New age eunuchs: motivation and rationale for voluntary castration.

Archives of Sexual Behavior,  October, 2004  by Richard J. Wassersug

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INTRODUCTION

Eunuchs are castrated men whose testicles are surgically removed or otherwise made nonfunctional by crushing or drug treatment. Next to tooth extraction and circumcision, castration has arguably been the most commonly practiced surgical ablation on the Asian continent since before Christ. It produced the hundreds of thousands of eunuchs that administrated much of the Byzantine world (Ringrose, 2003) and the Ottoman Empire in the west (Ayalon, 1999; Marmon, 1995) and the Chinese dynasties in the east (Tsai, 1996; see also Tougher, 2002).

Although Tsai (1996) considered castration the "worst form of human exploitation" and Taylor (2000) labeled it the ...