Man, 21, hospitalised due to risky ‘sounding’ sex act involving a USB cable

By JOHN ELY DEPUTY HEALTH EDITOR FOR MAILONLINE

Published: 14:49 BST, 12 June 2025 | Updated: 14:51 BST, 12 June 2025

A 21-year-old man ended up needing emergency surgery after a sexual experiment with a USB cable went horribly wrong.

The unnamed college student inserted the object into his urethra—the tube in the penis that carries urine out of the body—as part of a dangerous practice called ‘sounding’.

But the thick cable—which he had inserted in a U-shaped loop leaving both ends hanging outside of him—had gotten stuck, requiring an urgent trip to A&E.

American medics, who reported the case, said their patient admitted to having inserted objects like ‘cotton swabs and wire cables’ in a similar manner before.

But on this occasion he found himself unable to extract the USB cable.

Scans show how the man had pushed the looped cable so deep inside his urethra that it had entered his bladder, where it then become lodged. 

Writing in the journal Cureus, the medics said that initial attempts by staff to pull the cable out by hand were unsuccessful.

As a result, they decided to anaesthetise the man and attempted to extract the cable using special tools inserted into the urethra.

A 21-year-old man ended up needing emergency surgery after a sexual experiment with a USB cable went horribly wrong. Pictured a scan of the cable inside the patient

This proved successful and the cable was ‘gently’ pulled out until it could be snipped with scissors and each section extracted more easily. 

After keeping him in hospital for a week for monitoring, the man was then discharged with painkillers and antibiotics.

One month later he returned to hospital for a follow up which showed he had suffered no long term problems from his ordeal. 

Writing in the report the medics noted: ‘Self-insertion of objects into the urethra for sexual or other reasons is rare but can cause serious harm.’

Known risks include an infection, which can in turn lead to life-threatening sepsis as permanent damage to the reproductive organs. 

If inserted objects reach the bladder, it also carries the potential of rupturing the organ. 

Sounding is a sexual kink whereby people, mostly men, insert long thin objects into their urethra.

Examples of objects previously used include forks, telephone cables metal piping, nail clippers, an allen key, needles, olive seeds, batteries, a skipping rope, a coyote rib, and even a decapitated snake. 

While most famously done for sexual pleasure the act is has carried out by people with serious mental health conditions as well as men undertaking an ill-advised attempt to maintain an erection.

UK experts have previously reported a rise in the number of men having sounding issues over the past few years.

They have blamed it the surge in men looking to ‘expand their sexual activities and enhance their sexual experiences’.

How many men perform sounding is unknown.

However, the NHS in England reported treating 258 cases where patients had a ‘foreign body’ stuck in their urethra last financial year.

The vast majority of these cases, 231, were in men with an average patient age of 47.  

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Man, 21, hospitalised due to risky ‘sounding’ sex act involving a USB cable

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