Three Letters, Part 1

Some interesting correspondance.

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                           Three Letters, Part 
1                                                                   
              
The following are three letters which I recieved from a 
correspondent friend back in the mid 70's.  Even though they are 
nearly a quarter of a century old, I still find them quite exciting 
and provocative reading and I think you will too.  All comments and 
feedback are welcome.

Letter #1                 The Castration Complex

From the time I was first able to ejeculate while masturbating, 
around the age of twelve, I have had an intensly strong interest in 
every aspect of male genital modification, mutilation and removal, 
and over the years it has not deminished nor varied to any great 
extent.  If anything, it has only grown stronger and more deeply 
rooted with the passing of time.

It was in the spring of 1955, during 'Spring Break', just shortly 
after I turned sixteen, that I went up to a San Francisco YMCA room 
with a guy who proceeded to show me a collection of around one 
hundred photos depicting atrocities committed by the Japanese on 
American soldiers.  The collection had been acquired by this young 
sailor purely by accident one day, he told me, while out on patrol 
and rather than turn them in like he was supposed to, he had kept 
them hidden away in his personal effects.  Nearly a dozen years had 
passed since he first acquired them.  He was enroute to a new 
station back east and had stopped over for a few days in San 
Francisco.  He was 32 years old when I met him but looked much 
younger.

The photos, crude and probably hasty battlefield shots, were all of 
Japanese soldiers in the act of sexually mutilating and 
emasculating captives.  Needless to say, the photos were intensly 
fascinating to me. I got so interested in them that I spent several 
hours there looking at them and also came back the next day to look 
at them again.  While looking at them I quite willingly allowed the 
sailor to masturbate and fellate me.  Those photos, aside from 
feeding my lifelong fantasy about genital mutilation and removal, 
revealed to me the truth of what I had heard about the Oriental 
fixation with the penis.  I sure wish I could have made copies of 
all those photos but sadly there was no such thing as copy machines 
available back then.

Later, while traveling around the world in the service, I had at my 
disposal numerous historical documents and reports and I spent a 
lot of spare time delving into the history of gential mutilation 
and removal and phallic worship throughout the Far and Middle East 
and Africa.  One of my first realizations was of the prevalence of 
phallicide, the collecting of enemy soldiers penises as amulets of 
power, etc., and of circumcision and its multitude of forms and 
accompanying rituals.  I spent a few months living in those parts 
of the world, while in the service, making friends in both the Arab 
and Black African worlds and I personally became involved with a 
number of situations that proved phallicide to be very much alive 
at that time.

During the '70's Arab-Israli' conflict, a number of Morroccan 
soldiers returning home from Syria were found to have a number of 
dried penises in their duffel bags.  During the 'Belgian-Congo' 
conflict in the '60's, the only evidence concerning the 
disappearance of a lost U.N. Swedish Army Scout team of ten men was 
one severed, white, uncircumcised penis, found on the jungle trail 
near where the team disappeared, probably dropped by a warrior 
returning to his village with 'Proof' of his conquest.  Recently, 
the engineers building the highway through the Amazon jungle have 
been warned to be careful else they fall prey to certain tribes of 
Indians in that area who cannibalize the penis of live prisoners in 
the belief that it possesses the fertility power of its owner.

Felix Byrk, the German anthropoligist who wrote, 'Circumcision In 
Man And Woman' in 1930, states, "The following passage from the 
Book of Samuel in the Bible, is of interest in so far as it attests 
to mutilation of the bodies of the fallen enemies among the 
Isralites: "And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king 
desireth not any dowry but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, 
to be avenged of the kings enemies." (1 Samuel 18:25)  "Wherefore 
David and his men rose and went and slew of the Philistines two 
hundred men; and David brought their foreskins and gave them in 
full tale to the king, that he might become the kings son-in-law.  
And Saul gave him Michal, his daughter, to wife." (1 Samuel 18:27)  
It is only logical that the entire penis is meant by foreskin since 
it is unimaginable that David would have busied himself with 
posthumus circumcision of his fallen enemies."

That phallectomy was performed on enemies at an even earlier date, 
and during a presumably greater civilization was discovered 
recently at the opening of the tomb of Osymandrios in Egypt.  In it 
were found a number of large vases, each filled with mumified, 
severed, uncircumcised penises and testicles.  On the walls were 
also murals of captured enemy soldiers being emasculated.

Victorian English literature abounds with accounts of phallicism in 
the reports and journals of the many Nineteenth century British 
explorers and adventurers, and of the erotic experiences of the 
British military during their involvement with the Arab wars.  One 
sultan, after his army had captured three thousand British troops, 
had all three thousand sets of genitals sliced off and stacked in a 
pile in front of his tent. On another occasion, a large group of 
Scottish troops were captured by the Arabs, staked out naked on the 
desert, and their genitals slowly sliced off by an old Arab Shiek 
with a ceremonial dirk.

The Arabs have always taken great religious zeal in circumcising 
their Christian captives....from the time of the Crusades until the 
Algerian war.  Lawrence of Arabia allowed himself to be circumcised 
as part of his masquerade when he entered the forbidden city of 
Mecca, and later was threatened with castration.  Earnest Grandier, 
a British cavelryman, was taken captive during the Zulu war and was 
taken to a Zulu village where he was staked naked for several days 
while all the men in the village merely sat around and stared at 
him....probably the first naked white man they had ever seen.  He 
escaped after being threatened to be cut up, 'bit by bit'.

A contemporary San Franciscan had an experience very similar to 
that of Grandier, while he was a POW during the Korean war.  He was 
takento a very small North Korean village and was the only American 
prisoner there.  At night, he was taken to a village clubhouse 
naked where several of the village men congregated and merely 
stared at him.  They too had probably never seen a naked white man, 
and in their case, had never seen a man with such a large penis, 
nearly eight inches compared to their diminutive five to six inches 
average.  He was taken to the same room night after night and more 
and more of the village men would attend the viewing.  The American 
finally escaped before, as he put it, 'they wanted to do more than 
just look at him'.

The huge amount of related material coming out of the Twentieth 
Century wars will not be mentioned in these notes except to remind 
that the Nazis shipped hundreds of 'Special' teenage Greek boys to 
Dachau for castration 'experriments', and to remind, as many an 
American veteran has witnessed, that the age old phenomena of 
castrating battlefield corpses and sticking the removed penis into 
the mouth of the victim, still persists.

Why dwell on this gruesome subject?  Possibly because the time has 
come for Humanity, and for each of us, to face it.  It is now, and 
always has been a fact of life....at least since man has 
become 'civilized'.  The great psychoanalyst, Dr. Ernst Jones, 
concluded in his work, 'Essays In Applied Psychoanalysis'....'The 
patriarchal system, as we know it, betokens acknowledging the 
supremacy of the father and yet the ability to accept this even 
with affection, without having to have recourse to a system either 
of mother-rights or of complicated taboos.  It means the taming of 
man, the gradual assimilation of the Odepus Complex'.  At last man 
could face his real father and live with him.  Well might Freud say 
that the recognition of the father's place in the family signified 
the most important progress in cultural development.  So far as we 
can tell, the way in which this has been - at least partly - 
accomplishedhas been the replacement of Hate by SUBLIMINATED 
HOMOSEXUALITY, of Murder thoughts by CASTRATION THOUGHTS.  The 
necessary price paid has been the deminished sexual potency of 
civilized man, with all the complicated consequences of this'.

Amnesty International, the society formed to protect political 
prisoners throughout the world, early in '75, issued the urgent 
message that 'THERE IS AN EPIDEMIC OF TORTURE ALL OVER THE WORLD'.  
And, again, the genitals are the favorite target. (castration 
thoughts?)  In a USLA Reporter, issued in '74, to expose torture in 
Latin America, a list of tortures used in Chili were published, and 
the very first one listed was - 'Removal of the Testicles and/or 
Penis'.  The fifth one listed was - 'Electric Shock on different 
parts of the body, particularly the genitals'.  In another USLA 
Reporter issued in '75, the testimony of a victim of Brazilian 
torture was published and the following are excerpts of that 
testimony...."his penis was tied to prevent urination; and the 
defendant was left in that condition for three days.  One day he 
was brought into the interrogation room, a cord was tied around the 
defendant's testicles and he was dragged around the room and then 
hung from a ceiling hook by the cord tied around his testicles.  
Later the defendant's penis and testicles were placed on a wooden 
table top and over fifty stabs were made through his penis and 
testicles with a needle-thin awl, the type used for cloth...."!

Enough said.

How does castration relate to such an everyday occurance as 
circumcision?  How can I relate 'Castration Thoughts' to the 
circumcision we know in our own society?  Putting aside the 
religious circumcision of the Jews, Moslems, etc., let's explore 
where the practice of routine medical circumcision among the 
English speaking nations began...and why.  These nations are the 
only Christian nations ever to have known widespread circumcision.  
It is usually deemed necessary for 'hygienic' reasons.  But are we 
any more 'hygienically' advanced than say, the Scandanavians or the 
Germans?  It has become an 'American' fashion, but doesn't our 
aesthetic prototype of the male still come from the Classical Greek 
athlete ... who wouldn't be caught dead with his glans showing?  
Could it be moralism? Thomas S. Saasz, M.D., in his book, "The 
Manufacture of Madness" (1970) relates that Anglo-Saxon 
circumcision started in England late in the nineteenth century as a 
result of a published paper in 1891 by James Hutchinson, president 
of the Royal College of Surgeons, called, "On Circumcision as a 
Preventative of Masturbation".  He quotes Dr. Hutchinson as not 
only advocating circumcision for ..'this shameful habit', but 
proposed that ...'if public opinion permitted their 
adoption...measures more radical than circumcision would...be a 
true kindness.  "Castration thoughts"?  Alex Comfort notes the 
popularity of drastic surgical treatments of masturbation in the 
period between 1850 and 1900, and had this to say about 
them..."over this period there was a truly remarkable upsurge of 
what can be termed comic-book sadism.  The advocacy of these 
bizarre therapies was not confined to eccentrics.  By about 1880, 
the individual who might wish, for unconscious reqsons, to attempt 
control of masturbation would tie, chain, or infibulate sexually 
active adolescents...to adorn them with grotesque appliances, 
encase them in plaster or paris, leather or rubber, to fasten or 
even castrate them... Masturbation insanity was now real enough--it 
was affecting the medical profession."

Circumcision was officially recommended in England until 1941.  The 
incident of it was at its greatest in the generations of Englishmen 
born during the first three decades of this century.  Today, one 
seldom observes a young Englishman with a circumcised cock!  In 
America, it reached its greatest extent during and just after the 
Second World War, and only now is being questioned, and sometimes 
discouraged, as a matter of routine.  However, even though 
the 'Great Victorian Hysteria' over masturbation is over, many U.S. 
doctors still pressure for circumcision...as most uncut Americans 
can testify.  In one case, an American Serviceman, presented with a 
release for a necessary tonsilectomy just happened to notice that 
the release included circumcision.  He refused to sign the release 
and was threatened with charges of insubordination.  In another 
case, a teenager went to the hospital to have his appendix removed, 
and came home with his foreskin removed also.  Castration thoughts?

The origin of religious circumcision has been debated by 
historians, anthropoligists, psychologists and theologians for two 
thousand years. It is easily argued that the origins were not 
hygiene because most of the primative groups who practiced such 
ritual do not have the slightest concern or knowledge of 
hygienics.  For the same reason it is argued that the origins are 
not anti-masturbation because many of these same people openly 
masturbate their young sons in the belief that it will enlarge 
their penises.  That it comes from earlier Phallic worship and is a 
substitute for the sacrifice of the entire phallus is most often an 
accepted theory.  That it comes from homo-erotic urges is a more 
controversial theory, widely held today, and has remarkable 
evidence in the circumcision procedures of one of the oldest 
cultural groups on earth...the Australian Aborigine.  Quoting Felix 
Byrk...."A very remarkable, almost entirely incomprehensible 
mutilation of the masculine organ is performed among the Australian 
Aborigines.  It is known in anthropological literature as 
the 'Mika' operation and consists in a splitting open of the 
urinary tube for a more or less long distance to the orificium 
urethrae (kntrocisio, subincisio).  Von Gennep says it is not any 
more bargarous, nor any more symbilical, than wide-spread 
circumcision (Karsch, p.73).  Milne Robertson thinks it may be 
derived from primitive vulnerary art in occasional cases of 
inflammation of the urethra. (Karsch, p. 273).  A natural case of 
hypospadias could have served as a model.  According to Karsch (p. 
74) the natives give the following explanation: "Without the Mika 
operation, people are no better than dogs or other lower beings". --
-Klaatsch was the first to succeed in proving that subincision 
served homo-erotic pruposes.  According to him, the men of the 
tribe of Niol-Niol (-called Wamba-) enter into a fervent, almost 
matrimonial relationship with the not yet subincised youths and 
boys (-called Walebel).  The Wamba, for the purpose of sexual 
satisfaction, extend the slit in their urethra so that it remains 
open back to the scrotum.
Now the Welebel (youth) places his penis in the subincised penis 
and through constant friction succeeds in effecting an ejeculation 
of semen on the part of both.  From this informatoion it can be 
seen why the subincised men of the Pitta-Pitta tribe are (according 
to Roth) called 'Meko-maro' (vulva-possessors).  The English have 
coined the nickname 'Whistlecock' for the Australians who possess 
such an artificial hypospadias". (Karsch, p. 9). Castration 
thoughts?

Most males on earth are uncircumcised.  However, there is plenty of 
evidence that they too, experience the foreskin-castration complex--
especially in the way they treat their prisoners.  The Japanese 
have a definite foreskin complex and never appear in public (public 
baths) without their foreskin retracted and their glans in full 
view.  They go to great trouble to tie, or train, their foreskins 
behind the corona.  (I saw evidence of the Japanese foreskin 
complex in some of those atrocity photos).  The Eskimos, on the 
other hand, also practice family and public nudity, but tie strings 
around the tips of their foreskins to assure that their glans are 
not seen (as did the Classical Greeks).  The American Indians, 
mostly uncircumcised, not only scalped many a hapless American 
pioneer but also completely skinned the penis from the base upward 
if they did not cut it off altogether.  Many primitive tribes, 
while not circumcising at puberty rites, do other, even more 
bizarre things to their youths.  One South Pacific tribe cuts out 
the right testicle of all young men.  An Arabian tribe carries 
circumcision to the point of removing the entire penis skin along 
with the scrotum.  Another South Pacific tribe perforates the 
penises of an entire group of young initiates, runs a string 
through their penises and thus ties the group together.  I could go 
on for hours with anthropological material but will conclude this 
paragraph with the following observation....anyone involved with 
Sado-Masochistic activities knows how much an uncut male masochist 
enjoys being threatened with infibulation or circumcision.  

I have not explored in these notes what all the above information 
has to do with the sublimination of homosexuality.  I will only 
observe that the official interrogators, torturers and prison 
guards around the world certainly don't see themselves as being 
homosexual.  Yet, one of the most common observations by survivors 
of such treatment is that their tormentors enjoyed their work, and 
often did so with erections.  In the recent testamony of a Chilean 
statesman who survived torture after the recent coup, he stressed 
that his greatest pain was the humiliation he experienced when his 
interrogators displayed pleasure from 'teasing his penis'.  Another 
evidential remark was made by an American POW returning home from 
long internment in North VietNam.  He said, "There are sure a lot 
of queers in that society."  But the strangest observation of all 
to be made is that, as documented by the Nazis, 'many men go 
through torture with uncontrollable, embarrassing, rigid 
erections...even after hours of physical abuse'.

In the interest of brevity I have not gone into too great a detail 
on the above subject.  My main purpose in composing and sending 
these notes is to solicit your reaction and response.  Your 
fantasies are of special interest...since fantasies give insight 
into the hidden side of human nature and behavior.  Besides, 
fantasies can, and often do come true, sometime, someplace, to 
someone!!!

If you are curious about me...I have spent time in Africa and the 
middle and far East.  During this time I spent as much of it as 
possible working with slavers and became quite adept at the 
creation of eunuchs which are still very much in demand as slaves 
even though slavery has been officially outlawed since World War 
Two.  The Arabs are well known for their homo-erotic behavior 
towards foreign men, even friends.  This behavior is most often 
manifested in anal contact, but they are also fascinated with 
looking at and fondling a foreigners genitals.  On a number of 
occasions I have experienced the thrilling and somewhat 
embarrassing, age old Bedouin custom of desert greeting amongst 
caravans of mutual inspection of the genitals with the ever present 
fear that should one of them suddenly wield a knife to collect for 
himself a trophy, it would have been all over before I could have 
even reacted.

End Part 1