The Curious Account of Banana Slug Sex

Perhaps you recall the nasty story of John Wayne Bobbitt and his wife Lorena.  She, a saucy little number from Ecuador, took a horrendously large kitchen knife to John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis and severed it off as he lay in a drunken stupor in their bed.  Lorena Bobbitt then fled off into the night in an automobile and, at some point, flung John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis out the car window into a field.

Luckily, a crack penis search and rescue team was dispatched to the field forthwith.   The search team managed not only to locate the penis (based strictly on member size, I doubt they would have had such luck had I been Lorena Bobbitt’s victim), they also found the member in a timely enough fashion that the penis was yet viable.

Surgeons later successfully re-attached the penis to the rest of John Bobbitt, though doctors informed Mr. Bobbitt that he would likely be unsuccessful in pleasuring women again.  John Wayne Bobbitt proved the doctors wrong in that regard.  In fact, he even went on to “star” in a few porn movie productions, including: John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut and Frankenpenis.

    

Some versions of the Lorena Bobbitt story make claim that she (pun not necessarily intended) whacked off John’s penis because he did not properly pleasure her on the night of the assault.  Lorena is known to have a temper.  Long after the John Bobbitt incident, she was accused of slugging her mother because her mother switched to the wrong television program while they sat together watching a shared television set (Lorena’s actions in this second case do seem somewhat defensible to me).

Anyhow, I bring up the story of John and Lorena Bobbitt because I saw a banana slug while hiking through a redwood forest in California last week.

For those of you lacking in knowledge about the sex life of banana slugs, you need to know a few things about banana slugs.  First of all, banana slugs are endowed with an enormous penis.

We are talking seriously large here.

Banana slugs can grow to a size of 6 or 8 inches in length.  A slug’s erect penis can be as long as its body.  That’s pretty big relatively speaking.  Oddly enough, you might think that surgeons mistakenly attached the slug’s penis to the wrong spot because the erect penis sprouts from the banana slug’s head rather than from “down there.”

Banana slugs are also hermaphrodites.  For this reason, all adult slugs have female parts and should also be endowed with a whopper penis.  In this way, any slug should be able to mate with any other slug—a convenient arrangement at slug bar closing time.

Here is the part where Lorena Bobbitt enters Slug World.

 

Not all mature adults have a penis.  Some slugs have had their members lopped off.  Well, gnawed off might be closer to the mark.  Seems as though some slugs will sever the penis off their mate during the act of sex by vigorously chewing through it.  Slug experts—yes they do exist—are not entirely certain why slugs engage in such behavior.  Are they selfishly limiting gene pool options?   Does the severed penis remain as a “plug” to make sure that sexual transfer material remains in place?   Are the slugs stuck together and merely trying to escape?  Or (this is entirely my own theory) has one slug been a dismal lover?

I was a bit horrified the first time I read an account of slug lovemaking.  Slug World is a slow, yet, apparently brutal place.  For those of you likely to encounter a slug at any time in the near future…I suggest you not allow your penis near said slug.

Posted is the photograph I captured of the slug I met along a shadowy trail.

       --Mitchell Hegman

Slug information thanks to: TGIPF: The Weird World of Banana Slug Sex: Redux, by: Cassandra Willyard