Authors: Tom Hickman
Female emasculation of men is generally a singular activity but a collective one occurs in Emile Zola’s
Germinal
, though the shopkeeper Maigrat, guilty of sexually harassing or raping many of his female creditors, has already expired in a fall from a roof during a miners’ strike:
… the women had other scores to settle. They sniffed
around him like she-wolves, trying to think of some
outrage, some obscenity to relieve their feelings.
The shrill voice of Ma Brûlé was heard:
‘Doctor him like a tomcat!’
‘Yes, yes, like a cat! The dirty old sod has done it once too often!’
Mouquette was already undoing his trousers and pulling them down, helped by la Levaque who lifted the legs. And Ma Brûlé, with her withered old hands, parted his naked thighs and grasped his dead virility . . . and pulled so hard that she strained her skinny back . . . The soft skin resisted and she had to try again, but she managed in the end to pull away the lump of hairy, bleeding flesh…
But such a collective act is not confined to a novelist’s imagination, or to the deceased. In Cambodia, women dragged a man arrested for a series of rapes out of the police station, cut off his penis, put it through a meat mincer and then made him eat it.
Castration is a messy business, however done; few women resort to it. Rather more women who don’t, but who nonetheless think that only genital retribution will satisfy their grievance, adopt a hands-off approach – they administer scalding water or hot fat. Yet removing or maiming a man’s penis may not always be a vengeful act. A Beijing housewife had nothing but love in her heart when in 1993 she de-penised her spouse with a pair of scissors. A fortune teller had told her that his inadequate organ was the problem in their relationship. She snipped it off in the hope of making it grow back bigger and better . . .
Other dispossessions
Men have castrated other men for more reasons
4
than bloodlust – principally to provide servants, guards, administrators and priests. The Carib Indians (who gave their name to the Caribbean) castrated boys captured from their enemies for culinary purposes. Removal of a male’s testicles before puberty prevents the hormonal rush into adulthood. A cannibal people, the Carib appreciated that castrates’ flesh remained unmuscular and therefore tender until such times as they went into the pot.
East and West, castrated prisoners and criminals were the first servants, but demand for them exceeded supply and, as boys castrated before puberty proved more docile and trustworthy, slave traders saw the business opportunity and shipped in boys from other countries – the prettiest, it has to be said, fetching up in male brothels. Most of the eunuch class that came out of Africa, through Egypt and the Sudan, were ‘fully shaved’ – they were deprived of penis and testicles. Only such males
were
allowed in the harems of the Turkish Ottoman sultans. Elsewhere in the palaces, eunuchs usually shorn only of their testicles were employed, and they were white, not black: the Ottoman Empire at its height spread out of Asia into parts of eastern Europe and considerable numbers of eunuchs came from Hungary, the Slav lands, Germany, Armenia, Georgia and the northern Caucasus. All eunuchs in imperial China were fully shaved – emperors were ever fearful that a rival dynasty might be founded and took no chances with an enemy within. More secure in their power, the Moguls in India allowed all their eunuchs to retain their penis.
Castrating young boys was simple: pressure on the carotid artery rendered them unconscious, after which their testicles were crushed, often by hand, permanently damaging the seminal glands; alternatively their testicles were strangulated with cord so that they became necrotic and fell off – farmers castrate lambs in much the same way with elastic bands.
The adult scrotum and testes were forfeit to the knife.
Cutting off the testicles alone didn’t usually endanger life. But cutting off the penis did and fewer than one man in five survived African castration; even in in the Sudanese town of Tewasheh, once one of the world’s largest suppliers of eunuchs, only three thousand of the thirty thousand castrated annually didn’t die. The procedure was crude. The man was strapped down, his genitals bound with yarn to stop the circulation and then sliced away, the wound cauterised with a hot iron or tar and a bamboo rod inserted to keep the urethra open. Next the castrate was buried up to his navel in sand or mud and given nothing to drink for five or six days. If then his urine flowed, he stood a chance of living; if not, he’d die an agonising death, unable to empty his bladder – if, that is, he didn’t die from loss of blood or septicaemia. By contrast, the Chinese washed a man’s genitals in hot pepper-water to desensitise them, then
removed
them with a curved blade dipped in antiseptic lime juice. The wound was sealed with a silver plug and he was walked around for several hours before being allowed to rest. Three days later, the plug was removed. The castration procedure was so radical that if the castrate lived (perhaps half did) he would never be able to urinate standing up other than through a quill.
Penis-possessors may be disbelieving, but there was no shortage of willing candidates to become eunuchs in China, India and Byzantium, the breakaway eastern half of the Roman Empire that fell to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century: preferable to be inside the palace walls without some or all of your compendium than outside with it intact, but in abject poverty. Wealth and opportunity beckoned within and parents with several sons would often have one or two castrated in the hope of getting them into service; in 1644 there were twenty thousand applications for three thousand vacancies in China’s Forbidden City, which at the time employed seventy thousand eunuchs. It was possible for a eunuch to rise to administrator, military commander or even to confidential adviser, and in Byzantium eunuchs were so well regarded for their supposed incorruptibility that eight of the chief posts in the empire were specifically reserved for them.
The Ottoman and Chinese dominions collapsed in the early twentieth century and with them the era of the eunuch. The last in the Forbidden City streamed out in 1912, each carrying a pottery jar containing his severed organs (known in euphemistic Mandarin as ‘the precious treasure’) preserved in alcohol, to be interred with him when he died so that when reborn he would be whole again.
From at least the ninth century
AD
eunuchs sang in Christian Byzantine choirs. The larynx of men deprived of their testicles, like the rest of their body, did not grow normally
and
their voice retained a boy’s vocal range while at the same time developing extraordinary power. When Italians began to experiment with complex polyphonic choir scores in the sixteenth century, choirmasters, forbidden by papal degree to recruit women, stealthily introduced castrati. Castration was illegal (but not unknown: poor Italian mothers sometimes had a son castrated to sell to Turkish traders, who paid good prices). Hardly surprisingly all those who tried for choir places had not been to the local barber to be given opium, placed in a tub of very hot water and rendered almost unconscious and then have his parts sheared away; no, all of them had met with a tragic ‘accident’.
There was an upside to prepubescent testicular removal. The castrati did not go bald and, according to modern statistical research, lived thirteen years longer than average; and the seventeenth century made some the stars of the Italian operatic stage (‘Long live the knife!’ shouted the adoring crowds), the greatest of them becoming seriously rich. Women threw themselves at the castrati and even if tales of their conquests are exaggerated, some did have a lot of sex – losing testicles does not mean losing the ability to get erections and even to ejaculate. What Juvenal wrote about Roman matrons and young girls was true of Italian ladies: ‘They adore unmanly eunuchs – so smooth, so beardless to kiss, and no worry about abortions!’
But there was a downside, besides the inability to father offspring. Hormonal imbalances meant womanly breasts and hips, a weak bladder, poor eyesight, a lack of manly body hair and often an unusually small head; and for many a condition called macroskelia, which made the bones of the ribcage, legs and arms continue to grow – the arms of some castrati reached to their knees. Onstage the castrati were usually a head taller than anyone else, which was awkward for those who played
women
’s roles. The era of the operatic castrati ended in the early nineteenth century with a change in musical tastes and the rise of the diva, by which time an estimated four to five thousand boys a year had experienced ‘accidents’. But the last castrato did not leave the Sistine Chapel choir until 1913 – a succession of popes continued to turn a blind eye for the glory of God.
There have always been men prepared to be castrated for their religious beliefs. The priests of many civilisations were, including those of the Roman Cybele cult whose novitiates castrated themselves on the yearly public ‘day of blood’. What is extraordinary is that as the flutes played and the drums beat, some spectators, presumably normal penis-possessors, got so carried away that they joined in. According to James Frazer (
The Golden Bough
) ‘man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot’.
Early Christians were obsessed with self-castration as the ultimate means to chastity (‘and there be eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’ – Matthew 19:12), one being the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria. Fifteen hundred years later the Russian Skoptzis, who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church, followed the same biblical reading, the sect surviving into the twentieth century. The Karamojong of northern Uganda and the holy sadhus, still going strong in India and Nepal, cut nothing off but have a unique way of putting the penis out of commission; from an early age they hang heavy weights from it so that eventually it becomes two or three feet long and can be tied up in a knot – some sadhus carry theirs about in a cloth basket.
Extreme religiosity still accounts for a proportion of those in
the
West who take a knife to their genitals, in any combination of one testicle, two testicles, or penis, or
tout ensemble
. Drunks show up at hospital from time to time having removed a testicle or even two for no better reason than it seemed like a good idea at the time, frequently involving a bet. Those who fully castrate themselves are usually mentally disturbed or desperate transsexuals convinced they’re in the wrong anatomical body.
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,
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The medical profession over centuries has been keen on removing a man’s testicles as prevention or cure for many conditions. Castration was a regular treatment for hernias in the Middle Ages (as was piercing the testicles of those with bubonic plague). French physicians routinely castrated patients suffering from leprosy, rheumatism or gout. Doctors have been reluctant to relinquish the idea that the testicles play a part in unrelated bodily ills and abnormalities – as latterly as the early twentieth century in America epileptics, alcoholics, the insane, homosexuals and habitual masturbators – this last had been strongly advocated in Victorian England – were castrated.
Half a century ago it was especially unfortunate to have a micropenis; the most common way of dealing with the worst cases (almost no penile shaft, the glans virtually sitting on the pubic skin) was gender reassignment: a boy’s testes and vestigial penis were taken away, an artificial vagina fashioned, and the sufferer was told he was now a girl and prescribed female hormones for the rest of ‘her’ life. Today, advanced surgery can increase the abnormally small organ to something like normal dimensions, using muscles from the forearm, without loss of erogenous sensation. Men thus transformed, as the
New Scientist
reported in 2004, are now able ‘to enjoy a full sex life and urinate standing, some for the first time’.
THE NEUROTIC PENIS
All in the mind
CAN A MAN’S
penis be stolen from him by sorcery? Once, such a fear seems to have been universal. It looms large in the folktales of preliterate societies. It appears in ancient Chinese medical texts. It was part of the European medieval mindscape, resulting in hundreds of witches being burnt at the stake for penis theft. In the
Malleus Maleficarum
, the fifteenth-century guidebook on witches and their ways, the German Dominican monk and witchfinder Jacob Sprenger asserted that witches
collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat corn and oats, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report . . . a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which
he
liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said ‘You must not take that one, it belongs to a parish priest.’
Such was the pathological state of medieval thinking that witches were believed to have intercourse with the devil, whose penis was said by some to be at the rear and covered in scales, while others declared that it was forked or, indeed, that he had two, in either case for the purpose of simultaneous front and rear penetration. The devil’s ejaculate was reputed as cold as ice and exceeded that of a thousand men. Freud believed that the witch’s broomstick was really a metaphor for ‘the great Lord Penis’.
In the modern world, the delusional disorder of penis theft is largely confined to the countries of West and Central Africa. Those from Malaysia, Borneo and southern India and China have a related but different anxiety – the belief that it’s possible for their penis to shrink into their abdomen, which will cause them to die and become ghosts. Periodic epidemics of hysteria occur, sweeping through towns or cities or even entire countries. In a recent isolated instance in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, a rumour warned men not to shake hands with a ‘mysterious West African’, whose handshake melted genitals. Scores who thought themselves afflicted sought medical treatment. Alleged penis thieves in Africa are routinely hanged or set alight with petrol by angry mobs. But the mysterious West African was never found, which isn’t surprising: the rumour was a hoax – spread by text-messaging.