Castration and Rape
Ruth Macklin’s fine article fails to poignantly underscore the woefully misguided historical rationale for surgical penalty.
During the American era of slavery, castration was the ultimate (symbolic) emasculation of mythologically hypersexed black male slaves. Later at the turn of the 19th Century, when castration was generally prescribed as punishment among the underclass (those warehoused in penal institutions and on mental wards), the empirical data documents that castrated rapists and molesters used guns instead to assault since the issue has always been anger and aggression, not sex nor intimacy!
DAVID LYNN-HILL
Newport Beach
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