It was at age 11 when my divorced mother remarried and she explained that she wouldn't be getting pregnant because my new stepfather had already had a vasectomy, which she matter-of-factly explained as a being a simple operation that prevented sperm from being part of what he squirted out when they made love. She added that his balls were otherwise undisturbed. She consistently tried to be un-dramatically informative about sexual facts of life, neither pushing it prematurely or withholding it out of embarrassment or to keep us naïve. A year-older friend whom I told of my stepfather's vasectomy immediately assumed that his balls had been cut off and I had to explain it again.

We were city people. I learned of castration, although not by that name or even very explicitly, at summer camp at age 9, where riding horses bareback was among the activities. A teenage girl staffer explained mares, stallions, and geldings to us pre-pubertal kids. She said that a gelding was a stallion that "had its male sex organs removed" and was better behaved as a result. We boys already understood that our balls were special in some vague way and we kind of filled in for ourselves that what geldings had lost was their balls, and that it affected their behavior in ways the camp management preferred.

C van D (imported) wrote: Thu Oct 10, 2013 11:45 pm Some time ago "Country Life" magazine ran a story about a family holidaying on a farm. The daughter aged 9 or so went exploring and in one of the barns, watched two men turning boar-piglets into porkers - removing their testicles with two cuts of a razor.

Later she told her brother, aged six, all about it. The following conversation ensued:

Girl. I was watching them doing the pigs this afternoon. You should have heard them squealing!

Boy. What was being done to them?

Girl. Oh you know - that operationon their privates, that all boys have!

Grammar and punctuation can be so very important...

Mac and Riverwind seem to have had sheltered lives. I was raised in a country district where several of my schoolmates were farmers' sons. They were familiar with the practice of castrating animals and the various methods. Talk in the lunch-break one day got round to this, one boy asking "They prick an old horse's, don't they - and then they dry up" (Sounds familiar)

My mother's year of birth was 1903 at which date the Chinese and Ottoman empires - both of them eunuch cultures - were still on the go. My mother was quite open about the practice of castrating slave boys "so that they can't do the thing that starts a baby". She also got hold of the idea that French page-boys were castrated also.

Vasectomy wasn't invented then, so discussions about the difference didn't arise.

I learned about vasectomy around my late teens and early twenties and saw it only as one of the birth control methods. I knew about castration when I was much younger, before puberty and I never saw castration as a birth control method.

I think the REAL question is, how old were you when you learned the difference between PENECTOMY and castration?

My point being that a lot of adults today still don't know the difference. A lot of people -- A LOT! -- say "castration"

when they MEAN penectomy and get downright angry with you when you inform them that a male mammal who loses

his penis IS NOT getting castrated -- that he COULD get castrated and still wind up KEEPING his penis. They truly

TO THIS DAY just plain DO NOT KNOW the definition of the word. I guess some people don't know the definition of

"vasectomy" either but the thread-starter correctly intuited that most people, by a certain age, learn it. In the case

of PENectomy, however, PLENTY of adults have just plain never heard the word and therefore use "castration" when

they MEAN that.

I knew the difference as soon as I first heard the terms, because I was able to Google them and find the definitions within about 5 minutes. :p

C van D (imported) wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2013 12:16 am Mac and Riverwind seem to have had sheltered lives. I was raised in a country district where several of my schoolmates were farmers' sons. They were familiar with the practice of castrating animals and the various methods. Talk in the lunch-break one day got round to this, one boy asking "They prick an old horse's, don't they - and then they dry up" (Sounds familiar)

My mother's year of birth was 1903 at which date the Chinese and Ottoman empires - both of them eunuch cultures - were still on the go. My mother was quite open about the practice of castrating slave boys "so that they can't do the thing that starts a baby". She also got hold of the idea that French page-boys were castrated also.

Vasectomy wasn't invented then, so discussions about the difference didn't arise.

Vasectomies were performed in nineteenth century France as a way of male rejuvenation. No, of course, it didn't work, but the idea was that males would prolong their youth if the sperm wasn't leaking out. Hence the vasectomy. Who wouldn't know that vasectomy and castration are completely different operations performed for completely different purposes? If you know what the words mean, you know that they are different.

I first learned about castration back in middle school when I came across Nazi concentration camps and their castration experiments (QBVII book and movie came out about that time). I just knew it meant cutting the balls off a dude. Didn't learn about vasectomy until much later, maybe my early 20s, just as a form of birth control. It was even after that that I found out what exactly they did in a vasectomy vs. castration (cutting off the spermatic cords but leaving the blood supply to the testis). I come across guys now who are surprised that I can still shoot a load even though I'm castrated; I tell them I shoot the same load that a guy with a vasectomy does. They stupidly think that all the cum shoots out of the balls, when its just the sperms that are contributed to semen by the nutz. These guys don't even know their own anatomy.