After the operation, he and the “doctor” share a few laughs over a slice of pie. Laughter may be good for the soul, but it’s not good for a man’s surgically scythed scrotum, so the guy starts bleeding uncontrollably. Unable to stanch the flow, the “doctor” calls 911. The cops get there and send the 48-year-old patient to get patched up in a real hospital. Meanwhile, the “doctor,” a 29-year-old Taiwanese man who said he learned the procedure from his genuine doctor parents, tells police that he can’t imagine why the operation went awry–after all, he’s done fifty of ’em!
Sure enough, a pair of testicles–and not the 48-year-old’s–was found in a Tupperware container in the doctor’s refrigerator (a product endorsement that the company could have lived without). The “doctor” said the testicles belonged to an earlier customer, whose genital liberation had been performed in the back of a mini-van.
I can’t possibly be the only person thinking, “What the hell is going on in suburban Detroit?!”
The “doctor” hasn’t been charged with a crime because, apparently, it’s not illegal in the state of Michigan to remove the testicles of an adult who wishes to have his testicles removed (more on such people later). The local prosecutor’s office doesn’t even know whether the “doctor” can be cited for practicing medicine without a license.
“It’s been, as we say, ‘furthered for more investigation,’” Deb Carley of the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office told me. (More investigation? A pair of testicles were found in Tupperware. The only thing I’d need to investigate is why I have a sudden aversion to leftovers.)
The police inquiry did reveal that the Taiwanese “doctor” has overstayed his student visa by a full year. That information, cops told me, has been turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (which, no doubt, will soon be sending him his pilot’s license).
If you find yourself befuddled by this Testicles-in-a-Tupperware story, you may have a job awaiting you at the Oak Park Police Department.
“I don’t think anyone is aware that this kind of thing is going on,” said Lt. Bruce Smith, a spokesman for the suburban Detroit department. “But there are some people who are into this kind of … well, I don’t even know what you’d call it. They want their equipment off for some reason.”
The Oak Park investigation turned up dozens of chat rooms where men–including the “victim” in this case–discuss their desire to be castrated. My own investigation found that would-be castrati are using the Internet in ways never envisioned by the inventors of the World Wide Web.
Like Lt. Smith, I had a difficult time separating the certifiable nut cases from the nut cases who had legitimate reasons for wanting to no longer be legitimate men. And the Internet sites were no help. One Yahoo! chat group, Neuteredmenandwannabes, informed me that, “Some women and some men want their slaves without testicles.” Another claimed that “Castration isn’t birth control; it’s life control.” A third site claimed that the Bible supports testicular subtraction. Subsequently, I can’t read Matthew 19:12–“eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake”–without crossing my legs.
Later, though, I stumbled onto Eunuch.org (doesn’t it sound so much more credible than that IPO-seeking Eunuch.com?) and other web support groups where castrated men and those who wish to join their ranks can compare notes and fetishes. (Full disclosure? I tried to contact some of these men, but access to most of these Web sites are denied to the non-castrated. Despite my editor’s pressure, I decided that there’s a limit to how far I was willing to go on this story.)
But my journalistic curiosity–and my readers’ right to know–could not be satisfied by mere web-surfing, so I made a few calls and discovered quite quickly that there’s a lot of really weird stuff going on out there. The “Kevorkian of Castration” in Oak Park is just the beginning.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard the police say it’s ‘incomprehensible,’ because it’s not,” said Gary Taylor, a Shakespearean scholar at the University of Alabama who wrote “Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood,” a cutting social history of, well, cutting.
Taylor’s book reminds us that eunuchs often held great power throughout history. Poor Chinese peasants, for example, would castrate a son in hopes of landing him a well-paying job in the Forbidden City. And in the 16th century, young boys were castrated to ensure them work as angel-voiced singers. But that type of social climbing is ancient history, so I called Dr. Felix Spector. You don’t know Felix Spector? Well, obviously you’ve never shopped for a castration.
Felix Spector is to castration what Henry Ford was to the automobile. Recently retired, Spector had a long career of castrating men, men who would’ve otherwise been rudely turned away, labeled “insane” or “crazy,” or referred into lengthy, traumatic and, let’s face it, expensive psychological counseling. Spector’s patients don’t have time for that kind of rigmarole. They want their castration done yesterday.
Spector didn’t want to talk–he claimed that the reporters willfully misunderstand the castration issue (who, us?)–but I managed to keep him on the phone long enough to get him to explain that most of his patients were “people who have a strong libido that’s out of control and they feel that castration will take care of it.”
I asked Spector what he thought of the Detroit case and he was dismissive. “That guy sounds like a ‘cutter’,” said the man who once charged $2,000 for the operation. “He sounds like a non-professional who is doing it just to make money as opposed to helping people.”
Helping people do what? Control their libidos? Isn’t that what Cinemax is for? Apparently too many men in this country don’t have premium cable.
Dr. Michael Brownstein cuts off men’s testicles for a living–as part of sex-change operations. “People contact me all the time to be castrated, but I refuse,” he said. Brownstein only castrates men who have undergone rigorous, pre-sex-change counseling (to make sure they can mentally handle it), hormone treatment (to make sure they can physically handle it) and, of course, a credit check. “If it’s an issue of libido control, there are medical means. If you ask me, there’s something else going on here.”
Gee, really? Back in Oak Park, the cops don’t know what to think.
“We don’t even know what to call this guy,” Lt. Smith said of the castrati. “We can’t call him the ‘victim’ because he kept telling us that he wanted this done to him. Ugh. Can we stop talking about this now?”
