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September 1929 to the collapse of his regime in July 1943: yet, far from being a successor to Casanova, he was in such a hurry to relieve himself sexually that he rarely bothered to remove his trousers. Mussolini was nicknamed by in-the-know Italians, wrote Farrell, ‘Phallus in Chief. He would spot beauties in the street from his red AlfaRomeo, have them stopped and checked out by the police, then summon them to the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. There, in his marble-floored office, he would rip off a woman’s clothes and have urgent, rough sex with her in seconds – on a stone window seat, against a wall or on the carpet. One woman reported his sexual technique as consisting of squeezing her breasts as if they were ‘rubber automobile horns’. After he ejaculated, he would throw the woman her underwear and rarely see her again; one complained of being dismissed without so much as the offer of ‘coffee, liqueur or even a piece of cake’.
    But rather than this nerdish sexual technique making him a joke among Italian women, even if a very bad one, the little man seemed, bizarrely, to have enormous sex appeal. Thousands of letters would arrive every day from women begging him to have sex with them. A schoolteacher in Piedmont wrote requesting Mussolini to exercise the medieval
droit de seigneur
on her wedding night. To this day, Farrell reveals, dozens of people a day pay homage at Mussolini’s tomb, which is adorned with the black riding boots he was executed in, a black shirt and a flask containing a piece of his brain. ‘Many of these visitors are young women who perform a Roman salute with yearning in their eyes,’ he discovered.
    Although no dictator, President John F. Kennedy seems to have been not unlike Mussolini, in both his extremely limited sexual ability and his aggressive sexuality in dealings with women. According to an account by Frank Sinatra’s valet and confidant George Jacobs, who was also very close to JFK, the President’s lover Marilyn Monroe readily admitted that Kennedy was useless in bed. She said he suffered from premature ejaculation. However, says Jacobs in his book
Mr S: The Last Word on Frank Sinatra
, ‘She tried to take it as a positive, evidence of how she drove him out of control. “Jesus, George, he’s got a
country
to run. He doesn’t have time for the mushy stuff.” Frank, on the other hand, made time for the mushy stuff. “He’sthe best,” Marilyn frequently swooned. “Nobody compares to him. And
I
should know.”’
    When he was running for president, Kennedy also told Jacobs, who used to give him massages, a story about Marlene Dietrich masturbating him when he was a boy: ‘“Can you imagine what that was like for a Goddam teenager?” … By the time I rolled him over, Jack had become aroused. He turned beet red, but didn’t ask me to stop or stop talking. “We better get you laid, Jack,” I said, “You darn’ well better,” he replied.’
    Could rape which is, after all, as much an extreme case of pursuance of male orgasm as an issue of control and dominance, be nature’s way of efficiently spreading available genetic material as far and wide as possible, as a minority of evolutionary psychologists are now arguing? In humans, conception through non-consensual sex or rape is, sadly, all too common. But, while female orgasm may only play a minor part in conception, it has long been thought (albeit more from anecdotal evidence than hard research) that sex perceived by the female as loving, shared, relaxed and mutually pleasurable is more conducive to successful conception than joyless sex forced by a disagreeable male.
    This view may, sadly, be fallacious. Recent research by Jon and Tiffany Gottschall, of St Lawrence University in New York, seemed to show that an act of rape may be more than twice as likely to make a woman pregnant as an act of consensual sex.