“The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email.
News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable.
My brother’s best friend was at University in the early nineties and it was the birthdays if one of the guys he shared a house with so they all rushed into his room and shouted “surprise” but they got the surprise as he was humping a cut off shampoo bottle lined with a warm, wet flannel that he’d jammed between his mattress and bedframe.
I imagine they’ll eventually find an ancient, improvised Fleshlight at Pompeii because as long as there are have been horny teenagers, there has probably been homemade vaginas.
Pompeii is actually someplace you probably wouldn’t find one, considering it was packed with brothels.