A TO Z OF SEXUAL HISTORY: PENIS PANIC

Imagine one day waking up and looking down and realizing your dick has shrunk. Just a little sure, but you can feel it recoiling, turning itself against you, ultimately with the intention of killing you. This is penis panic, and despite what you think you know about it, prepare to have your dick's mind blown all over again.
Of course, your dink isn't really disappearing. Penis panic is medically known as genital retraction syndrome – a pathological belief the genitals are shrinking, most common in South East Asia where it is called koro or shook yong. It can occur in any community that believes there is a real penis shrinking disease. Sufferers believe in it with such conviction that they see it happening, break out in sweats, have heart palpitations and tremors. Often, in the hysteria of desperation they tie a weight to the end of it or safety pin it to the inside of their thigh to keep it in place.

Sadly, through the wild attempts to prevent the imagined cock contraction sufferers maim themselves so violently that they often permanently damage the very thing they are trying to save--further validating the belief that the disease actually exists.

Koro strikes down whole communities, with epidemics of thousands of men flooding hospitals clasping their cock in horror. In southern coastal areas of China there have been more than five epidemics in the last fifty years. In 1984, one outbreak spread across 15 cities affecting 3,000 people, even some women who complained their breasts or labia were shrinking.

The first mention of koro comes in the 300BC text The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine. Some speculate it is to do with the belief that cum contains man's vital energy, his yang or chi, and masturbation or promiscuity drains it. Guilt also plays a factor in the hallucination that the penis is shrinking. Koro is often foretold by fortunetellers, and a stranger brings it into a community. In other places it's believed a fox spirit manifests itself as a woman and seduces men, possessing him and shrinking his cock. Neighbours and relatives who believe they witness the disease have tried to cure the infected by beating them with anti-evil gongs or feeding him yang-augmenting potions, like tiger dick or deer tails. Sometimes men are accused of having koro and subjected to painful penis saving treatments against their will.

Penis panic also kind of happens in Africa, in a nastier form – penis theft. In April 2008, in the Congo, 13 men were arrested for their own safety, after a group tried to lynch them for using witchcraft to steal their penises. The policeman at the scene said, "When you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it?'"

Alain Kalala, who works selling phone credit, testified, "It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny." Again in 2003 in Sudan the hospitals were flooded with hysterical dudes claiming their penises had disappeared after shaking hands with a mysterious West African known as Satan's Friend. There have been 32 reported cases of men murdered by mobs for penis purloining since 1997 throughout Africa – some lynched, others burned to death, and some hacked with machetes.

While there are few cases in the West – mainly individuals already suffering from other psychological problems – the Italian Compendium Maleficarum (an encyclopedia of witchcraft written in 1608) reports witches capable of casting spells that cause the "retraction, hiding or actual removal of the male genitals". So clearly the Europeans managed to lynch all the dick-thieving bastards before they stole our men's power. Come on Africa, if we can do it, so can you.

CAMERON KING