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An African occult
group reportedly
uses magic to make
victims' penises vanish.
Invasion of the Penis Snatchers
From the Files of Fortean Slips
by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com
(Disclaimer: This special PG-13 Fortean Slip is guaranteed to be delivered absolutely 100% free of cheap, hackneyed references to John and Lorena Bobbitt ... Except for this one.)
Good old Sigmund Freud, history's most revered pervert, theorized that the better part of a man's psychological makeup was predicated by a secret primal fear of having his genitals removed. While it's certainly a dreadworthy scenario, emasculation seems an unlikely candidate as the chief determining factor of a guy's destiny. You've got to wonder why Freud didn't focus on a more commonplace anxiety in men's lives, like fear of the Internal Revenue Service, or fear of getting too old to conceivably score with the Playmate of the Month. After all, male organs don't just disappear by themselves.
Right?
Unfortunately, the answer is not an unequivocal "no." There are disturbing reports from Africa about a sinister occult group, which has supposedly been been using magical powers to make their victims' private parts vanish. These evil bastards are locally known as the penis snatchers.
Said to be mostly Nigerian, they have struck in several towns along the Atlantic coast from Cameroon to Nigeria. Witnesses claim that the penis snatchers perpetrate their fiendish hex with no more physical contact than a handshake. One 18-year-old casualty indicated that he shook hands with a Nigerian, whom he thought was his friend, when "he felt an electric-like current run through him, and a feeling that his manhood had retreated into his stomach."
Yee-ouch. Outrage in these areas has swelled to such a magnitude that three accused penis snatchers have been lynched by furious mobs and hanged. A number of other reputed members of the member-swiping gang have been hospitalized with brutal injuries.
Incidentally, doctors examining the victims reported that every one of the allegedly snatched penises was in fact present and accounted for, entirely intact. Does that mean that this brand of genitalia thievery is a mercifully short-lived curse that's over before you even have to pee? Or could it be that these guys are afflicted with a phenomenally intense Freudian and Fortean conflict, and Mr. Happy's disappearing act was totally in their heads?
We bearers of the Y-chromosome can hopefully continue shaking strangers' hands with impunity, because there is a medically documented precedent for a type of psychosomatic Penis Snatcherism. I'm not joking. This disorder is indigenous to eastern Asia, known in Malaysia as koro ("turtle head") and in China as Shook Yang ("shrinking penis"). It is characterized by frightful delusions that the penis is retracting into the body, never to be seen again. The condition is thought to be triggered by a cultural fixation on the importance of male reproductive prowess, and may be exacerbated by feelings of guilt over impotence, masturbation or infidelity.
You know, this sounds like a perfect plot line for a porno movie ripoff called "The XXX-Files." Investigating paranormal sexual phenomena for the FBI, skeptical agent Sullky and free-believing agent Nailder encounter the most baffling case of their very smutty careers:
Nailder: "I'm telling you, Sullky, there's got to be some kind of black magic behind this. We've got reports coming out of Limbe, Tiko, Muea and Batoke -- it was only a matter of time before the penis snatchers struck on this continent."
Sullky: "Penis snatchers? Nailder, you've obviously never heard of Shook Yang, a psychogenic syndrome that reached epidemic proportions in Singapore in 1968. Men with Shook Yang are so stricken with the unfounded fear that their penises are vanishing into their abdominal cavities, they resort to clamping the organ with strings and pins, weighing it down with heavy hanging objects, or enlisting relatives to grab onto it so it won't slip away."
Nailder winces in dismay.
Sullky: "In fact, a common treatment for Shook Yang is for the man's wife to confine the organ to the safety of her mouth."
Nailder: "Hmmm... Uh, Sullky, I just remembered: I shook hands with one of those guys."
Sources:The Electronic Telegraph; "Extraordinary Disorders of Human Behavior," edited by Claude T. H. Friedmann and Robert A. Faguet, Plenum Press, 1982. Special thanks to Ruffin Prevost.
(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.
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