Spontaneity

ESTRAGON:
What about hanging ourselves?

VLADIMIR:
Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

ESTRAGON:
(highly excited). An erection!

VLADIMIR:
With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?

ESTRAGON:
Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Waiting For Godot
Samuel Beckett



"He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his dead clothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs. Bellingham, Mrs. Yelverton Barry, and the Honorable Mrs. Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up."

The hanging of the Croppy Boy,
from Ulysses by James Joyce.

In the times of public executions it was common knowledge that hangings occasionally provoked erection and ejaculation. This reflex is probably caused by the snapping of the spine, but it could easily be misinterpreted as a sign of sexual pleasure.

Then the ultimate fix of strangulation and death is introduced, disclosing that it was the notorious Jonathan Wild who first discovered, while examining the pockets of hanged felons, that "They evinced certain emotions and commotions, which ... proved that all flesh must die to live again."

extracts from:
Please Be Tender When You Cut Me Down
KR Joergensen, 1995.