You’d think that someone would have solved this mystery immediately after the first severed member hit the mattress, but apparently the academic world is still trying suss out the social forces behind the mid-1970s epidemic of Thai women cutting off their husbands’ penises.
This latest attempt to make sense of the carnage comes to us courtesy of The Guardian, which has scoured the scholarly debate to bring us a sort of academic “best-of” list. And now, a “best-of” their “best-of”:
“It became fashionable in the decade after 1970 for the humiliated Thai wife to wait until her [philandering] husband fell asleep so that she could quickly sever his penis with a kitchen knife,” writes Kasian Bhanganada in 1983’s Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam.
Kasian’s paper details how he, along with several colleagues, was forced by the deluge of penis amputations to become a studied hand at “penile reimplantation.” So, for some “lucky” Thai cheaters, the damage proved only temporary.
Drs. Genoa Ferguson and Steven Brandes looked at the social implications of the penis severings in a 2008 paper entitled The Epidemic of Penile Amputation in Thailand in the 1970s. The doctors write that, “Women publicly encouraging and inciting other scorned women to commit this act worsened the epidemic.”
So basically, cutting off your husband’s Linus was the mid-‘70s Thai version of Bieber Fever. Can we all agree now that the ‘70s were the worst decade?
