They have been boiled, fed to ducks, even attached to balloons and cast into the night sky -- when it comes to permanently depriving a cheating lover of a recently severed penis, the imagination of the wronged Thai woman knows few bounds.
Thailand has become the world center of penis reattachment surgery, but then it has been forced to be. While not unique to the kingdom, penis severing has been honed in the kingdom to its most devastating effect through a heady mixture of routine infidelity, assertive womanhood and a national cuisine that lends itself to a kitchen full of sharp knives.
The men are now fearful of a rash of Thailand's most notorious crime of passion, according to the surgeon who has stitched back many a male member for grateful patients.
Sitting in his office at Bangkok's Paolo Memorial Hospital, surgeon Surasak Muangsombot recalled how he re-attached his first phallus in 1978 and soon discovered that penis hacking was a peculiarly Thai form of sexual violence.
Since then Sweden has had three cases, the US two and one in Australia.
In the same period, Surasak's team alone has operated on 33 cases and many more have been reported around Thailand.
"Some years there are three or five and then it goes quiet. It goes in and out of fashion but sometimes its like an epidemic," he said, mimicking with his nimble surgeon's hands the swoop of a blade on an unsuspecting member.
Doctors and psychologists blame the shocking attacks on a cultural mix of Thailand's tradition of polygamy, which was banned about 100 years ago but still persists, and the fact that the phallus is revered as a symbol of power and fertility.
The phenomenon has become so widespread that doctors have had to keep up with increasingly inventive and angry wives and lovers who want to prevent the offending item from being reattached.
"They boil them, feed them to ducks, flush them down the toilet, bury them and have even tied them to balloons and let them float away," Surasak said.
He said his hardest case required bribing an angry wife to confess its location in a septic tank and the hiring of a wrecking crew to retrieve it.
"I asked the nurse to clean it up well and warned the patient that he may get septicemia and he said, `do your best and if it gets septicemia I will die with my penis.'"
"It was 15 hours between it being chopped off and reattached, which is much longer than the books say it can be done, but I went ahead and to my surprise everything went fine," he said.
The latest case was reported on Tuesday when a 29-year-old northeastern farmer was admitted to hospital for surgery with a severed penis, claiming that his wife kicked him.
The couple had fought, she then denied his requests for sex and kicked him when he complained, according to his account to doctors. Such were the length of her toe nails, she severed his penis.
Thai psychologist and media commentator Dr. Wallop Piyamanotham said the practice stemmed primarily from the outlawed, but flourishing, habit of keeping secret wives.
"Before a man could have many wives but later we followed the Western law of one man one wife, but men still act the same and have many wives so the only revenge open to the wife is to cut off his penis," Wallop said.
"Very few of these men have sex with their main wife and this leaves her feeling sexually unimportant and the only joy they have is getting him to come home and spend more time with his family," Wallop said.
The phallus also plays a special role in Thailand as a symbol of personal vigor and prosperity, and carved wooden and stone phalluses are found everywhere from shop fronts to ship prows.
Wallop said this special symbolism also made it a prime target for a vengeful partner.
"It's not just about being practical and getting his mind off sex, it is like a symbol of potency so they cut off his power," Wallop said.
In another reported case this year, a bloodied Preecha Nasomyon, 31, was found by neighbors after he had an argument with his wife over an extramarital affair.
The fight ended with Preecha's privates being nearly completely severed by a large kitchen knife.
The distraught man refused to press charges against his wife and had his penis successfully re-attached by experienced surgeons.
Surasak said despite the damage done to patients such as Preecha, the recovery rate is surprisingly high.
"The operation success rate is 100 percent but I think only about 50 percent can again experience normal reliable function again," he said.
"The wife of one recovered patient complained her guy made love to her four to seven times an night and was waking her up at all hours because it only lasted two to three minutes," said Surasak with a resigned shrug, adding "we do our best."
He warned men who insist on being unfaithful to follow a few golden rules.
"If you have a mistress they [wives] will get mad and cut it any time, so make her very happy, always carry a thermos to put it in and keep the name of a good doctor close by," he said.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS