Gary Taylor, an authority on the subject, would use the simple word "castrate." In our penis-obsessed modern times, the c-word has come to mean removing the penis, but Taylor's recent book, "Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood," focuses on the word's essential and original meaning -- the removal of a mammal's testicles. Taylor's book returns the essence of manhood to the scrotum, recalling a time when men bragged about how much their balls weighed, rather than about the length and width of their penis.

Taylor says castration was mankind's first attempt at bioengineering, and that the procedure has been perfected in modern times with the vasectomy. His book begins with a quote from a young woman shouting with joyful irony that her vasectomized boyfriend has been "fixed." Taylor himself is likewise "fixed." I discussed Taylor's "fixation" with him, and he even put his long-term lover on the phone to verify Taylor's personal eunuch power. Taylor then got back on the phone and explained how our willingness to castrate fellow mammals (such as our dogs) reveals that castration is both at the center of Western civilization and an issue we must deal with if humanity is going to advance spiritually.

In Salon's review of the book, Greg Villepique writes that Taylor won't "make anybody reach for the pruning shears." Don't be so sure. Taylor has invented what can only be called "eunuch chic." He may convince you that being ball-less is, in fact, the height of virility.

Castration really means having one's balls lopped off, right?

Definitely.

When you had your vasectomy, they didn't sever everything between your balls and the rest of you, did they?

No. Part of what I'm trying to get at in the book is that the motivation for castrating animals and human beings was contraceptive.

If human beings back then really wanted to be efficient, why didn't they just whack off the penis?

The subject would probably die. Very few people survived total genital amputation. They'd bleed to death or get infections. They did do this sometimes in the Muslim world [in medieval times]. Some of the eunuchs in Islamic harems had everything cut off and they had a sort of pipe inserted. But those eunuchs were much more expensive because most of the people they tried to [insert the pipe in] died. There were two methods of cutting off the testicles that I mention in the book -- one was excision and one was compression.

When you're talking about very small boys, pre-puberty, you can actually put a boy in a hot bath and then crush the testicles. They sort of dissolve into powder inside the scrotum. Or sometimes, instead of cutting off the testicles, they would wrap a light string around them to cut off the blood supply. The balls would just wither even though their remnants would still be there as blackened remains of the scrotum. All of these are very simple technologies; they don't endanger the rest of the body in the way that radical genital amputation of the kind Freud was talking about would.

There's this cliché that eunuchs who were created after puberty could still get erections and thus safely service the concubine. Where does this come from?

From two things probably. There was very little communication between the harem and the outside world. The eunuchs acted as the conduit to the outside world, so that there's actually little information about life with the concubines. This created all sorts of speculation, rumor and gossip. The second thing is that obviously it does not take an erect penis to pleasure a woman sexually. So it would certainly have been possible for eunuchs and concubines to engage in erotic activities that wouldn't have involved breaking the hymen or the risk of pregnancy or much that would have irritated the sultan in terms of the preservation of his rights to these women.

Would it have been more objectionable to the sultan to have lesbian activity?

There's speculation about lesbian activity in harems. Of course, one of the problems about lesbianism in the Western tradition is that nobody talks about it at all. There's even more silence than with male homosexual activity. How are we going to know about this in harems? The women weren't going to talk. Neither were the eunuchs. They were the only people who would have known. There is a story told about one of the sultans, who one day is said to have seen one of his geldings mounting a mare and been very upset about this in relation to the condition of the eunuchs in his harem.

Isn't it simplest to imagine eunuchs as nonsexual entities like castratos [fellows who lost their balls before puberty]?

I don't think that's true. The all-important distinction is when the castration occurs. Someone who castrates himself for religious reasons does it after puberty. Castration does not get rid of the sexual drive, get rid of erections or any amount of sexual activity.

But it could. I could cut my balls off and be impotent forever. And you could cut your balls off and still have an erection.

Being castrated as an adult has nothing to do with how horny you may be. There are factors that could lead a person to be impotent as an adult, and some of those factors are psychological. Even if they can't get an erection, there are people -- witness Viagra -- who feel very sexual but can't get it up. Whether you can get an erection has nothing to do with how horny you are or whether you are interested in sex.

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