Marina Cantacuzino Body Language Some people can identify a defining moment in their childhood – an incident that brings an idea to mind which is then indelibly fixed in the psyche. For Gelding – an adopted alias for the American Internet guru to all wannabe eunuchs – that moment came when he was 12 years old and thrown against an older boy in a packed bus. “Do that again and I’ll crush ’em,” said the older boy, grabbing his genitals. The pain was as piercing as the pleasure. And so began a lifetime’s quest to be castrated. In the United Kingdom, self-motivated castration mainly exists only in the most extreme SM scene, while in the United States those aspiring to be castrated comprise a burgeoning tribe made up of gay and straight men. Men who want to be castrated fit no stereotype, have no common neuroses or childhood experience. Some are androgynous types who want to remain in a prepubescent, asexual phase, others are eroto-phobes who don’t like to feel driven by their libidos and want to become surgically tranquillised. Some want to be feminised, a few want to become nullified by having their penis removed along with their testicles. In Gelding’s experience a quarter of those who get castrated continue to regulate their libidos with testosterone, which allows them to have full sex. But what compulsion drives grown men to be castrated in the first place? According to Gelding, the desire to be castrated stems from puberty but does not develop into a fixation for at least 10 years.
This was certainly his experience. Now in his early 50s, he has been without his testicles for six years and is keen to point out that he has no desire to be feminised. Growing up in rural New York State, he knew he was gay from childhood, but it was only in his mid-20s that he discovered the gay SM scene and a world where castration was honoured rather than abhorred. One of his first boyfriends was a cutter – a man who worked in the netherworld of the gay SM scene, cutting off men’s testicles, consensually and safely. By 1991 Gelding’s testicles had become an unbearable affront to him. The idea of cutting aroused him sexually, but more than that, there was an aching need to be rid of something that had begun to take a stranglehold on his life. At first he tried to cut off the offending items himself by using rubber bands as a tourniquet and drenching his balls in ice water. But after an hour he ran out of adrenaline and went into clinical shock. Three years later he went to a cutter in California and got rid of them safely and efficiently. “I’ve never felt more myself, more complete or happy,” he says, unemotionally.
A self-confessed mother hen, Gelding has for four years been dispensing advice on his website to men who want, or think they want, to be castrated. In that time he’s had 5 000 enquiries from both gay and straight men. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Russell Reid, of Hillingdon hospital in west London, identifies castration fixation as “highly disturbed behaviour, in mainly gay men, whose self-hatred is directed towards their genitals”.
Reid’s experience of this tender topic is predominantly with transsexuals and with men who are hypersexed. “These men are led by their erect penises and some are driven to offend. Being castrated can be a huge release because they become pre-pubital, and sex is no longer an overwhelming preoccupation.”
He finds the origins of the fixation perplexing but speculates that it might be a case of the fear of castration turned on its head to become an uncontrollable craving. There are several doctors in the US who will surgically remove testicles, but seldom before getting their patients to sign a consent form saying it is for gender reassignment. However, the majority are amateur cutters, subject to prosecution for practising medicine without a licence, and desperately sought after on the Net by men in urgent need. Although these cutters offer a necessary service (reducing the instance of self-castration), for the most part they too find the act of cutting erotic. One cutter describes the “lovely crunching sound” a Burdizzo (a castration device) makes “like biting into fresh celery”. Burdizzos, elastators and other animal castration devices can all be purchased on the Net, which has become a sanctuary to these would-be eunuchs. There are numerous websites providing information, and chat lines link men from all over the world who share this compulsion. When Gelding was delivering himself into the hands of the cutter there were no such support services and perhaps that’s why it wasn’t until he was in his 40s that he finally did what he had always wanted to do. Since then, he says, he has found some kind of inner peace, but at a price. He would have preferred to have been one of those who rationalised their way out of it. He considers those who manage it to be the lucky ones. The others must join him among one of the most disenfranchised of groups. Men who are ridiculed, despised and misunderstood by a society which will never be able to make any sense of why they feel incomplete with their testicles and yet complete without them.