To prevent yourself from reproducing, to dedicate yourself to God, rather than being interested in a family that you would have to support. In the ancient Jewish sects, and in many early Christian interpretations of Christ's message, there is an expectation of the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God. Therefore you did not want to reproduce because the world was about to come to an end.

Hemingway said Jake Barnes' balls were intact in "The Sun Also Rises." So it was Jake's dick that was clipped?

Yeah.

So Jake can be considered as "Mr. 20th Century" in regard to how castration now means "dickless" as opposed to "without balls"?

Mr. 20th Century, exactly. Jake Barnes has all the sexual desires but he can't perform. That's what we regard as the great tragedy.

Wouldn't the history of castration have been more "Freudian" if it had been easy to cut off a man's penis without killing him?

All sort of histories might have been different if our physiology had been different. I resist the constructivist dogma in the academy at the moment that says, "Everything is decided socially. It's all language." My point is: No. Human bodies made it easier to do certain things than other things. It's a lot easier to cut a man's balls than his entire genital equipment. Also, it is incredibly difficult to cut out a woman's uterus or tie her tubes. Therefore you had to be at a much more advanced stage of technological evolution before you'd even think of making a woman sterile as opposed to making a man sterile. So it's no accident that human cultures learned to cut off men's testicles long before we were able to do other things.

There are modern examples of women cutting men's dicks off, like [Lorena] Bobbitt and pissed-off wives in Thailand --

Who tie their husbands' severed penises to balloons and let them float away.

But there is no history of women cutting men's balls off, is there?

There are a few examples. In the late Roman Empire the gelding of human males was said to have been invented by a queen who wanted to have lots of sex and not get pregnant. What this demonstrates is that even when men got the facts wrong they were aware that women might be attracted to males who wouldn't get them pregnant. There's a poem by [Roman satirical poet] Juvenal, which I quote, about a woman being serviced by a eunuch, and she wants the balls not to be cut off until the boy is basically post-puberty, until his balls weigh a pound apiece. The satirist was exaggerating, of course.

Hey! Mine weigh that much.

What can I say? If this book is a success, then men will go around talking about whose balls weigh more instead of whose dick is longer. There's an example from the Renaissance in Germany, where it was claimed that a woman cut off her husband's equipment because she was jealous that he was having so many affairs. The point in my book is that the focus from reproduction to sexuality begins to happen around the time of the Renaissance and gradually builds up until the early 20th century, when Freud completely reversed the previous assumptions about castration.

If castration was the first human attempt at bioengineering, what is its future?

I did an interview with a gay-oriented radio station out of Vancouver, British Columbia, and someone called in who had gone to a doctor to have himself castrated. He was calling to tell people that they shouldn't do this -- they should go into therapy instead. I made it clear that I wasn't advocating that men go get castrated. We no longer need to castrate ourselves for the biological reasons, but there is a sub-subculture of self-castration in the United States. I think it will become a personal body modification like piercing your nipples.

I feel like every day of my life I'm involved in castration culture because my dog still has his balls. There's a big dog myth that intact dogs are aggressive, but my dog is incredibly cooled out. It's castrated dogs that get enraged and attack him because of canine rage and jealousy.

Historically there was an enormous amount of bad blood between the two groups. The uncastrated didn't like the castrated, but you suspect the feelings were mutual.

Is there any historical example of friendship between a eunuch and an intact man?

Well, part of the difficulty is that if there was such a friendship, almost certainly people would have thought that it was sexual. Eunuchs were always accused of sexual perversions, but we don't know anything about these people's sexual practices. There were certainly very close friendships between emperors and their chief eunuchs.

Let's talk about your relationships. You've been the castration guy since the book came out.

Long before that actually.

What has it done for your social life?

What started happening long before the book came out was I would tell scholarly colleagues what I was working on and this would always produce lots of jokes. I suppose the result of this research on my social life is that I've become the center of a huge comedy network. I was on the Los Angeles comedy channel radio station doing a program called "Morning Sickness." And I'm talking to a pair of women on a comedy talk show in England. This has been fun. I can make jokes about this subject better than anyone else.

How about the woman you live with -- is she kidded about you?

She doesn't get kidded at all. The whole point is that it relieves her of the possibility of pregnancy. She's always loved the fact that I had a vasectomy.

No, no, no. I meant that you're the castration guy.

[Silence]

You're the expert on the history of castration.

Well, she's here -- you can ask her. Her name is Celia Daileader. She's a professor of English. [Taylor leaves the phone and Daileader picks it up.]

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