Castration Quotes

Following his studies with Carrel, Voronoff worked in Egypt for the Egyptian king. Voronoff soon became fascinated with the eunuchs that were part of the king's harem. In particular, he noted that the castration they received seemed to increase the speed at which the eunuchs aged. This observation was the beginning of Voronoff's obsession with a surgical answer to aging. Likely inspired by the pioneering work of his mentor and the excitement of the new surgical techniques, Voronoff began to dabble in experimental transplantation. But he went beyond the techniques that his mentor had perfected. In early experiments Voronoff transplanted the testicles of a lamb into an old ram, claiming that the transplant served to thicken the ram's wool and increase its sex drive. These early studies foreshadowed the work that would follow. ~ Nathan Wolfe

I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular and definitive cutting-off which figures castration and is figured by the click of the shutter. ~ Christian Metz

Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. ~ Michel Foucault

For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind. ~ Antonin Artaud

But never fear, gentlemen; castration was really not the point of feminism, and we women are too busy eviscerating one another to take you on. ~ Anna Quindlen

Instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out? ~ Maria Dahvana Headley

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

What free-market economists are not telling us is that the politics they want to get rid of are none other than those of democracy itself. When they say we need to insulate economic policies from politics, they are in effect advocating the castration of democracy. ~ Ha-Joon Chang

Dehydration
Humiliation
Degradation
Mind castration
And the sky is black
And the one next to you
Keeps thinking that they're having a heart attack.
Desolation
On medication
Nurse nurse nurse
Can't sleep easy
Nurse nurse nurse
Are you fucking with me
ECT fucking did a thing on me
ECT did a job on me
ECT did a job on me
ECT did a job on me.
Pinned Down
Pinned Down. ~ Shane MacGowan

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty. ~ Novalis

I wasn't entirely sure how to reply. Blow me and Screw you both seemed like strong contenders, but the peanut gallery in my head appeared to be favoring castration. ~ Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I wonder why men get serious at all. They have this delicate, long thing hanging outside their bodies which goes up and down by its own will. If I were a man I would always be laughing at myself. ~ Yoko Ono

While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography. ~ Gay Talese

As masculine self-consciousness grows stronger, the stage of matriarchy is followed by that of division. Symptomatic of this transition period is the twin-brother motif in mythology, which expresses the mutual affinity of opposites. This division turns destructively against itself in self-mutilation and suicide. As we saw, in uroboric and matriarchal castration the will of the Great Mother was paramount. But the centroversion tendency which underlies the ego-hero's struggle for self-preservation and which first takes the form of anxiety, advances beyond the passive, narcissistic stage and turns into resistance, defiance, and aggression directed against the Great Mother, as illustrated mythologically in the story of Hippolytus. ~ Erich Neumann

I flinch. Maybe you have to be male to understanding that castration can't be reduced to finger-scissors and some onomatopoeia. ~ Mark Mills

The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistadorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern. ~ Germaine Greer

After a year and a half my therapist retired, so I was bounced to someone else-a woman.
Shazam! I suddenly felt I could open up and talk about the real stuff going on in my head. She lasted two session. I guess it was the castration fantasy that pushed over the edge. ~ Joan Nestle

In addition to working as hard as men, women and girls were susceptible to sexual exploitation in ways and at rates that did not apply to men (the subject of males as victims of sexual assault has received little scholarly attention, with the exception of lynching and its attendant castration ritual). Absentee owners had to rely on managers and overseers, both white and black, who viewed sexual access as their right. Many enslaved children resulted from these unions; the question of how these interactions should be understood is a matter of debate. The rewards of voluntary cooperation could have included ~ Michael A. Gomez

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite. ~ Theodor Adorno

Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration. ~ Naomi Wolf

None seemed irreverent enough to address the situation of being a baby, of caretaking a baby. Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? It astonishes and shames me to think that I spent years finding such questions not only comprehensible, but compelling. ~ Maggie Nelson

You can date every girl in town as far as I'm concerned. I hate you. I pray every night that you'll fall victim to some strange and unusual castration accident. ~ Kim Harrington

The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

This exile is a fascinating symbolic act from our modern psychoanalytic viewpoint, for we have held in earlier chapters that the greatest threat and greatest cause of anxiety for an American near the end of the twentieth century is not castration but ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one's group. Many a contemporary man castrates himself or permits himself to be castrated because of fear of being exiled if he doesn't. He renounces his power and conforms under the great threat and peril of ostracism.
- Rollo May, "The Tragedy of Truth About Oneself" (The Psycology of Existence: An Integrative, Clinical Perspective by Kirk Schneider and Rollo May), pp. 14-15 ~ Rollo May

Monastic incarceration is castration. ~ Victor Hugo

Shelly, what is this?"
"What?"
"This." She shook her fork.
"A Rocky Mountain oyster."
"Is it a shellfish?"
"No, it's a testicle."
"Oh, my God!" She dropped the fork as if it had suddenly zapped her. "Whose?"
Dylan burst out laughing. "Not mine."
"They came from the Rocking C. I bought 'em during castration season," Shelly told her.
"You bought them? Oh, my God!"
"Well," Shelly answered as if Hope were the crazy one, "they don't just give away free oysters, you know."
"No, I don't know. I'm from California. We eat real food. We don't eat cow ball. ~ Rachel Gibson

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man. ~ Thomas Jefferson

...[F]riendship is a method of castration that doesn't use a sharp object. ~ E. Lockhart

When Vishous pushed open the door to the exam room, he got a gander at the kind of seating arrangement that made him think fondly of castration. ~ J.R. Ward

Rumour has it you've turned castration into an occupation."
"You go cutting one guy's cock off and you never hear the end of it," Nyx said. ~ Kameron Hurley

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

It also occurred to him, like a well-aimed kick to the head, that the idea of watching Rose marry anyone was something he looked forward to about as much as he would castration.
Possibly less. ~ Kathryn Smith

She'd brought a few books along for the journey (I'd asked if they were for kindling, and she'd threatened castration), and she'd given me permission to look through them under further veiled threats about what would happen if I marred them in any way. ~ Rin Chupeco