Again That Whiny Voice?

Again, that whiny voice. Its owner was Simon, an unattractive, rather pudding-faced twelve-year-old. Physically he was one of those “big” little boys, tall for his age, big-limbed. He was dressed, as usual, in a grimy white T-shirt several days from the wash, scuffed trainers with no socks, and in preference to jeans which he never wore, grubby white cotton PE shorts. These were too loose in the leg, showing that his privates had not kept pace with the rest of him – two little robin’s eggs in a small, loose pouch, and a tiny penis that might have served a 4-year-old to pee through, Not too unlike other boys of that age, you might think.

With a difference. Simon was going to be neutered.

He’d brought this entirely on himself. Like most boys of his age he was a dirty-minded kid. Not deterred by the diminutive size of his privates he had learned how to get an erection (“I just keep on pulling my willie till it goes stiff!”). In this he was encouraged by 15-year-old Sue, a little slut if ever there was one. She had persuaded Simon to rub his penis up and down between the cheeks of her bottom, while she crouched on all fours on the bathroom floor. And they had been discovered.

No big deal: Sue had kept her knickers on; Simon was to young to reach orgasm. But Jennifer (Sue’s mother and Simon’s guardian) had seen enough to convince herself that Simon was depraved. He wasn’t her child – in fact, no one had heard from, or even about, Simon’s parents for over a year.

I learned of Simon’s impending fate from Sue herself. I had a long-standing arrangement with Jennifer to help with the children’s homework. On this particular evening, Sue was alone in the house. “I’ve got some news for you” she confided. “Simon’s going to have that operation we don’t talk about”.

I knew at once what she meant. Sue’s New Forest pony, Mustang, had been purchased as a colt, and gelded soon afterwards. Sue had watched, fascinated, and afterwards told me all about it. “It’s so he won’t be so frisky and naughty” she’d said. “The vet brought instruments to cut off his balls, and now he’ll never be able to do the thing with a filly, however much he wants to”.

I looked across the room at Sue, who had knowledge beyond her years. She was eyeing me now, at the same time giving me a good view between her legs, where a skin-tight sheath of black nylon accentuated the curves of her sex. “You know all about that, don’t you, Uncle Carl?”

This was true. My job with an obscure branch of UNICEF had taken me all over the world, following reports of occurrences of castrating boys – most of which proved either to be permitted by local law or accidental. There were more accidents than you might think. Most recently I’d returned from Asuncion, Paraguay, where there were reports of a “football training academy” where something odd had been reported.

So I’d tracked this place down. Not a lot to see except a lot of youngsters chasing a football up and down a mud-patch. So I’d gone on to the changing rooms and at first, prepared to do a hasty retreat, hearing a lot of high pitched laughter and banter and believing I’d got into the girls’room. I hadn’t.

There were three boys in there, showering off. From their round bottoms and long slender legs they might have been mistaken for girls till they turned round. All three had tiny penises, drawn in as far as the glans. One had vestiges of a scrotum, the other two no trace. At some time they had been castrated, made sterile and impotent, never to know what it was to be fully male. Later, making my enquiries in due form, I learned their story.

José had been odd-job boy in an engineering workshop, turning out forgings. His chief occupation was to stand by the drop hammer with a pair of tongs, hooking the completed forging out of the way for a new blank to be put in position. Occasionally one of the blanks split, due to blemishes in the iron. José’s life had been changed when, a rare occurrence, a forging burst. The fragments sang viciously through the air; a fierce stab of pain between his legs made José look down to find a rent in his shorts, which were soaked with blood. The splinter had missed his cock whilst neatly removing his balls as if with a guillotine. Nothing could be done except to staunch the bleeding.

Rafael had been at a fiesta when some joker put a lighted firecracker in his shorts pocket. The explosion blew the boy’s scrotum to ribbons. As with José, all that could be done for him was to stop the bleeding and tidy him up. “Afterwards” he told me “my cock not go hard any more”.

Batista’s story was different. Alone of the three, his operation was no accident. He had left the streets of Asuncion to find work on a remote hacienda. This place however was no longer a ranch, but the haunt of paedophiles who paid large sums for sex with pretty, passive, emasculated young boys. Each night, before the first visitors arrived, all the boys had to submit to powerful soap-and-water enemas, to wash their bowels out.

Soon after arriving there, Batista was doped, and with only a local anaesthetic in the top of his thigh, submitted to a gelding operation, the attendant – he was a veterinary surgeon’s assistant – slitting the boy’s scrotum and cutting out the testicles with a small penknife. Once he was healed, Batista made his escape back to the city. Here he had lived for a time with a pretty young call-girl who found it amusing to have a boy-eunuch to wait on her, who never did anything as tiresome as get erections.

All the other kids out on the football pitch were in a similar way: none had a full set of genitals, but there was no evidence that any of them had been castrated after arrival. Some appeared to be the victims of accident. Others had clearly been gelded, but I found no fresh castration-scars. There was nothing for me here; they had a roof over their heads, they were fed, and apparently not badly treated.

I moved on to Central America, to a plantation area up near the Mexican border. Here, the coffee growers had for many years drawn on an abundant source of child labour, of both sexes. For many years, also, the sexual curiosity of these kids had led to a high incidence of pregnancy among the girls. Castrating the boys might have been an option but this was expensive if done under surgical conditions and dangerous if stockyard methods were employed. Then in the 90’s there came a breakthrough.

As a by-product of some quite different piece of research, scientists in the USA discovered that a lactic-acid derivative, if injected directly into a young boy’s balls, attacked the hormone-bearing tissue, so that in a relatively short time the organs withered away. At the same time the boy’s penis retracted and lost its function of becoming erect. The plantation-owners’ problem was solved, safely, cheaply and – for the boys – painlessly. Like young horses after being gelded, all their energies would go into their work, not squandered in producing sperm and testosterone.

I watched a party of these youngsters at work, barefooted, the girls in short cotton skirts and vests, the boys in cotton shorts. Doctor Emilio, the medical officer, called one of the boys over and made him take his shorts off for my inspection. This boy had arrived from a city orphanage two months earlier and had gone straight to work after a quick visit to the neutering clinic. Outwardly he was a tough-looking kid, with sturdy thighs – but then you saw the scrotum that was only a clump of puckered skin, and a minuscule penis, shrunk to a couple of centimetres. “The only problem” said Doctor Emilio “is that after neutering, their penises are so short, that they can’t get them out of the leg of their shorts to have a pee. They have to do it sitting down”.

I was fortunate enough to witness a new arrival being neutered. It was all very quick and efficient. The clinic nurse gave the boy a shot of novocaine at the top of his leg, and a few moments afterwards he was ready. Grasping one of the boy’s testicles between finger and thumb the nurse selected the right place to put in the hypodermic, then thrust the plunger home. She repeated this on the other side, then gave the kid a playful slap on his rump and told him to pull his shorts up. “There” she said with a smile. “He will do nothing with girls now. It will all go small – small – small! ”.

So simple! For so long, the problem of rendering a boy incapable of ever having sex with a girl had always ended with surgery of some kind. Occasionally this had been reproduced in art. The subject of Caravaggio’s “Love Victorious”, a cheeky-faced, chubby-bottomed urchin of about twelve, was the victim of his own good looks. Rescued off the street, he was the artist’s favourite model for Cupid and so on. But in “Love Victorious” he already has a sturdy penis and would soon lose his boyish prettiness.

So the artist took him to one of those places that specialised in keeping boys’ voices high, and sketched him during the operation. The boy’s feet are secured in an iron frame, and the barber-surgeon has applied a clamp to his genitals, which holds his penis out of the way and when tightened up, stretched the skin of the boy’s scrotum making it easier to cut out the testicles. The barber reaches for his castrating instruments, and in a small brazier there are irons heating, not only for cauterising the wound but for burning out the spermatic cords. Without this, boys were known to retain the ability to get erections even after castration. Burning out the cords guaranteed impotence.

Cecco, to give the boy his name, survived the crude surgery, but being gelded and made impotent inverted his sex drive. He became the artist’s passive sex partner and remained so for many years. Though he had lost his testicles and the use of his penis as a sex-organ, he still had his bottom, the object of desire for so many virile young men, and he made full use of it.

I had somehow drifted out of the present. Sue’s voice brought me back to earth. She had drawn one foot up on to the seat of the chair giving me a full view between her thighs, the flimsy material of her pants clearly showing the outline of her vagina-lips. If I stayed much longer I’d do something I was ashamed of, afterwards, I thought. Sue was speaking. “How’s it done on boys, Uncle Carl? They prick a boy’s balls, don’t they – they prick a boy’s balls and then they dry up and he can’t get a stiff willy”.

“Exactly right” I said. No reason why Sue shouldn’t know what was, by now, commonplace in many countries. All across the USA for a start, in state orphanages, pre-adolescent boys were being neutered as a routine. The best-looking boys were carefully watched for the best time to carry out the process – when they were beginning to show signs of sexual interest, more often than not by trying to masturbate. The psychological shock of suddenly losing the power to get erections was found to cause a personality change, making the boys more docile.

Adoptive parents with daughters of their own were more ready to take young boys into their families if they were incapable of sex with the girls. The girls, too, at the age of awakening sexual curiosity, were unlikely to have it aroused by a boy whose genitals had been so reduced.

In the Gulf States, where I’d worked for a time, there was a centuries-old tradition of castrating boys. Here, the release of the boy-neutering drug had been a godsend for the authorities. “Having his balls pricked” as Sue artlessly put it, was standard punishment for juvenile delinquents. Any youngster convicted of joyriding, breaking windows or whatever, would make a rapid journey from the magistrate’s court to the police clinic. There, while others held the boy down and removed his shorts, the police surgeon – often a female – would inject the drug into his testicles. Within a month these would have shrunk to a fraction of their natural size, and the boy’s penis retracted into his body.

It was an extremely effective punishment – the boy not only having to endure the shame of what had been done to him (neutered boys were ridiculed by their peer-group who were still intact) but also the lasting hallmarks of the boy-eunuch: the high voice, the peach-bloom complexion with none of the blotches and pimples of adolescence.

I remembered two youngsters particularly. One was a messenger boy attached to the reception desk of the city hospital. Not so very long before, he had been an uncontrollable tearaway, up to every kind of mischief. This boy was neutered, by injection into his testicles, when he was eleven years old and just beginning to get spoontaneous erections. A year on, he was clean, polite, hard-working and, so far as one could tell, contented. The only cloud on his horizon was that he would never put his penis up a girl’s vagina.

I also remembered Anthony, from the city orphanage. No one seemed to know exactly where he came from but his origins were apparently European. He was a nice looking kid, fair hair, brown eyes, age about thirteen. There was this family, very wealthy, with a teenage daughter. They wanted Anthony as a companion for her, but Sheikh Abdullah, her father, insisted that Anthony must be a eunuch.

So Anthony’s first stop, on leaving the orphanage for his new home, was a clinic, where he joined the queue of delinquents, waiting to have the boy-neutering drug pumped into their genitals. Anthony’s turn came. A few minutes later he was pulling his shorts up, his balls full of the enzyme that would wither them away. Realising what had been done to him, he howled his eyes out.

Sue listened to all this, round-eyed.

But to return to Simon. He was kicking stones round the patio, aimless as usual. “What’s it going to be like, Uncle Carl – when I go to have my balls pricked?”

“You’ll need to have a day off school” I began. “Then Jennifer will run you into the clinic, in town, and book you in. Then a nurse will give you something to drink, which will make you feel nice and relaxed, and you’ll be asked to take your shorts and pants down.

“Then you’ll get an injection right at the top of your leg and you’ll quickly feel all that part of you, round your privates, go cold. When the nurse is sure you are ready she’ll call the doctor and sit you in a chair, that holds your legs apart. The doctor will tell you to look up – to keep looking up – and while you are looking up he’ll give you the neutering drug, one on each side. And that’s all.

“Afterwards, over the next few weeks, your balls will start to dry up, until there’s only a fold of skin: you won’t be able to feel them. At the same time your willie will shrink up and will never go stiff, ever again. And in a few months’ time you’ll forget what it was like, to be a boy, to have funny feelings down there”.

“And that’s all?”

I nodded a reply.

“That’s alright then. No one would talk to me about it. Nobody cares”. His eyes filled with tears of self pity, and he wandered off.

A face appeared at the window: Sue. I went back upstairs to see what she wanted. This was soon obvious. “Talking about this has made me horny” she said. “I’m glad that little rat is going to get his balls pricked. Now, Uncle Carl, you are going to give me a nice time. Oh it’s quite alright, I popped my cherry a while ago and I’ve done it with quite a few boys.”

She loosened the zip of her hockey skirt, which fell to the floor, and her black knickers followed. She turned to face me, with opened thighs and knees slightly bent.