Large Fierce Mammal

“The Queen was in the Parlour” (1860, Valentine Cameron Prinsep). Eating bread and honey, perhaps while she wonders where her clitoris, labia, and nipples went.

We’ve all had that annoying relative who insisted in cornering us as children with threats of, “I’ll get your nose!”, ultimately tweaking it and displaying their own thumb protruding between index and middle fingers as proof they’d done it. To the people involved with tonight’s Dark Sentiment, this is even more annoying.

“No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa.”

So begins A Mind Dismembered — In search of the magical penis thieves. Written by Frank Bures and appearing in the June 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine. If ever an opening line was written that was guaranteed to draw in even the most reluctant reader, this has to be it.

Mr. Bures continues:

“One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural Psychiatric Review. In 1975, while posted in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria, Dr. Ilechukwu was sitting in his office when a policeman escorted in two men and asked for a medical assessment. One of the men had accused the other of making his penis disappear. This had caused a major disturbance in the street. As Ilechukwu tells it, the victim stared straight ahead during the examination, after which the doctor pronounced him normal. ‘Exclaiming,’ Ilechukwu wrote, ‘the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.'”

This account describes a typical case of magickal penis theft as it was occurring and being reported in Nigeria in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, except that the alleged perpetrator was actually brought in by police instead of being summarily lynched by a fearful mob after being pointed at in the street by someone crying, “He stole my penis !!!“

In truth, the word “theft” is misapplied here because the missing organ is often as not believed to have been retracted into the victim’s body by maliciously magickal means, and left alone will surely kill them. In women, the effects may result in vulva/labia, nipples/breasts reported as doing the same. Of interest is that the clitoris doesn’t seem to matter enough to be magickally assaulted, so I wrote it into tonight’s ditty because, I swear by the old Gods and the new, it matters to me.

Commonly called “koro” the condition is described as, “… a culture-specific syndrome delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that one’s genitalia are retracting and will disappear, despite the lack of any true longstanding changes to the genitals. And it’s not unique to Nigeria. In “The Diseases You Only Get if You Believe in Them — An exploration of syndromes that are unique to particular cultures, (The Atlantic, 22 April 2016), Julie Beck reports:

“You can’t get your genitals stolen in America.

“At least, not while they’re attached to your body. But people can in Nigeria, Benin, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In all of these places, there have been cases of koro (also called suo yang in some places), ‘a cultural syndrome where people feel like their genitals are being sucked into their body,’ says Frank Bures. ‘And there’s a fear of death. It’s often thought to be caused by some kind of curse, or spell, or spirit—something otherworldly.'”

That’s enough of the serious treatment. Now on to tonight’s ditty, intended for singing to the tune of Sing a Song of Sixpence, which you all should know.

A Song of Missing Genitals

By LFM

Sing a song of Koro,
Of penises that hide,
Of down and dirty witchcraft
No nation can abide.
You’re minding your own business,
But catch the evil eye,
Your penis spins from out to in
And pretty soon you’ll die!

OHHHH!

Sing a song of Koro,
It’s not just for the boys,
An equal opportunist
The girls can share its joys.
All labias retracted, a host of missing clits,
It’s hard to keep decorum
With your nipples in your tits!

HEY!