So why do people get off on this? Could it be prostate-related ? Edwards says it’s hard to say, as some also find pain pleasurable, but she does add that this sometimes stems from men who are used to being penetrated by dogs. “It’s that feeling of them biting and scratching and rooting around that’s pleasurable to them,” Edwards says. From there, a mouse, gerbil, or whatever is inserted into the tube - oftentimes with a lubricant on their snout - and a string is tied to their tail for later retrieval. If you’re still with me after that - and I honestly don’t blame you if you’re not - Edwards explains that the way this is done is by putting some kind of plastic tubing into one’s anus (a toilet paper tube, a common detail in the Gere story, is too flimsy). And while no cases exist in any medical journals, that doesn’t mean people haven’t ever put a gerbil in their asshole, it just means that it hasn’t gone horribly wrong for them to the extent that they’ve needed medical attention for it. Edwards also says, “Eels are pretty popular, both by men to insert into their anuses, and occasionally women into their vaginas, but more often the women use small fish like a goldfish.” She also worked on a case that involved a mouse being inserted into a man’s anus, which was later removed in an emergency room.Īs for gerbils specifically, Edwards says that she’s not personally dealt with a gerbil case, nor has she read about them, but she says that she wouldn’t be surprised if it occurs. One such case was a man she dealt with who would go to Thailand, rent young girls and insert roaches into them. This is a form of bestiality, which essentially deals with things crawling on you or in you.” Generally, these things are living, “or at least they were living when you put them in there,” Edwards explains, citing a variety of cases on the subject. “While it’s colloquially called ‘gerbiling,’ the actual name for it from a medical or mental health point-of-view is formicophilia, which involves not just gerbils, but other kinds of small critters as well. Jenny Edwards, an attorney specializing in criminal law and sexual offenses relating to bestiality, zoophilia and zoosexuality. As the final likely nail in the coffin, late National Enquirer gossip columnist Mike Walker once remarked, “I’ve never worked harder on a story in my life… I’m convinced that it’s nothing more than an urban legend,” referring to not only the Richard Gere story but gerbiling as a whole.ĭespite all this, gerbiling may still be a real thing - in fact, it probably is. Iconic sex-advice columnist Dan Savage remarked in 2013 that he’d never heard of any firsthand or even secondhand account of this in real life. One of the very few who replied told me, “There is no sexual act of ‘gerbiling.’ This is an old urban legend.” Certainly, the Wikipedia article for “ gerbiling ” (which contains perhaps the greatest wiki image/caption pairing of all time) regards the act as merely a “rumored sexual practice.” Being a respectable journalist, though, and unwilling to take Wikipedia at face value, I also reached out to literally dozens of gerbil breeders for this piece. Why has this story been so durable? Where did it come from? Why the fuck is a gerbil always the rodent of choice? Most importantly, is it true?įirst off, let’s establish whether gerbiling - as it’s apparently called - is even a real thing.
Yet this single-sentence narrative has somehow endured the test of time for decades, like some ancient folklore passed down from generation to generation. The story goes like this: Richard Gere once got a gerbil stuck up his ass and then had to go to the ER to get it removed. And while other rumors usually jump around from celebrity to celebrity (the way the rumor about Prince getting his ribs removed to suck his own dick eventually became a rumor about Marilyn Manson instead), this particular tale is only ever related to one guy: Richard Gere. Of course, you know the story - it’s one of the most enduring celebrity rumors of all time.