Will Small Genitals Reduce the Risk For Lethal Pain?

[Jhalemore (imported)]

Throughout most of history, it was preferred that people designated to be eunuchs were castrated before puberty. In my opinion, it seems like the pain would probably be weaker for the children than it would be for a mature man. Considering that nerve/pain overload has killed a lot of people in barbaric castration, do you think it would be smart to feminize yourself so that the genitals shrink and there is a lower chance of a mistake in surgery being lethal?

[ZeuterMe (imported)]

I suspect there's a study somewhere about that assumption of yours. Having said that, I find the premise dubious.

Hell, kids are awful at "walking it off". When was the last time you met an adult that needed someone to kiss it and make it better before they'd stop crying?

[colin (imported)]

I think that it has nothing to do with the size of the genitals, but rather with the development.

A baby does not usually have full nervous development in the legs until it is about 6 months old. Similarly a boy's testicles do not 'drop' until he is several years old. During that time it is quite probable that the ability to sense pain is reduced.

There is also the possibility that the psychological development affects the way that the pain is perceived and may shield them from the worst effects.

[ZeuterMe (imported)]

On the contrary, I suspect exactly the opposite effect. Consider the studies done on the harmful effects of circumcision - a certain, characteristic psychological harm is effected on infants circumcised without robust pain control. This is independent of physical harms, but I haven't found a study yet that can adequately attribute the social harms into categories of physical or psychological.

Consider, as a tangent, that the average circumcised African male is something like three times likelier to sleep around, and you'll suspect that Kellog's goal of decreasing sex's pleasure (so that people spent less time doing it, and only bumped uglies when they wanted babies) had some degree of success (but instead of giving up on it, men keep looking for satisfaction when they're not capable of it like their lizard brain says they should expect).

But in addition to that, I've read of clear, unambiguous psychic scars lingering for decades.* (I'll post studies if I can find them, and get the results without a journal subscription!) Ties to stress and reactionary behavior are what I remember.

What advantage castration in infants has over older patients is a big, fat bucket of unused stem cells. As it turns out, stem cells are key to healing in adults, but are more differentiated (and therefore less versatile), and fewer are left (since both old wounds and the routine wearing out of aged cells depleted the reserve). With robust pain control methods, and until regenerative medicine makes bandages work better, I see little practical reason to say that if we neuter puppies at six months, we shouldn't do humans at the same age.** You just need to be sure his balls have dropped, or you're going fishing. I'm not aware of any other critical developmental issues, other than the fact that at that age puppies can use a newspaper and babies are still using diapers. So long as the dressing was kept from steeping in pee (or worse), you should be good. The thing is, we don't make dogs sit through it with only their howls of agony to comfort them. I think we can treat our own species at least as well, right? :p

* (And diseases. Consider that a New York moehl was barred from his profession after giving over thirty babies syphylis - with no sexual side effects to give it away, only end-stage neurosyphylis and its associated madness would give away the disease. I wonder how many dead or retarded babies could have been happy and healthy now for want of aseptic practices? Castration, like circumcision, is actually kinda non-trivial, and you have a chance to really fuck up, especially if the patient isn't capable of complaining before complications compound.)

** (Under the assumption that they were destined for it, and my advice would be considered only as far as harm reduction goes - I'd advise waiting for informed consent, or recruiting older volunteers, or whatever alternate approach minimized coercion, but if we're talking about something like a heritable, genetic testicular cancer where such surgery is going to happen, the sooner the better.***)

*** (Consider circumcision fuckups - in the last century, the standard of care was when a male child's genitalia was destroyed by a botched surgery, to create a neo-vagina and raise them as girls. It didn't work out so well - some physical sex characteristics are in the form of brain anatomy, and they're laid down before birth in a cascade of neural pruning events. If you're going to perform a medically necessary castration, you can avoid many physical side effects like becoming as thoroughly dependent on testosterone for bone density and muscle tone by skipping puberty, but neonatal castration doesn't make someone either a girl, or sexless. "Still a boy, just a different kind of boy" sort of thing.)

Edit: Citations upon request, dinner now.