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I know that this will sound weird but until I was about 13 I thought that "vasectomy" was just another way of saying "castration". I knew men had it done so they wouldn't have any more babies and I thought that they were having their balls cut off.

I had a friend who said his older brother was going to have a vasectomy and that really sort of weirded me out.

I was eight when I learned about castration. I was 12 when my cousin and uncle had vasectomies and my kcousin explained it to me. I had never heard of a vasectomy before that. Back in the 1960's men had to go to states where it was legal. My cousin and uncle used a hunting trip to get it done.

I was about five or six when other kids and I witnessed some men castrating piglets. They did it by placing the poor little pigs on a large stone and cutting their testicles with a large sharp knife. The pigs squealed loudly in pain. After the men where done with a number of pigs, they, playfully, turned to us kids and threatened to do the same with us. They even took one of my friends, placed him on the stone, and went ahead with other motions while the kid screamed. The men where just having fun with it.

About vasectomy I learned when I was in my early 20s.

I don't recall exactly when I've heard of vasectomy the first time, perhaps 18 y.o. but I was told this was to render men sterile and that had nothing to with castration. My mother has often threatened my brother and I to cut our penis but that never lead me to fantasize about penectomy.

Do you know if your friend developed a castration fantasy, like you, afterward?

-Antino- (imported) wrote: Wed Oct 09, 2013 1:36 am I was about five or six when other kids and I witnessed some men castrating piglets. They did it by placing the poor little pigs on a large stone and cutting their testicles with a large sharp knife. The pigs squealed loudly in pain. After the men where done with a number of pigs, they, playfully, turned to us kids and threatened to do the same with us. They even took one of my friends, placed him on the stone, and went ahead with other motions while the kid screamed. The men where just having fun with it.

About vasectomy I learned when I was in my early 20s.

I don't think I was more than 10 or so when I first heard of a Vasectomy. I think it was a storyline on one or more Sitcoms of the 1970's. I always knew what it was and that it wasn't a castration. I don't know when I first even heard of castration or ever gave it any though. Personally I came to the EA as an offshoot of TG Usenet groups and TG websites. I'd imagine I first read of castration in relation to MTF surgery, not as something on its own.

-Antino- (imported) wrote: Wed Oct 09, 2013 1:36 am I was about five or six when other kids and I witnessed some men castrating piglets. They did it by placing the poor little pigs on a large stone and cutting their testicles with a large sharp knife. The pigs squealed loudly in pain. After the men where done with a number of pigs, they, playfully, turned to us kids and threatened to do the same with us. They even took one of my friends, placed him on the stone, and went ahead with other motions while the kid screamed. The men where just having fun with it.

And it's not only vasectomy that gets confused. 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!

We, as children, never heard of any of those things when we were young. Things were much different then. I vagely remember hearing about George Jorgenson becomming Christine. However, the media coverage was not what it is today and the adults didn't talk about those things in front of the children. I was probably about 6 before I knew the difference between boys and girls genitals and in high school before knowing why.

I am with Mac on this one, it was never talked about, TV still had a problem with a man and woman holding each other or haven forbid kissing and even Ozzie and Harriet slept in twin beds and they were married.

So as an adult as for when ? who knows I don't remember or care.

River

Having not been provided with information from adults about sexual subjects I took matters into my own hands and went on to acquire as much information as I could from whatever sources I could find. --FLO--

My Dad grew up on a farm and spoke very matter-of-factly about farm life including castration of animals. He said they smeared lard on the site as a dressing. Animals like horses were castrated to make them more docile and manageable. Animals bred for food were castrated to make the meat more tender. I was probably about 8 or so if I remember right. As a matter of curiosity I remember asking him when I was about 18 how tough human meat would be if a guy like me wasn't castrated. I was in pretty good shape. He said the meat would be like an old bull, so tough you couldn't chew it. So I understood castration. I learned about vasectomy in the early 60s sometime when a family acquaintance got one. Just the thought of having one's scrotum cut open was just as scary for me at the time as castration. Then I had one myself in the mid 80s.

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 4:45 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: Wed Oct 16, 2013 5:16 pm 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.