| Suk yeong ("koro") culture-bound syndrome | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jun 25 2011, 05:31:33 PM (296 Views) | |
| black man | Jun 25 2011, 05:31:33 PM Post #1 |
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The Right Hand
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In 1951 Yap Pow-Meng described "su yang" as a mainly Cantonese culture-bound syndrome called "koro" by the Malays. It was diagnosed in case of preoccupation with the idea of a man that his genitals keep on "shrinking" until the person dies. In case that you know neither HK action movies nor certain books on qin na: in China (or at least in Guangdong) there seem to be relatively many people who believe that a kick or strike to the male genitals can cause immediate death. Eunuchs might also be depicted as deathly pale in such movies. For his paper from 1964 Yap examined 19 suk yeong cases in HK. Yap indicates that these were (one way or the other) mental cases who believed that lack of sexual exercise would be unhealthy. Median age was 29, 7 having belonged to the age group from 21 to 30, 8 to the age group from 31 to 40. Apparently, they observed how they male organs shrank (due to factors which normally reduce blood flow, such as cold). Then they got their panic attacks. The author doesn't exclude the possibility of some additional "visual illusion" (p. 40) though. In this paper from 1964 Yap also remarked that suk yeong was found in the lower Yangzi valley as well. But it seems to be unknown in Beijing, Korea and Japan. See p. 37. Tseng Wen-Shing's "Clinician's Guide to Cultural Psychiatry" from 2003 mentions several local or regional suk yeong epidemics, including one in Thailand and one in eastern India. At least the Indian cases can be associated with different believes though (health threat due to semen loss, see p. 127). I.e., they shouldn't be considered to be suk yeong cases. The Thai epidemic appears to have developed among rural Thais without any direct influence of Chinese culture. Then again, it's more like the Indian epidemic having affected women with allegedly shrunk genitals, too (See Jilek and Jilek-Aall 1985, p. 207). A separate cultural cluster in this regard could include Sulawesi (according to Jilek and Jilek-Aall 1985) and, possibly, the southern Philippines (according to a "suspicion" of Yap's informants for his 1964 paper). Unlike suk yeong, the phenomenon (or phenomena) observed in Sulawesi is (are) not restricted to males. On the other hand, one could also speculate whether suk yeong and what was observed in the eastern Austronesians mentioned above can be traced back to one primordial "TK-Austronesian" or "Sino-Austronesian" phenomenon. |
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| Ebizur | Mar 27 2012, 02:25:51 AM Post #2 |
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This idea of "shrinking penis" is very exotic to me. I do not recall having heard anything like this in either the US or Japan even among students, whose gatherings might be expected to be a hotbed of strange, unsubstantiated rumors. Perhaps the closest is the idea of testicular atrophy due to habitual use of anabolic-androgenic steroids, but I think that that idea has some scientific support. In Japan, some males are concerned about the appearance of their penises because it is generally considered beautiful to have a penis whose glans protrudes from the prepuce at all times (even when flaccid): i.e. "too much shaft, not enough skin" = cool, "too much skin, not enough shaft" = uncool. This preference has never been connected to preoccupation with any hypothetical "shrinking of the penis," however.
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