"500 Person Sex" (５００人ＳＥＸ, EC-OPEN-0604) is a sex video released by Japanese adult video production house, Soft on Demand (SOD) on 4th May 2006. It is the largest known sex orgy recorded.

It features 250 couples, described by SOD as students, who enter what looks like a large warehouse, and over the course of two hours, engage in a variety of foreplay, mutual masturbation, and intercourse. All sexual acts are performed in near synchronization with all the other couples.

In 1887, Charles Dana Gibson - then twenty years of age - began a long-term contract with "Life". As a young man, Gibson "dipped his pen in the cosmic urge and tried to draw a girl so alluring that other young men would want to climb into the picture and sit beside her." By the time of the 1890s the Gibson girl was well established, and she was a front-runner for twenty years. In 1903, Gibson signed a hundred thousand dollar contract with

There are those people who assert - and we know what they mean - that the nudist films have nothing to do with sex. Well, it may be so for some, but not for others. "The Garden of Eden", appropriately enough, was the first of the nudist pictures in Britain. It appeared in January 1957 and featured Jamie O'Hara. The film was sent around to the local authorities - "They didn't object, and there was considerable public acceptance of the picture, which opened the screens to nudity."

Antonio Pisanello (c. 1395-c. 1455) has been taken as one of the first Italian artists to see in the nude form the wide scope for erotic art. He produced copies of the Bacchic Sarcophagi in the Campo Santo collection of antique art in Pisa, and then added to some of these an erotic component, for instance he drew the legs of a young girl to suggest "uninhibited delight in sexuality."

It is a commonplace of sexological research that women are supposed to be less easily aroused by visual erotica than are men: this is found in the bulk of relevant research from Kinsey onwards, but some of the findings are ambiguous. Recently various women have been involved in the creation of "pin-up" magazines for women. The two most famous of such magazines are "Viva" and "Playgirl". Are women, suddenly confronted with a graphic centrespread penis fastened onto a handsome male, stimulated to lustful urges? I don't know. The only girl I

In one view, Eve tempting Adam is the first case of sex in advertising, though perhaps this is not normally what we think of by the phrase.

Another candidate for the title is a woodcut produced in 1491 by a Belgian publisher to promote a new translation of "Histoire de la Belle Melusine" by Jean d'Arras.

Rudolph Valentino began his career as a dancer, then rose to stardom as a dark passionate lover in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1921), "The Sheik," and "Blood and Sand" (1922). When he died in hospital in 1926, thousands of people stopped the traffic. In addition several women committed suicide, 100,000 condolence telegrams were sent, and a monument erected to his memory was set up in Hollywood.

Guillaume de Machaut, born in Champagne around the year 1300, was the dominant figure both in lyric poetry and music in fourteenth-century France. Many of his own poems were specifically arranged for musical setting.

In a famous work combining both poetry and music, Le Livre du Voir Dit, probably written between 1361 and 1365, Machaut recounts the progress of his love affair with a young girl called Peronne. At this time the poet was more than sixty years old and blind in one eye. It is likely that the girl was more impressed by

The most famous modern dynasty in the publishing of erotica is centred in Paris. Before the war an Anglo-Irishman named Jack Kahane founded the Obelisk Press and published Joyce's "Haveth Childers" (a foretaste of "Finnegan's Wake"), Durrell's "The Black Book", Conolly's "The Rock Pool," and Harris's "Life and Loves".

There have been a number of distinguished female photographers of the nude in the twentieth century, including Emy Andriesse of Holland, and Nell Dorr and Ruth Bernhard of the United States. Miss Bernhard's work is the best known, having appeared regularly in magazines and books over the last three decades.

She has been quoted as saying -