The Ten Greatest Sex Lives in History

From Kinsey to Casanova.

By James Brady Ryan

What makes a sex life "great"? Is it the number of notches on your bedpost? Is it the impact it has on the world at large? Is it coming up with really, really inventive ways of getting your subjects to fulfill your rapacious desires? We at Nerve say it's all of this and more! And so, in the spirit of sexual liberation, we've collected and sifted the ten greatest sex lives in history, to provide you with a little inspiration for when the missionary position just isn't cutting it anymore.

1) Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan is remembered as a fierce warlord, but did you know he was quite possibly a direct ancestor of 8% of the Central Asian population? No one knows for sure which member of his immediate family was responsible for, you know, planting the seeds that would become approximately 17,000,000 males, but Genghis is a very likely candidate. After all, he conquered lands stretching from China to India to North Africa to Eastern Europe: between the many actual wives he took, there was probably a decent amount of...less than official coupling in Khan's tent. When you're responsible for .5% of the men on earth? Yeah, that's impressive.

2) Madonna

Love her or hate her (and there are plenty in the latter camp), but you can't deny Madonna's impact on contemporary sexuality. This is the woman who writhed around in a wedding dress while singing "Like A Virgin", sported an infamous cone bra, sang a song simultaneously about praying and blowjobs, and then released a coffee-table book entitled, simply, Sex. No one has ever done more to commercialize female sexual aggression.

3) Wilt Chamberlain

20,000. Twenty. Thousand. That's the number of women this legendary basketball player claimed to have slept with in his lifetime, and while it would be hard to verify the figure (or even to comprehend having that much sex), friends and lovers of the one-time LA Laker say that it wouldn't surprise them. Apparently Chamberlain had enough game and starpower to charm the pants off almost anyone, as well as the ability to round up multiple partners at a moment's notice. Think about that the next time you're searching your cell-phone contacts for a friend with benefits.

4) Emperor Nero

His uncle Caligula may get all the credit for freakiness, but if you want an emperor who really put some thought into his sexual depravity, you have to go with Nero. Roman rulers were no strangers to lavish orgies, but once he'd tired of the normal sex parties, Nero moved on. He had several wives (one of them male) and married another man as a wife. When that wasn't enough to keep him busy, he'd have people tied to stakes so he could run around in an animal pelt "assaulting" their genitals. We wouldn't want to meet the guy, that's for sure, but you have to give him points for inventiveness.

5) Helen Gurley Brown

Helen Gurley Brown may not have been as "inventive" as some of the other people on this list, or as prolific, but as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and the author of Sex and the Single Girl, Brown introduced an entire generation of women to the idea that they could have a career, have sex, and still land a husband. When your sex life improves the sex lives of women for decades afterwards? That's greatness.

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