Nose art for the crew was a personalized reference to a piece of military hardware. You are trusting your life to the plane to get you back safely. You have to go through enemy territory.… So nose art brought the crew together. It provided a signature for the unit. By putting a girl on a plane, the crews felt they were protected on their way out to bomb and patrol. It inspired the crews and gave them a sense of belonging to an organized team. The main purpose, I guess, was to inspire the crews to have faith they’d be coming back...

At the peak of his power, thousands of letters arrived every day from women begging Mussolini to sleep with them - one teacher from Piedmont even wrote pleading that he deflower her on her wedding night.

The letters were sorted into 'known' or 'new' categories.

After background checks by his policemen on the 'new' women, they were passed on to the great man himself, who'd pick out any that caught his eye - generally, the older women with big breasts and powerful hips - and have them summoned to the Palazzo Venezia.

It meant a busy schedule and, like Napoleon, he didn't waste time.

Trysts took place in the afternoon, usually on a stone window seat, the carpet or against a wall, and - according to one former lover - ended without ceremony, 'coffee, liqueur or even a piece of cake'.

Meanwhile, Claretta sat waiting for him in her apartments, listening to Chopin and miserably eating sweets.

According to one man servant, from the moment he moved into the Palazzo in September 1929 until the collapse of his regime in July 1943, Mussolini had sex with a different woman nearly every day...

In 1946, Alfred Hitchcock got around the censors by having Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman take a series of little kisses, for a long period of time in "Notorious". Hitch broke the Hollywood censor record then, for the longest kiss scene in Hollywood history. The censors were outraged, but he did not break their rules, and so this scandalous scene is remembered as one of the first sexy scenes of the silver screen. What is remarkable about it is that Ingrid's character, the brazen German Siren Alicia, is aggressively doing the seducing, which is not a normal sterotype for that time...

Not many writers furnish enough material for a biography focused entirely on their love lives. In his short life (1788-1824), George Gordon, Lord Byron, managed to cram in just about every sort of connection imaginable—unrequited pinings galore; affairs with aristocrats, actresses, servants, landladies, worshipful fans, and more in almost as many countries as appear on Don Giovanni's list; plus countless one-offs with prostitutes and purchased girls; a brief, disastrous marriage; and an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. And that's just the women! It's a wonder he found the time, considering everything else on his plate. He composed thousands of pages of dazzling poetry, traveled restlessly on the continent and in the Middle East, maintained complex relationships with friends and hangers-on, wrote letters and kept diaries and read books constantly, boxed and took fencing lessons and swam, drank (prodigiously), suffered bouts of depression and paranoia and physical ill-health, and, in his later years, joined in Italian and Greek liberation struggles. Just tending the menagerie that he liked to have about him—monkeys, parrots and macaws, dogs, a goat, a heron, even, while he was a student at Cambridge, a bear—would have driven a lesser man to distraction...

Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting's eyes in old age -- the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death.

China's last eunuch was tormented and impoverished in youth, punished in revolutionary China for his role as the "Emperor's slave" but finally feted and valued, largely for outlasting his peers to become a unique relic, a piece of "living history."

He had stories of the tortuous rituals of the Forbidden City, Emperor Pu Yi's last moments there and the troubled puppet court run by the Japanese during the 1930s. He escaped back to the heart of a civil war, became a Communist official and then a target of radical leftists before being finally left in peace...

The Church even dictated how you were supposed to have sex. Anything other than the common “missionary position,” for example, was considered unnatural and therefore a sin, according to the Church. The woman on top position, or entering her from the rear (sex a tergo) were not favored because they interfered with the natural order of male-female roles. Anal and oral sex were sins because they could only be practiced for pleasure, not procreation, which for the purists was the only purpose of sex.

Punishments for those using “deviant” sexual positions could be very harsh: three years' penance for the woman on top and the same for both oral intercourse and sex a tergo, which was generally seen as the most sinful position ... with the possible exception of anal intercourse.

These were the official ideas of the Church, but some “progressive” theologians began to question these ideas. Albertus Magnus named five sexual positions and ranked them from most acceptable to least acceptable: 1) missionary, 2) side-by-side, 3) sitting, 4) standing and 5) a tergo. Magnus said the missionary was the only completely "natural" position; the others were "morally questionable but not mortally sinful. In certain situations, however, (such as extreme obesity), these other positions could be not only acceptable but even practical...

A Dutch-Japanese phrase book, compiled in 1770 for a trade legation from Holland -- the only Westerners permitted to reside on Japanese soil by the xenophobic shoguns -- had a mere 80 phrases. Its brevity suggests a paring down to the absolute essentials of speech needed to get by with the locals. Yet eight of the phrases -- an eye-catching 10% of the total -- pertained to hiring the services of female companions. These included a scripted exchange that would not be out of place in one of the more free- wheeling modern guidebooks for Western travelers to Thailand, say, or the Philippines: "Do you like that girl? / Yes, I like her a great deal. / Would you like me to make appropriate arrangements? / Yes, please do." One can almost picture bewhiskered Dutch lips smacking in a most un-burgher-like anticipation.

The Dutch legation was confined to a small island off the Nagasaki harbor. But the Japanese authorities -- sensitive to the basic needs even of hairy, barbarian Christian men -- allowed courtesans from the Maruyama pleasure quarter of Nagasaki to visit the Dutchmen. Occasionally the Dutch were taken on excursions to Maruyama itself, always with an official Japanese escort. "Imagine," Richard Bernstein writes, "a delegation of Japanese traders in France being escorted by Louis XIV's police to an elegant Parisian brothel." This, he observes, would have been inconceivable, even if there had been Japanese traders in Europe at the time, because Eastern sexuality "was a world apart from the sexual culture of Europe."...

"I wish you would smack me or flog me even. Not in play, dear, in earnest and on my naked flesh.... I would love to be whipped by you, Nora love!...to hear you call me into your room and then to find you sitting in an armchair with your fat thighs apart and your face deep red with anger and a cane in your hand.” He tells her, "I will lick the lips of my darling's cunt...I will luck up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.”

If human culture seems obsessed with sex lately, it's nothing new. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known artistic representation of a woman - a carved ivory statue of a naked female, dating from 35,000 years ago.

The figurine, unearthed in September 2008 in Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, may be the oldest known example of figurative art, meaning art that is supposed to represent and resemble a real person, animal or object. The discovery could help scientists understand the origins of art and the advent of symbolic thinking, including complicated language.

"If there's one conclusion you want to draw from this, it's that an obsession with sex goes back at least 35,000 years," University of Cambridge anthropologist Paul Mellars told LiveScience. He was not involved in the new finding. "But if humans hadn't been largely obsessed with sex they wouldn't have survived for the first 2 million years. None of this is at all surprising."...

From about 1780 to 1830, a unique form of portraiture emerged. Miniature paintings of eyes were being produced, so small that they could be set in a ring or a brooch. While some eye portraits represent relatives and lovers who'd died, as a form of private mourning, most of the known eye portraits appear to have been part of a sentimental exchange between lovers, as was the case with Maria Fitzherbert and the young Prince of Wales.

In 1784, Maria encountered the Prince of Wales at the opera in London, and the prince was immediately smitten. He proposed marriage, and while she reluctantly agreed, she later fled to the Continent, hoping he would eventually lose interest. In 1785, the Prince sent a letter to Maria to propose again, but rather than send an engagement ring, he sent a portrait of his eye...

Nell Gwynn was one day passing through the streets of Oxford, in her coach, when the mob mistaking her for her rival, the Duchess of Portsmouth, commenced hooting and loading her with every opprobrious epithet. Putting her head out of the coach window, "Good people", she said, smiling, "you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore."

Theodora, the second sister, dressed in a little tunic with sleeves, like a slave girl, waited on Comito and used to follow her about carrying on her shoulders the bench on which her favored sister was wont to sit at public gatherings. Now Theodora was still too young to know the normal relation of man with maid, but consented to the unnatural violence of villainous slaves who, following their masters to the theater, employed their leisure in this infamous manner. And for some time in a brothel she suffered such misuse. But as soon as she arrived at the age of youth, and was now ready for the world, her mother put her on the stage. Forthwith, she became a courtesan, and such as the ancient Greeks used to call a common one, at that: for she was not a flute or harp player, nor was she even trained to dance, but only gave her youth to anyone she met, in utter abandonment. Her general favors included, of course, the actors in the theater; and in their productions she took part in the low comedy scenes. For she was very funny and a good mimic, and immediately became popular in this art. There was no shame in the girl, and no one ever saw her dismayed: no role was too scandalous for her to accept without a blush.

She was the kind of comedienne who delights the audience by letting herself be cuffed and slapped on the cheeks, and makes them guffaw by raising her skirts to reveal to the spectators those feminine secrets here and there which custom veils from the eyes of the opposite sex. With pretended laziness she mocked her lovers, and coquettishly adopting ever new ways of embracing, was able to keep in a constant turmoil the hearts of the sophisticated. And she did not wait to be asked by anyone she met, but on the contrary, with inviting jests and a comic flaunting of her skirts herself tempted all men who passed by, especially those who were adolescent. On the field of pleasure she was never defeated. Often she would go picnicking with ten young men or more, in the flower of their strength and virility, and dallied with them all, the whole night through. When they wearied of the sport, she would approach their servants, perhaps thirty in number, and fight a duel with each of these; and even thus found no allayment of her craving. Once, visiting the house of an illustrious gentleman, they say she mounted the projecting corner of her dining couch, pulled up the front of her dress, without a blush, and thus carelessly showed her wantonness. And though she flung wide three gates to the ambassadors of Cupid, she lamented that nature had not similarly unlocked the straits of her bosom, that she might there have contrived a further welcome to his emissaries....

Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has bedded approximately 35,000 women in his 82 years of life, according to an upcoming documentary.

A special security team would scout out Havana beaches each day recruiting hotties for El Presidente’s pleasure.

“He slept with at least two women a day for more than four decades - one for lunch and one for supper. Sometimes he even ordered one for breakfast,” an ex-Castro official, identified as “Ramon,” tells filmmaker Ian Halperin. “I don’t think he would have stayed on as long as he did if not for all the incredible women he had access to as president.”

'Slut' - a word defined by the OED as 'a woman of a low or loose character' - dates back to 1450. But the negative connotations of sleeping around don't start there. Almost 50 years earlier, Chaucer had published his glorious portrait of Alyson, the dominant, sexually voracious, 'gap-toothed' (a signifier of hypersexuality) Wife of Bath in his Canterbury Tales. Even earlier, the notion that women could have too many sexual partners was rooted in traditions of lineage. In the early Middle Ages, wealth and standing was passed down, not by way of father to son, but to father to their sister's son. The thinking was that a man knew who his sister was and in turn who she'd given birth to so there was a guaranteed blood line. Your wife, on the other hand, couldn't be trusted. That doesn't mean women are any less interested in sex than men, just that they have more to lose...

To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

At this point, dear reader, let me concede one shocking truth. Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.

On the other hand, the bride's terror need not be extreme. While sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it...