by Tom Hickman
Every year at least two hundred Americans, and thirty to forty Britons break their erect penis. A few, bizarrely, do so by tucking themselves into their underwear while still tumescent, but almost all do it during violent intercourse. A few, equally bizarrely, do it by falling out of bed during this and buckling their erection on the floor; a few by being too physical and crumpling against their partner’s pubic bone or perineum; but most do it when their partner is on top in the riding position and rotating her hips.
The lining of the penis, the tunica albuginea, is about the thickness of thin cardboard and protects the spongy chambers that fill with blood during erection, and it has a safety factor of ten times the normal erect-state pressure. If that is exceeded, however, the tunica breaks – and breaks with an audible crack.
Again the pain is excruciating, the penis swells and turns the colour of a ripe Victoria plum, and surgical repair is needed, as well as six weeks’ bed rest with the penis in splints. The break will heal, though the likelihood is a penis that kinks on subsequent elevation. If the break is extensive, the unfortunate penis-possessor can develop Peyronie’s disease in which fibrous plaque accumulates at the site, erection becomes painful and rigidity diminishes – and the penis can take a sharp left or right turn and be grossly misshapen, bulging at top and bottom but seeming to have an invisible clamp around the middle. Four in ten men with Peyronie’s have a permanent degree of erectile dysfunction.
Unlike a torn frenulum, Peyronie’s (which can also have medical causes) is suffered mostly by middle-aged men, though the prevalence and incidence are hard to establish; many don’t seek help because of their embarrassment. Current literature suggests 3–9 per cent of men are victims.
The dispossessed
According to Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel, the first part of his body that early man protected (with tough fig leaves) was ‘the staff of love and packet of marriage’, words spoken by Lady Humphrey de Merville in exhorting her husband, on his way to war, to attach a jousting helmet to his groin. It was in Rabelais’ century, the sixteenth, that new technology allowed the ‘genitall shield’ to be incorporated in suits of armour: no less boastful in size than the codpiece but serving a more critical function. When purpose-made protection is lacking in dangerous circumstances, men take emergency measures. Troops being carried in aircraft that came under fire from the ground during the Second World War often chose to sit on their helmets, protecting their lower head rather than their upper.
In the aftermath of wars, penises can be even more vulnerable than during them: the victorious have a habit of emasculating the vanquished. Once, it was universally believed that making enemies incomplete in their parts would prevent them from getting to the other world, from where they might wreak vengeance; the belief still seems to exist in parts of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Mostly, of course, penis-possessors at war have castrated other penis-possessors, to take from them the very thing that makes them men, their manhood, and in so doing, ‘feminise’ them.
The Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews and Ethiopians among other nations regarded penises as trophies of war, with bookkeeping scrupulousness: after invading Libya in 1200 BC, the Egyptians went home with a haul of 13,240 (six Libyan generals, 6,359 Libyans, 6,111 Greeks, 542 Etruscans, 222 Sicilians). The Aztecs weren’t trophy collectors, preferring to string taken penises along the road to shame their foes – as the Spanish found out when they invaded central Mexico in the sixteenth century. Whether taken as trophies or not, the cutting off of enemies’ genitalia has occurred in every kind of conflict: the Normans, for example, castrated Englishmen in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings, including the already dead King Harold who, William of Poitiers relates, had his ‘leg’ cut off – leg being a Norman euphemism; the English and French castrated each other on the famous battlefields of the Hundred Years War; the remnants of Napoleon’s army in the retreat from Moscow, starving in the snowy countryside, were hunted down by the Cossacks and castrated in their hundreds. The conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, big and small, have not been exempt.
Penis-possessors haven’t always needed the excuse of war to deprive other penis-possessors of their manhood – in the years of the codpiece the Turks waylaid Western travellers to see if the contents lived up to the packaging and removed what they found when it did not, out of indignation and perhaps pent-up relief that it did not. Fear of the potency or the size of the penises of other races has historically led to instances of castration. The soldiers of the Roman emperor Hadrian cut off the organs of living Israelites – because circumcision, a religious rite of Judaism, permanently exposed the glans, as occurs in the uncircumcised when the penis is erect, thereby giving them the reputation of being pathologically lustful – flinging them heavenwards and taunting God: ‘Is this what you have chosen?’2 Bible Belt America, which believed that the black man was the descendant of Noah’s accursed son Ham and had ‘the flesh of asses’, during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth lynched over four thousand for the alleged rape of white women, almost all of the men first having their genitals cut off.
Castration has always been in the repertoire of executioners and torturers. During the Crusades (when Christians and Muslims emasculated each other with equal enthusiasm) the French knight Thomas de Coucy hung up his captives by their genitals until they ripped from their bodies; in his autobiographical memoirs (De vita sua) Guibert de Nogent gives an account of this, and the nightmares it gave him. Centuries later the Inquisition similarly suspended some of those unlucky enough to come to its attention – and targeted the penises of others with the ‘crocodile shears’, a metal contraption of hemicylinders with internal teeth, which was heated red hot before being clamped in place. Castration was also an aspect of hanging, drawing and quartering, which for five hundred years – until as late as the eighteenth century – the English meted out for high treason (often liberally interpreted: Henry VIII executed a few obstinate Catholic clergymen to bring others into line over his reform of the Church; he dispensed with an alleged lover of his fifth wife in this way too). Victims were half hanged, their ‘privy members’ then cut off and held before their face while they could feel the agony and humiliation, before these were thrown into the fire, followed by the bowels from their sliced-open body – a fate suffered by Charles I.
Castration of the testicles was commonly one of the prices for a variety of crimes in the whole of medieval Europe, including for counterfeiting coins and for poaching royal deer; in France during the Protestant Reformation it was the penalty for homosexuality, which the convicted on balance must have thought preferable to death, commonly the penalty in different cultures and periods. But a second offence meant the loss of the penis and a third burning at the stake. Across Europe, for rape, for the taking of the virginity of a daughter of a peer, and, in some parts, for adultery with another man’s wife, the penis and the testicles were forfeit – as in China, Japan and India (where a man who seduced the wife of his guru was made to sit on a hot plate and then chop off his penis himself). European revenge narratives cite many instances, the most famous that of the French philosopher Pierre Abelard who fell in love with his pupil Heloise. After she became pregnant, her uncle and a gang of kinsmen tracked him down and, he later wrote, hacked off ‘those parts of my body by which I committed what they complained about’.3 Clerics and monks guilty of sexual transgressions were often separated from those selfsame parts. A lay brother who impregnated a teenage nun of the Gilbertine order at Watton in Yorkshire was lured by her fellow sisters to their monastery, where she was forced to castrate him before returning to her cell.
Abuse and betrayal have undeniably always driven some women to castrate men, needing no coercion to wield the knife. But such handiwork became a worldwide phenomenon from the early 1990s after John Wayne Bobbitt, a small-town former US Marine, had his penis cut off by his wife Lorena. Across America, and from China to Peru, copycat cases began to
occur, with Thailand becoming the epicentre: by the end of the millennium, over a hundred cases had been reported to Thai police, who admitted there were probably many more but the victims preferred to keep their loss to themselves. Penises, and testicles, can of course be reattached and even returned to normal functioning – if, that is, they can be found. Bobbitt was lucky: his wife had thrown his penis over a hedge and it was recovered. A man in Alaska was equally lucky: his partner had flushed his down the toilet but it turned up at the local waterworks. In thirty-one of the above Thai cases Bangkok Hospital was able to give another meaning to ‘friends reunited’. Other severed penises, however, had gone for ever – women had fed them to their ducks or chickens or put them in a blender or down the waste disposal. One man in India had to wave goodbye to his penis after his wife attached it to a helium balloon.
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 reasons4 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 centu
ry 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.
