Senseless, how will a man castrate himself knowing the pains involved.

Senseless, how will a man castrate himself knowing the pains involved.
Driven to extremes by the expectations loaded on them, some men turned to self-castration. Stories such as these show how self-castration made literal the feelings of emasculation which men suffered when they were unable to maintain control in their romantic relationships, whether from poverty, impotence, or because of a domineering partner.

Self-castration was particularly strongly associated with men’s fear of being cuckolded and of raising children who were not their own. One 18th-century surgeon told his readers of a gory case in which a man ‘on a suspicion of his wife’s incontinency, and thereby to discover the truth’ decided to geld himself in an upstairs chamber. He was discovered when the blood from the wound ran through the floor and was noticed by the residents of the room below, but luckily was ‘rescued from the most imminent danger’ by the surgeon’s timely arrival.

Stories like these were so notorious that they even inspired a comic ballad, titled The Quaker’s Wife’s Lamentation. In this popular song, a Quaker man castrates himself because he suspects his wife of infidelity, telling her

If thou had’st been true my Girl,
I ne’er had parted with Natures Pearl.

The song shows how a man’s self-castration could also be a punishment for his wife, who suffered shame from people knowing about her husband’s castrated status and her own potentially loose morals. When the Quaker tells his wife that ‘I am Lame, and thou must Hault [limp]’, she cries out:

Oh husband, husband, what have you done?
You’ve parted with Jewels were none of your’n,
But they were Jewels belonging to me,
For which I’d not take Gold nor Fee;
Them I delighted more to feel,
Than e’er I did my Spinning Wheel.

Though this ballad was meant for comic effect, it also reveals a surprising truth about the gender politics of 17th- and 18th-century Britain. Men were supposed to rule the household and women were meant to remain chaste, silent and obedient. In reality, however, women did not always act on this ideal and men found themselves struggling to live up to unattainable models of masculinity. Paternity was a particular source of anxiety. The period’s economic system relied on men passing on their wealth and titles to their children, but, in an era long before DNA testing or even accurate calculation of conception dates, men only had their wife’s word that the children they were rearing really were theirs.

Trapped between the demands of society and the pressures of messy real life relationships, self-injury offered men an attention-grabbing but dangerous way to express their feelings of discontent, anger and frustration. Acting the martyr, or merely ‘disappointed in love’, men who turned the knife on themselves reveal much about the time in which they did so.