When the gerbil drops into the anal cavity, remove the wet paper towel roll, leaving the string you’ve tied to the gerbil’s tail hanging out of your ass. The gerbil, now trapped inside your anal cavity, thrashes around, desperate for air. It is this thrashing that provides pleasurable sensations. Once the gerbil is dead, remove it by pulling on the string. Repeat.”

Yep…

Now as you’ve probably surmised from the incredulous tone of this article and our allusions at the beginning, gerbil-stuffing isn’t and never has been a thing. In fact, as far as we can find in our extensive research of porn sites and spicily dark corners of the internet the world over FOR SCIENCE!!! there has never been a confirmed case of anything like it ever happening.

On top of that, a comprehensive review of known medical literature concerning foreign objects removed from people’s anuses found no cases involving a live or dead rodent of any kind being removed from a human butt. And we should note here, that many other bizarre things being removed from people’s rectums are extremely well documented, let alone other bizarre sexual things.

On this note, perhaps the most unbelievable thing we came across being that time a teen girl born with no vagina gave a blowjob, and ultimately became pregnant from swallowing after…

What the what?!?!? You say? We are glad you asked because it’s a fascinating case of life… uh… finding a way.

Before we get into it, we should note we were absolutely positive this one must be a myth, but nope. If you care to look into it, the source of this story is a paper published by a doctor about this rather curious case he encountered. His paper ultimately found its way into the very reputable British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1988 and has been disseminated like the contents of that girl’s stomach after the blowjob ever since.

The girl, whose name is not given in the case report, arrived at a local hospital with all the signs of a woman in labor. Upon examination, doctors found no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple. With no birth canal, the baby’s only option of escape was Caesarian section. Doctors subsequently delivered a baby boy via C-section (weighing in at 2.8 kg / 6.17 lbs), and then set out to solve the mystery of his conception.

As they say in the case study, after performing the emergency C-section:

While closing the abdominal wall, curiosity could not be contained any longer and the patient was interviewed with the help of a sympathetic nursing sister. The whole story did not become completely clear during that day but, with some subsequent inquiries, the whole saga emerged.

The girl’s hospital records showed that only 278 days earlier (about 9 months), she had arrived at the hospital with knife wounds to her stomach. How’d she get them? I’ll just quote the case study, as they describe it perfectly:

The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practiced fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant although it had crossed her mind more often as her girth increased and as people around her suggested that she was pregnant. She did recall several episodes of lower abdominal pain during the previous year.

While performing surgery to repair the stab wounds, doctor’s found two holes that opened the girl’s stomach to her abdominal cavity. They also noted that the girl arrived at the hospital with an empty stomach, resulting in the absence of large amounts of stomach acid or any other food matter.  Thus, it is thought, in the most unlikely of circumstances, that the sperm in the girl’s stomach gained access to the girl’s reproductive organs through her injured gastrointestinal tract.

Dr. Peter Schlegel, chairman of urology at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, weighed in on the issue and pointed out that sperm can normally swim up and out of the reproductive cavity and into the abdominal cavity. “The sperm are naturally there at times, and eggs are naturally there,” he says. “Eggs are released from the ovary, and they sort of dance around before they get taken up by the fallopian tube.”

In fact, getting pregnant as the result of sperm originating in your abdomen is possible enough that in the 1980s, during the early days of fertility treatments, doctors performed a procedure called DIPI (direct intraperitoneal insemination) during which they injected sperm into the lower abdomen hoping that it would find its way to an egg.

What makes this perfect storm of circumstances even more amazing is that the doctors involved thought it likely that this was the girl’s “first or nearly first ovulation otherwise one would expect that inspissated blood in the uterus and salpinges would have made fertilization difficult.”

But we digress… Going back to gerbils up your butt, in our own research we stumbled across an entry in a medical textbook about the practice; however, the doctor writing about it openly referred to it as an urban myth and included his own email address in the book so that anyone who had proof of it ever occurring could let him know. And as anyone knows, stating something wrong anywhere for public consumption, let alone challenging the public to prove you wrong, is a surefire way to be proven wrong if any such proof exists. To date, it does not appear anyone has been able to show the good doctor he was incorrect.

So where did the whole idea come from then? Well, nobody is quite sure, though the first known references appear to be from the early 1980s, though the lack of any kind of paper trail as it were makes this hard to know for sure.

Specifically the myth is said to have begun shortly after the release of Pretty Woman in 1982. At this point, rumors began circulating that actor Richard Gere had to have a live gerbil removed from his anus. Exactly who started this rumor isn’t known (with some claiming it was started by Sylvester Stallone after the pair had a falling out). However, this being the days before the world wide web, funny enough, it appears the myth was initially spread via fax.

This fax took the form of a formal-sounding letter from the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals informing whoever was reading that Gere had been arrested for abusing a gerbil by shoving it into his anus. Despite the patently absurd nature of the claim and the fact that the Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals isn’t a real organization, the rumor somehow gained traction to the point that even today, decades later, some people still believe it.

Gere isn’t the only person to have such a rumor spread about him and throughout the 1980s numerous celebrities were rumored to have engaged in the practice of “gerbilling”. Oddly, the main victims of this damaging rumor, besides maybe the gerbils, appear to have been newscasters, several of whom were accused of killing or otherwise maiming gerbils in this manner in the early 80s. As for Gere, he’s reportedly indifferent to the whole thing, coolly noting simply that, “It’s kid stuff.”

The idea of gerbil-stuffing once again entered the public consciousness in the 1990s with the rise of the internet and later popular South Park parodies stoking the flames, all allowing people to spread unverified rumors with renewed zeal. This once again saw the aforementioned Gere story being spread far and wide, exposing a new generation to the “knowledge” that it was common practice for gay men to put gerbils in their happy factories.

As is wont to happen with rumors, internet users added their own embellishments to the myth. One of our favourites being that men hoping to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war would sometimes put a gerbil tail in their butt…

Why?

Well according to the internet, the idea of gerbil-stuffing being practiced by gay men was apparently so widespread back then that seeing a gerbil’s tail hanging daintily from your butt would be enough to subtly indicate you were gay to whoever was conducting your medical. Of course, one would think the easier way to do this would be to simply say you were gay, but that’s less fun we guess…

For the curious, there is absolutely no truth to this whole draft angle whatsoever, but it’s amusing nonetheless.

Since the 90s the rumor has continued to spread across the internet in spite of a complete and total lack of evidence from any reasonably trustworthy source or sufficiently rattled gerbil. Although, we suppose with their lower jaw removed, it would be difficult for the gerbils to speak up about it, even if they managed to escape their tubular coffin…

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy our new popular podcast, The BrainFood Show (iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Feed), as well as:

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