Hoax Museum Blog: Sex/Romance

Fake ‘Love’ Cows — Ambreed, a New Zealand cattle breeding company, has developed a fake cow to collect semen from bulls. The fake cow is "a small go-kart with natural cowhide on its roof" (kind of like a Real Doll, but for cows). It's been exhibiting this fake cow at the Fieldays agricultural exhibition in New Zealand, promoting the device with live "sex shows" of bulls mounting the device. Here's how it works: I tried to find a picture of the fake cow, but haven't been able to find one. (Thanks to Gary for the story.)

7.9% of Japanese Men Over 40 Are Virgins — Apparently the movie 40 Year-Old Virgin should have been set in Japan, if the new study ("Male and Female Life and Awareness") by the Japan Family Planning Association is to be believed. It found that "7.9% of the men in the 40-45 age segment claimed they have yet to experience sex." That seems like an awfully high figure, and without knowing any details about the study (how were the questions phrased, how many people were questioned, etc.) it's difficult to know whether to take it seriously. Kunio Kitamura, director of the JFPA, blames this figure on poor male-female communication in Japan and widespread performance anxiety among Japanese men: "Their concerns, over things like being unable to achieve erection, or enabling their partner to reach orgasm, became so oppressive they decided to avoid sex altogether." I've searched, but I can't find any more details about this study other than this lone article. (My lack of knowledge of Japanese obviously hindered my search.) But my gut feeling is that this study probably isn't too reliable.

A Virgin’s Plea — Here's a hoax that I missed while away in Scotland. Geoff (who withheld his last name) claimed to be a twenty-five-year-old virgin. He launched a website (avirginsplea.com) on May 1, declaring that if his site received five million hits by the end of the month, a girl he knew had promised to sleep with him. Soon blogs were linking to his site to help him out, and the media (unable, as always, to resist an unusual story about sex) deluged him with requests for interviews. Predictably, it all turned out to be a hoax. Geoff, although a real person, was not a virgin, as reporters found out who tracked down a former girlfriend of his. In addition, Geoff hadn't created the site. He was merely the front man for it. The creator of the site was web designer Matthew Gamble who had intended it, so he later claimed, to be an experiment in viral marketing.

I learned about this hoax yesterday when I got a call from MTV Canada, who, after initially having been taken in by the hoax, were now interviewing Gamble on air. They telephoned me to get my opinion as a 'hoax expert'. Specifically, they were very curious about whether Gamble's hoax warranted inclusion in the Museum of Hoaxes. I assured them that it did, which seemed to make them happy. I didn't add that my standards for what warrants inclusion on the site are pretty low. As long as something sounds kind of hoaxy, I'll post about it on my blog. (The standards for what makes it into the Gallery sections of the site are much higher.)

I should also note that avirginsplea.com was a spoof of helpwinmybet.com, a site launched in March by a guy claiming that his girlfriend had agreed to a threesome if his site received two million hits. To my knowledge helpwinmybet.com hasn't been exposed as a hoax, per se, but I'm guessing that it's just a scheme to generate revenue from ads for dating sites.

Man, 33, Marries Woman, 104 — Muhamad Noor Che Musa met Wook Kundor while he was a lodger at her house. Soon love blossomed, and the two have now gotten married. Sure, she's 104-years-old, and he's only 33, but let's wish them the best anyway. (I guess kids are out of the question.)

This is the kind of news story that makes you wonder, right away, if it's true. But as far as I can tell, it is. A picture of the newlyweds ran on the front page of Malaysia's Berita Harian newspaper (with, as the Telegraph puts it, "Wook holding the marriage certificate in her gnarled hands"). And a number of reporters seem to have interviewed the couple. Anyway, the idea of a very old person marrying a relatively young person doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. What does seem more questionable is the woman's age (can she prove that she's 104), and the claim that this will be her 21st marriage. That would mean she's married a new husband every 4 or 5 years. Possible, but pretty rare for a Muslim woman.

Breast Exam Scam — 76-year-old William Winikoff of Coconut Creek, Florida has been charged with lewd and lascivious conduct for posing as a doctor and offering women free breast exams. Remarkably, he duped at least two women with this scam:

Carrying a black “doctor’s” bag, investigators claim Winnikoff walked up to a apartment building and told a 36-year-old woman, that he was in the neighborhood offering free breast exams. According to police, the woman let Winikoff into her apartment and the phony doctor began the exam, touching first her breasts, and then, her genitals. The woman quickly realized that Winikoff was not a real doctor and she called 911, but the fake doctor had already left her apartment to find another victim; a 33 year old woman who lives in the same apartment complex.

The Smoking Gun has some more details about this case.

It may sound like a stupid scam, but variations of it seem to happen more often than you would think. And the perpetrators always manage to find women who will fall for it. For instance, in October 2002 Zachariah Scott, a Toronto hospital employee, was charged with telling women in the obstetrics ward of Mount Sinai Hospital that he was a 'lactation consultant,' and then examining their breasts. No one realized anything was amiss until one of the women asked a nurse if she could see him again. She was told that the hospital only had female technicians.

Even weirder was the case, reported by Portuguese newspapers in 2002, of a woman who phoned other women and told them about a revolutionary new technology that allowed breast examinations to be conducted by satellite. All they had to do, she told them, was stand topless in an open window and a passing satellite would conduct a mammogram. Every woman who was contacted complied with the strange instructions. One woman even stripped entirely naked. The phone would then ring again, but instead of getting their mammogram results, the phony doctor would describe her sexual fantasies to the women in graphic detail.

Korean Couple Weds on a Train — About a week ago a touching scene took place in South Korea. A couple boarded a train and then proceeded to get married in front of all the passengers. The groom explained to everyone that he was too poor to pay for a proper ceremony, so he and his bride had decided to get married on a train instead. After the ceremony the crowd broke into wild applause, and pictures of the wedding (taken by a passenger with a cellphone) began to circulate on the internet.

But now it turns out that the scene wasn't quite as romantic as it appeared. The couple were actually actors from the Theatre and Film Department at Hoseo University. Naturally, some people are annoyed by the deception. Mr Shin Jin-woo, who dreamed up and directed the performance, has issued a statement saying: "I sincerely apologise to subway passengers who believed the ceremony was real, as well as many Internet users who posted encouraging messages online. It was not our intention to deceive the public. We felt that it would be rude to the passengers at that time if we told them that the ceremony was not real, but just a play."

The part I don't understand is this: Why would being poor explain why the couple was getting married on a train? Surely it would have been cheaper for them to get married in a civil ceremony at town hall rather than arrange for someone to marry them on a train. I realize it was all an act, but their story doesn't strike me as being logical.

Related Posts:
Aug. 25, 2002: Mock Weddings
Aug. 26, 2003: Mock Weddings II
Feb. 16, 2005: Fake Marriage Proposal
Mar. 6, 2005: Wedding Photos

Dating Service for Single Men Seeking Birthmoms — Ally forwarded me a link to the website withchild.us, along with this comment:

A friend sent this to me (we used to be part of a young mom's group) and I thought it was really disturbing... Could this site be a hoax? I sure hope so... It's a site that hooks up men who want to adopt with girls who don't want to give up their babies and they have the slogan "Attention Single Men Seeking To Adopt A Baby: Why snatch a baby from a poor 18-year-old birthmom when you can have the baby and the birthmom?" Yeah, weird...

I'm sad to say that I don't think withchild.us is a hoax. Bizarre, yes. But not a hoax. The idea the site promotes, as Ally said, is to pair up guys who want to adopt or find a wife, with pregnant, single women who are considering adoption. The mother gets to keep her baby, the guy gets to have an instant family (wife and kid), and theoretically everyone is happy. But check out the two guys, George Duckworth and Patrick Gibbons, who are listed as seeking pregnant brides:

Not surprisingly, there are no women-seeking-men registered on the site.

Withchild.us is registered to Tom Alciere, who seems to view the adoption industry as an evil business that encourages young girls to get pregnant so it can sell their babies. His alternative is to encourage the young girls to marry guys who would otherwise be shopping for mail-order brides. (He even says, "Why travel to the Philippines to marry an 18-year-old cheerleader when there are young ladies available in your area?") On the surface it seems like a logical solution. Except, of course, that it completely ignores real-world considerations, such as whether any 18-year-old girl in her right mind would want to be saddled with Duckworth for the rest of her life. Alciere is also registered as the owner of internetbrides.info, where he offers info about finding an internet bride, as well as links to sites where you can "get laid tonight". A quick google search reveals that Alciere was a New Hampshire state representative, in which position he stirred up controversy by encouraging people to kill police officers. Charming guy.

The Case of the Gary-lous Parrot — Remember that story about the British parrot that kept squawking the phrase "I love you, Gary", thereby revealing to its owner, Chris Taylor, that his girlfriend was having an affair with a guy named Gary? It was all over the news about a week ago. (Charybdis posted it in the forum.) Well, it's looking more and more like the story was bogus. The couple has been refusing offers of thousands of pounds to get their photo taken with the parrot. In fact, it's not clear that the couple even exists since the freelance reporters who produced the story are the only ones who have access to them. The New York Times has posted a correction to its original story about the parrot:

An article on Wednesday about infidelity exposed by a chatty parrot described the way the parrot, owned by a man living with his girlfriend in Leeds, England, kept screeching the name of the woman's secret lover. When the parrot said "I love you, Gary," in what sounded like the woman's voice, her boyfriend (whose name is not Gary) broke up with her. Although the article reported that the information had been obtained from reports in The Daily Telegraph and other British newspapers, The Times could not verify the former couple's accounts because the information was given to the British press by a freelance journalist who charged for the account. The Times does not pay for information. The Times should have disclosed fully to readers why we relied on other news reports. Or, perhaps it would have been prudent, given that condition, for The Times to have resisted parroting the episode at all.

The New York Daily News encountered similar difficulties when it tried to track down the couple, leading it to speculate that the entire thing was a case of an urban legend reported as news:

When The News' Adam Nichols investigated the tale, he found strikingly similar ones earlier in the year, in Israel and Germany. When contacted, freelancer Paul Hardaker, who wrote the original story, would not give up his sources. "You see the same stories about parrots over and over, going back hundreds of years," explained urban legend expert David Mikkelson, who runs the Web site www.snopes.com. "I really have a hard time believing that there are that many people who are caught by parrots blurting out their lovers' names."

Saudi Bride — Here's an image going around, captioned "Saudi Bride." First of all, I think it's safe to assume that these two aren't really bride and groom. I don't think she's wearing traditional Saudi wedding attire. (Though maybe she really is a bride... perhaps an American one.) Also, the guy's face has obviously been photoshopped. For instance, the left ear has been reduced in size, while the right ear has been enlarged. In fact, I'd guess that his entire face has been pasted into the photo.

Pherotones — Pherotones are ringtones that will make you "irresistible to the opposite sex." They're basically like pheromones, but they work via sound rather than scent. They're also a hoax. According to NewsTrend.com, the website promoting them is part of a viral marketing campaign dreamed up by the McKinney-Silver ad agency. NewsTrend writes:

The first mentions of Pherotones began around December 30, on "Dr. Vanderhood's" Pherotones blog, where the good doctor began posting "an ongoing diary of the life of a scientist on the verge of a major breakthrough." The JoniMueller blog caught wind of the Pherotones blog and posted about it on January 16. The real story began to break on January 18th with an Oreilly interview with Vanderhood.

The strange thing is that no one knows what this stealth marketing campaign is for. It seems a bit useless to attract all this attention, and then blow it by not revealing what you're advertising. (Thanks to Thilo for the link.)

Woman Marries Dolphin — A British woman has married a dolphin. The touching ceremony took place at Dolphin Reef in the Israeli port of Eilat (which is, I guess, where the dolphin lives). The dolphin is named Cindy, but despite the female name seems to be a male. (That would have made it even more unconventional if it was a gay interspecies marriage.) No word on where the couple plan to honeymoon. And one can only speculate on whether this marriage will ever be consummated.

This may be the first human/dolphin marriage, but I don't think it's the first interspecies marriage. After all, I've posted before about Marry Your Pet, the website that provides a marriage certificate to those who want to wed their beloved animal. As for weird weddings, the other example that comes to mind (besides Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson) is that woman who married a dead poet.

The Husband Mannequin — Suzy Walker's husband is away from home, serving on the USS West Virginia. But you'd hardly know he was gone, because Suzy carries around a life-size mannequin of him:

Walker bought her stand-in man for $200 and she takes him everywhere. He's been to the movie theater, Victoria's Secret, and the gas station to buy lottery tickets. The couple attracts lots of attention.

The only thing that could make this creepier would be if it turned out she didn't have a real husband. Didn't William Faulkner write a short story with a premise like that?

Sexsomnia — I first reported about the phenomenon of sleep sex over a year ago. It's a rare disorder that causes people to engage in sexual behavior while asleep. It's also potentially one of the greatest excuses for sexual impropriety ever devised. Now there's a case in Canada in which a guy successfully defended himself against charges of sexual assault by arguing that he's a sexsomniac:

Jan Luedecke, 33, met his victim at a party on July 6, 2003, and both had been drinking, the Toronto Sun reported. The woman, who can't be named, fell asleep on a couch and said she awoke to find him having sex with her. She pushed him off, then called the police. Luedecke claimed he fell asleep on the same couch and woke up when he was thrown to the floor. Sleep expert Dr. Colin Shapiro testified Luedecke had sexsomnia, which is sexual behavior during sleep, brought on by alcohol, sleep deprivation and genetics. The judgment outraged women's groups, the newspaper said.

I'm willing to bet that as popular awareness of sexsomnia grows, it'll begin to be used as a defense more and more often. It'll be like the mirror image of the repressed memory mania (i.e. a mania of not remembering, instead of remembering). The phenomenon itself may be real, but it sure seems like it's a malady tailor-made for con artists.

Wait For The Bling — Sightings of a curious abstinence-promoting billboard are being reported throughout Iowa. The message that the billboard offers: Wait For The Bling. While teen pregnancy is obviously a serious problem, these billboards almost seem like a joke (and have a few people questioning if they're photoshopped). But they seem to be real. The fine print on the bottom of the billboard reveals that they're created by the Iowa Department of Public Health's Abstinence Education Program. Maybe they'll have the desired effect, though I doubt it. Seems to me like they could just as easily be interpreted to mean "Don't do anything until the guy gives you an expensive gift." (via Eschaton)

Date Bait — Match.com, an online dating service, has been accused of sending some of its members bogus romantic emails in an effort to get them to renew their subscriptions. But even stranger, it's also been accused of sending Match.com employees out on phony dates with subscribers:

The Match lawsuit was filed earlier this month in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by plaintiff Matthew Evans, who contends he went out with a woman he met through the site who turned out to be nothing more than "date bait" working for the company. The relationship went nowhere, according to his suit. Evans says Match set up the date for him because it wanted to keep him from pulling the plug on his subscription and was hoping he'd tell other potential members about the attractive woman he met through the service, according to Leviant [Evans's lawyer]... Leviant said his client found out about the alleged scam after the woman he dated confessed she was employed by Match.

If Match.com really was paying a woman to go out with this guy, that would seem like an incredibly expensive way to generate a very small amount of publicity. It seems more likely that the girl made up the story about being a Match.com employee as a way to dump the guy.

Police Officer Declares Himself Hindu Deity — A male police officer in India has declared himself to be the reincarnation of Radha, the female consort of the Hindu god Krishna. Naturally, he dresses the part:

Devendra Kumar Panda, a 1971 batch officer of the Indian Police Service (IPS), presents an odd sight draped in female attire - complete with nose ring, lipstick, finger and toe nails painted red - and singing hymns in praise of Lord Krishna and dancing. "Lord Krishna has himself assigned me the role of Radha and whatever I am doing is in pursuance of his wishes," 57-year-old Panda told IANS.

However, his wife isn't buying any of it:

On Saturday, Panda chose to put up a full-scale performance before a host of TV cameras in his house. "I see nothing wrong with this. After all, I am carrying out the will of almighty Lord Krishna," he said. An unimpressed Veena has declared her husband as "fake" and refuses to believe his claims about divinity. "He is indulging in all other normal activities, and even chats on the Internet. I am sure all this façade is put up by him to find some excuse for remaining in the company of women, whom he describes as 'Krishna's gopis'," she alleged.

As strategies for picking up women go, that's a pretty elaborate one. I wonder if it actually works.

Yorkshire Man Raped By Dog — The following story has been circulating around, even getting posted in the hoax forum (warning: don't read it if you're easily offended):

Extract from the Yorkshire Evening Post:
A drunk who claimed he had been raped by a dog was yesterday jailed for 12 months by a judge. Martin Hoyle, 45, was arrested by police after a passing motorist and his girlfriend found a Staffordshire bull terrier, called Badger, having sex with him at the side of a road in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
Prosecutor Ben Crosland said the couple had stopped to help because they thought Hoyle was being attacked by the animal. But when they got closer they saw that he had his trousers round his ankles, was down on all fours and the dog was straddling him from behind.
"The defendant mumbled something about the dog having taken a liking to him," said Mr Crosland. "The couple were extremely offended and sickened by what they saw." Another passing motorist contacted the police and Hoyle was arrested as he walked with the dog down the road.
Hoyle, of East view, Marsh, Huddersfield, told police "I can't help it if the dog took a liking to me. He tried to rape me."
He repeated the rape allegation at the police station and added "The dog pulled my trousers down." Hoyle, who has had a long-standing alcohol problem, was jailed for 12 months after he admitted committing an act which outraged public decency.
His barrister said Hoyle had no memory of the incident because of his drunken state, but was now very remorseful and incredibly embarrassed.
Jailing him, Judge Alistair McCallum told Hoyle "Never before in my time at the bar or on the bench have I ever had to deal with somebody who voluntarily allowed himself to be buggered by a dog on the public highway. Frankly it is beyond most of our comprehension. It is an absolutely disgusting thing for members of the public to have to witness."

So is there any truth to this story, or is it just a joke? First, it should be noted that the story dates back to 1998 and has been attributed to various publications, including the Yorkshire Evening Post, the London Evening Standard, and The Sun. A Dec. 19, 1998 posting in the usenet group alt.tasteless claimed it was printed in The Sun on Dec. 1, 1998. I don't know why the story has suddenly started to circulate around again now.

I can't find the story listed in any electronic news archives. However, the Lexis-Nexis archive for the Yorkshire Evening Post only goes back to 2000, and The Sun's online archive (which goes back to 1996) didn't want to work for me (probably because I'm not a subscriber). So I can't rule out that the story never appeared in a newspaper.

In the story's favor, there is a Yorkshire prosecutor named Ben Crosland, as well as a Judge named Alistair McCallum (who has a history of making memorable remarks about the cases he's judging. In 1996 he stirred up controversy by referring to a case of sexual harassment as mere "horseplay.") The main factor weighing against it being true is how ridiculous it is. It definitely has shades of being another Hippo Eats Dwarf kind of story (right down to the detail of the bull terrier being named Badger), but until I can determine that it wasn't printed as news in 1998, I won't classify it as a hoax.

Update: After subscribing to The Sun's archive (at their lowest rate), I discovered that this story was indeed reported there on Dec. 1, 1998, though in an abbreviated form. See the comments below where I've pasted exactly what ran in The Sun.

Flirts For Hire — While searching San Diego craigslist for someone willing to clean my hardwood floors twice a month, I stumbled upon a "Flirts for Hire" service:

Is your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife not giving you the attention you deserve? Hire us, we will send someone over to bars, restaurants, clubs to flirt with you in from of them. They will get jealous in a heart beat. No physical contacts involved. No kissing, or any form of sexual activities. Just good clean fun.

I suppose this is a more real-life version of having an imaginary girlfriend. When I did a google search to find out if there were other Flirts for Hire services around the country, I found a 2003 article from news.com.au about a more sinister version of this practice:

Kirri Cleveland... is the 30-year-old going on 13 who is starting a "flirts for hire" operation that sounds like a schoolyard game, but actually is being put up as a legitimate going concern. With any luck, her enterprise - where female "spies" tempt men into being unfaithful and then dob on them - will be a dismal failure. But its very existence is damaging enough with the wedge it is attempting to drive between the sexes...
Professional flirts will be paid to deliberately cause other people grief. At least garden variety adulterers - even if they do ultimately hurt a third party - are not financially rewarded for their misdemeanors. Ms Cleveland denies her service is entrapment. Well, that is a matter of opinion...
Ms Cleveland says it is mainly women who want to engage a "flirt for hire"... She also claims 50 to 60 per cent of men will take the bait.

Grotica Search Engine — No, Google is not unveiling a new erotica search engine, despite what this press release posted on pressbox.co.uk (and now linked to by a number of blogs) claims:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – September 15, 2005 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today its plans to enter the lucrative adult content market with a new search engine that will be kept separate from its main line of search services.
Called Grotica, the new service uses sophisticated image processing tools to automatically categorize still photos and movies according to subject matter and degree of explicitness. Google's powerful keyword search functions have been further enhanced for this application with over 3000 synonyms for anatomical terms and erotic activities.

Dear Abby Dilemma — Last week a woman wrote in to Dear Abby with an interesting dilemma:

Dear Abby: My husband gave me a diamond and sapphire ring for our anniversary. Because it was too large, I took it to a jeweler, who asked me where it came from. When I asked the jeweler why he asked, he informed me that the sapphire was synthetic and the "diamonds" were cubic zirconia. I'm not certain whether to tell my husband. I don't want him to think I don't like the ring. It is beautiful, and I will love wearing it regardless. However, if he bought the ring thinking it was the real McCoy, he may have spent a lot more on it than it is worth. Because my husband has always given me exquisite jewelry, I suspect he doesn't know. Should I share this information with him or keep my mouth shut? - Stuck in Stone Mountain, Ga.

Dear Stuck: Tell your husband that you took the ring to the jeweler to have it sized and what he told you. Assure your husband that you love it and want to keep it "regardless." He may have bought it from the Home Shopping Network or he may have been taken advantage of. Either way, it will clear the air.

I suspect Stuck in Stone Mountain made two false statements in her letter. First, I doubt she took the ring to the jeweler because she thought "it was too large." She wanted to know if it was real. Second, there's no way that she thinks "he doesn't know." She's sure that he knows and is dying to let him know that she knows. (But my wife says I'm being too cynical and thinks the woman might really be concerned that her husband got ripped off... as opposed to being concerned that he was trying to slip a cheap gift past her.)