Sitting on the stairway looking at the maidens fair.
The sultan entered the harem and he shouted through the halls,
What do you want for Christmas? And the eunuchs shouted, Balls! —old rhyme
In many ancient cultures when you won a battle and killed a man you cut off his dick as a trophy. There are friezes more than three thousand years old on the walls of the smaller temple across the way from Karnak, in Egypt, showing piles of enemy penises. Accompanying the penises are hands, which those enemies may have used to pleasure themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century, Peter C. Remondino wrote in his History of Circumcision, From the Earliest Times to the Present , “Among the modern Berbers it is still a practice for a young man, on proposing marriage, to exhibit to his prospective father-in-law the virile members of all the enemies he has overcome, as evidence of his manhood and right to the title of warrior.” In one Ethiopian culture, as recently as 1972, the penises of vanquished enemies were worn by the victor on a bracelet.
The cock and balls, everyone understood, was the seat of the enemy's manhood, and it was manhood that caused all the fighting.
There were even sects who practiced self-castration. The Skopsy, a Russian Christian group of the nineteenth century, cut off their own genitals to show the strength of their dedication to God.
In ancient Rome, novitiate priests of the goddess Cybele castrated themselves with swords to the accompaniment of music and chanting. In medieval Syria, young Christian men sliced off their own genitals during religious orgies, then ran through the streets with their organs in their hands until they selected a house to fling them into. As if it weren't enough having a bloody severed dick land on your doorstep, the people of the chosen house were then expected to take the new eunuch in and dress him as a woman.
Castration—either by simply removing the balls or by taking off the penis as well—was also practiced as an early form of bioengineering. Men without sex organs, it was found, were more governable and also had better powers of concentration. The blood couldn't rush to their dicks if they had no dicks, and even if they did have dicks, without their balls there was no testosterone to drive them crazy with lust. There were four ways of creating eunuchs: complete shaving of penis and testicles (these men had to use quills to urinate); removal of the balls alone; severing of the penis alone; crushing of the testicles (this had to be done when a boy was young). The operations were dangerous, particularly if the penis was removed, and many died from them.
Eunuchs were almost always people in subordinate positions—either conquered people taken as slaves, or boys who were surgically altered in order to serve their rulers. Being castrated in the latter case was a way up the social ladder—you traded your sexuality for a species of refinement. You became a not-man, an unthreatening man and therefore theoretically more useful.
A man whose balls were removed before puberty would not be likely to develop an adult penis. He would also retain his pure, strong, boyish soprano. Boys with singing talent were castrated in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Italy in the hope they would end up singing in the Papal Choir or the opera. Those who became opera stars were idolized—and besieged by admirers, male and female, who found their sexual strangeness mesmerizing. They also apparently had love affairs. At least they did in the movie Farinelli and in the Anne Rice novel Cry to Heaven. (In Farinelli the castrato even sort-of fathers a child, doing his own lovemaking, then calling in his brother to deposit the semen.
Anne Rice's castrati have sex with each other, with men who have balls and with women. Their penises are described as shorter than average, but thick.)
Eunuchs worked as civil servants for the Chinese emperors, and were appointed by Byzantine emperors as government ministers and even Church patriarchs. In most places where rulers had harems, eunuchs guarded the harems. Though eunuchs could not impregnate women, those who still had penises might well be capable of sexual arousal and prolonged lovemaking. A sultan might have hundreds of concubines. Unless she was a favorite, a woman in his employ had a chance of having sex with him maybe twice a year. And so some of them had passionate love affairs with eunuchs, the only other men they were allowed to see.
Chinese eunuchs, who were totally shaved, kept their privates preserved inside sealed jars, and when they died the jars were buried with them. They might also be required to show the contents of their jars—which they referred to as “the precious”—as qualifications for job promotion.
Eunuchs could get work with various absolute monarchs until the early twentieth century, when, with the death of the Chinese and Ottoman Empires, their market dried up.