A Desperate Attempt To Connect Ancient Sex Toys To The Royals

Today in obligatory tangential Royal Wedding news: St. Andrews, where the pair met, has a collection of ancient sex toys.

If you want to see the “Beggar’s Benison and Wig Club Collection” at the Museum of the University of St. Andrews (the Beggar’s Benison was a Georgian sex club), you need a good reason and a formal application. But for students of the esoteric, erotic, or merely odd, it might be worth the effort. Describes Slate’s Tony Perrottet,

There are drinking glasses in the shape of giant phalluses. Lewd platters are engraved with surreal pornographic images, including erections shaped as lighthouses and roosters with human penis heads. One prize exhibit is a snuff box filled with female pubic hair that was plucked by one of William’s most debauched and lecherous royal relatives, King George IV, the prince’s fourth great-granduncle, who ruled from 1820 to 1830. And a timeworn case contains a ghoulish wooden mannequin’s head whose peculiar erotic purpose can be traced back to another randy royal forebear, King Charles II.

Still, as familial skeletons in closets go, I’m guessing that the royal family can boast a lot worse. And, as the author sums up, “Today, we can only speculate as to whether Prince William was aware of the sexy stash at his alma mater and the royal connections that swirl around it.” Indeed.