6 Intimate Items That Embarrassed Everyone at Airport Security

6 A Huge Penis

New Yorker Jonah Falcon has appeared in several documentaries as a man with an enormous penis. It is an organ that hangs 9 inches in its relaxed state, not just according to his own unreliable estimate but according to an editor at HuffPost, who examined him for a story. Even more surprising than the man’s penis size is his name, Jonah Falcon, which is not an alias he invented to advertise his penis but the actual name he was born with. More surprising still, the HuffPost’s editor is named Buck Wolf, which sounds even more like an alias invented to advertise someone’s penis. 

In 2012, Falcon was in San Francisco International Airport, having strapped his penis to one leg to avoid needless complications. This move was in vain. A TSA agent still noticed something suspicious and asked him if he had “some sort of growth.” “It’s my dick,” answered Falcon, and they believed him — but they did next wipe his hands with powder to check for explosives. We don’t see why they’d now suspect explosives. It had to be to cover their own embarrassment. 

But the brief delay Falcon experienced added up to nothing compared with what our next heroes experienced…

5 A Penis Pump

When Mardin Amin walked through security at O’Hare in 2006 with a penis pump in his luggage, he didn’t want to be too vocal about it. The female TSA agent asked him about the small black object in his backpack, and he kept his voice hardly above a whisper when he replied, “Pump.”

Right now, try saying the word “pump” softly a few times. What word does that sound like? What word, which a TSA agent is already primed to hear?

Yes, the agent thought Amin was boldly declaring that he had a “bomb” in his pack. It didn’t help that the agent identified him to be Middle-Eastern, and he was flying to Iraq. Security ultimately determined that he was not really carrying a bomb, but that didn’t stop them from referring his case to Chicago prosecutors, who pressed felony charges against him, seeking three years in prison. They dropped the charges a month later, because at least one person in the state’s attorney’s office was sane. 

4 A Vibrator

If you go through security with a vibrator today, you’ll probably experience no trouble at all. Worst-case scenario, you’ll have to identify it as a sex toy to allay the suspicions of an agent who wants to make sure it’s not an e-cigarette. 

But then we have the case of what happened in Berlin in 2018. Security personnel X-rayed a check-in bag and saw a vibrator in a man’s luggage. They thought it was a grenade. They took no chances with questioning the passenger (it was a present for his girlfriend, he’d later say). No, they just went ahead and evacuated the entire terminal.

This was the third time in 10 days that German airports evacuated terminals over security threats that amounted to nothing. We’re going to suggest these evacuations were actually a coordinated terrorist plot. We’re suggesting that solely to force Belin to launch another needless investigation, forcing even more closures. 

3 A Chastity Belt

We’ve talked a bit before about how chastity belts, as people commonly think of them, never really existed. No knight really locked his lady in steel underwear to fend off all penetration during his months away. That would lead to severe hygiene issues almost immediately and far more serious medical issues not long after that. 

But just because no one used them like that back then doesn’t mean no one can use them in any manner right now. Which is why, if you’ve crafted a specific kind of BDSM relationship with a partner, you can totally don a chastity belt today and leave them the key. People won’t even be able to detect that you’re wearing one, unless of course you’re brave enough to try walking through a literal metal detector. 

In 2003, A British woman tried to fly from Athens to London while wearing a chastity belt. She said her husband had made her wear it throughout her Greek trip, and while we don’t know if that’s true (we have no record of any British airport spotting the belt on her when she left), Greek authorities believed her story. Oddly enough, it fell to the pilot to decide whether to let her though, and he said yes. As a pilot, he was obviously a fan of keeping belts securely fastened.  

2 278 Genital Piercings

Some of you imagine that your battles with airport authorities end once you board the plane. You’re forgetting about the next step in your quest: convincing immigration once you arrive to let you into the country you’re visiting. 

In 2014, German man Rolf Buchholz flew into Dubai. As a German national, he should have been able to enter the UAE without a visa and stay for three months. Problem was, Buchholz was the world’s most pierced man. He had 278 piercings just on his genitals and almost 500 piercings in all. His piercings were, in fact, why he was visiting Dubai — he was doing a paid appearance at a nightclub — but they also convinced officials to deny him entry. They suspected him of “black magic,” claimed Buchholz, and sent him back to Germany. 

That’s deeply unfair. It’s wrong to make any such assumptions about someone based on their appearance. Let’s take a look at the guy:

Uh, on second thought, never mind. Go ahead, Dubai, make whatever decision you want. 

1 A Kiss

The romcom trope of someone running through the airport after their departing love is so tired that movies have now been mocking it for decades. Chris Evans has been in two different movies where he races through an airport after someone and then breaks the fourth wall to talk to the audience about what a cliché that is. 

But in January 2010, we got a real case of a guy jumping past security to kiss his girlfriend goodbye. It happened in Newark, and after slipping under a rope to deliver the kiss, Haisong Jiang walked his partner all the way to the gate. No one stood up and clapped, but also, no one shot him dead. In fact, no one noticed at all.

Not at first, anyway. Later, someone spotted the breach on security footage, forcing the airport to turn to its one tool: total evacuation. Hundreds of flights got delayed, and staff searched for the interloper, but he was long gone. It took a five-day manhunt to track him down, and authorities ended up fining him and sentencing him to 100 hours of community service. Thousands of passengers got pretty annoyed over the whole thing while also being a bit outraged that Jiang had managed to get past security undetected. We suppose all TSA agents were distracted at the time, interrogating some other passenger over their collection of cock rings. 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.