TLC has a new reality show called Abby & Brittany, centered on a pair of 22-year-old conjoined twins. For a fascinating intro video of Abby and Brittany Hensel, when they were kids on The Discovery Channel, go here. Prompted by the new series, Alice Dreger retells the story of Chang and Eng Bunker:
Chang and Eng were joined by just a bit of liver and some skin. One April day in 1843, Chang married Adelaide Yates, while brother Eng married sister Sallie Yates. Based on the fact that Chang and Adelaide had 10 children, and Eng and Sallie 12, it's fair to say the brothers had sex. At the autopsy of the Bunker twins, one of the anatomists opined that their active sex lives "shocked the moral sense of the community" — even though the truth is that the Bunkers' neighbors appeared to have just accepted the situation. A little known fact is that the Bunker wives' father originally objected to his daughters marrying the twins not because they were conjoined, but because they were Asian. (This was, after all, the antebellum American South.)
Dreger sees discomfort with conjoined twins' sexuality as an impetus for risky separation surgeries:
[W]hen I talked to contemporary surgeons about how they decide whether to undertake the substantial risks some separations involve, I found that surgeons had two fears, sort of conjoined: one, that twins would grow up conjoined and thus never have sex; two, that twins would grow up conjoined and actually have sex.
The Dish 