Koro: The Fear of Chinese Men that Their Penis Will Retract into Their Body and Cause Death

Koro is one of the strangest medical disorders that you will likely ever hear about. One of the strange components related to this subject is that it is almost exclusively experienced in China and the East Indies. Koro is considered a phobia and while it may not be as weird as phobias like automatonophobia, which is the fear of ventriloquist dummies or metrophobia, which is a fear of poetry, it is unquestionably odd. What is most odd about koro is the way that it manifests itself and is sometimes treated. Well, the way that it is sometimes treated may actually cause you to wonder if the whole thing wasn't made up. But more on that later.

Koro among men is the fear that their penis will disappear inside their body and ultimately cause death. The natural reaction to the fear that your penis will retract into your abdomen and result in demise is to make sure that the penis stays where it is supposed to be, right? And how does one go about that? Well, if you've got a case of koro, you take hold of the little guy and keep a firm grasp upon him to make sure he stays where he should. The problem, of course, is that holding onto the penis for an extended period of time is going to tire out most guys. Not all, mind you, but most. And here is where things really start to get strange.

Once a koro victim no longer has the strength to keep the penis outside, he will turn to family members or friends. These people take turns grabbing hold of the victim's penis and keeping it outward. One very common treatment, and the one that may cause you to ponder for just a second and think this whole thing is some kind of scam, is the performance of the wife to keep the penis happy enough to stay on the exterior. This performance involves, well, let's just say that it doesn't involve the wife being able to talk. If you get my drift.

But wait. A phobia with a treatment such as that just described can actually go fully around the bend and wind up on a train headed to a bizarre little town I like to call Bizarre Town. So common was koro at one time that the Chinese medical practitioners came up with a tool designed to help those victims not fortunate enough to have an agreeable wife. In order to keep the penis outside the body, the patient would be fitted with a device that worked to clasp the member in place and obstruct any inward movement.

If the clasp was not enough to cause the koro victim to get over their unwarranted fear, they would be treated with rhinoceros horn ground into a powder. The rhino is seen as a source of male potency by several cultures and the Chinese treatment of koro responds to this idea by introducing it to their own philosophy of the Yin and the Yang. The fear of your penis retracting into your body was seen as proof of excessive Yin in the male body. Rhino horn powder was therefore intended to rebalance this unbalanced of too much of the feminine Yin residing within the male.

In other words, all it took to protect the wang was a healthy dose of a little more Yang.