HUMOR
Witches Were Accused of Keeping Disembodied Penises as Pets
Backlash to ‘Barbie’ movie shows it’s still a concern
I’m a feminist and a witch enthusiast — but I was not prepared for the tidbit I recently learned while listening to BBC Radio 4’s podcast: Witch. A 15th-century witch-hunting guide accused women of stealing men’s penises and keeping them as pets.
This is not a joke.
Published in 1486, the Malleus Maleficarum (translated as “the Hammer of Witches”) was written by German Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer. In this guide for exposing and eradicating witchcraft, Kramer claimed that witches made men’s sex organs disappear — or, worse, collected disembodied penises in a nest and fed them oats.
“[Witches] can take away the male organ [by] concealing it with some glamour [… and what] shall we think about those witches who somehow take members in large numbers — twenty or thirty — and shut them up together in a birds’ nest or some box, where they move about like living members, eating oats or other feed?”
Here’s the kicker: No one liked this dude. Theologians laughed at him and the bishop kicked him out of town because everyone thought he was a pervy weirdo. Yet royal courts still revived this text during the Renaissance and used it to persecute and kill thousands of women.
Upon learning this information, I shared it in a group chat with six women
Here’s the conversation that ensued:
First and foremost, this proves that if women did keep penises as pets, we’d take damn good care of them (like we do everyone and everything else in our lives).
But it also made me wonder, how long this has been going on?
Has there ever been a time when femininity did not pose a threat to the male genitalia?
- For the last 5,000 years, dozens of cultures have feared the evil eye (a curse cast by a witch’s malevolent glare). Some cultures believe that it causes male impotence. Others think that you can defeat the evil eye by ejaculating on it.
- In the middle ages, there were illustrations of the “phallus tree” (a tree with literal penises growing out of it, which women picked like apples).
- In 1908, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of castration anxiety — a boy’s fear of losing his penis because he wants to sleep with his mom.
- In the mid-1900s, Jacques Lacan continued Freud’s work, distinguishing the phallus as a symbolic organ that’s “castrated” by the all-powerful mother.
- Over the past two decades, the rise of incels, or involuntary celibates, proves that men are still using the state of their penises (in this case, the state is “untouched”) to enact violence on women.
And now, men have been faced with what may be the largest threat to their manhood that has ever existed: the Barbie movie.
Backlash over the “Barbie” movie proves that men are still terrified of losing their manhood
To fully understand the earth-shattering impact this pink display of satire had on certain men, we turn to this generation’s Heinrich Kramer: conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro.
“This movie is a flaming piece of dog shit piled atop an entire dumpster on fire piled atop a landfill filled with dog shit,” said Shapiro in a YouTube video called “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie For 43 Minutes.”
As someone who watched all 43 minutes (often in slow motion to accurately record his ramblings, which made him sound a lot like the angry, plastered guy in your local bar), “destroys” is a stretch; “makes it abundantly clear that he is not the target demographic for and lacks the emotional intelligence to understand the irony and symbolism of” would be more apt, but alas, character limits.
Shapiro predicted that after one successful week at the box office, the Barbie movie would “fall off a cliff” and “the repeat business [would be] non-existent.” The movie grossed $1.446 billion, making it the highest-grossing film of the year and the 14th highest of all time. It continued to make millions months after its premiere.
Aside from the “beautiful costume design, which is there for the ladies,” — (small lady brain see pretty dress, go wow) — Shapiro calls it an “angry feminist claptrap that alienates men from women” and “undermines basic human values.”
According to Shapiro, the Barbie movie (rated PG-13) is serial-killer-level dangerous for young children:
“It has a heavily political message. It is explicitly designed to divide men from women. It has these messages directed at kids; it is supposed to be a kids’ movie [but it takes a] piece of children’s IP and wears its skin around like a mask like Hannibal Lector.”
Needless to say, out of 10 Barbies, Shapiro rates it “negative all the Barbies.”
Ben Shapiro is not the only man who is threatened by the “Barbie” movie
Take, for example, these reviews I screenshotted off Letterboxd.
Or these posts I got from Reddit.
And finally, this guy, who manages to bring my entire point full circle in a mere seven words:
How do we, as a society, heal from this?
It’s been roughly a year since the Barbie movie disrupted the very fabric of society with its pink, plastic set design and jokes about patriarchal horses.
By now, hundreds if not thousands of disembodied penises are roaming the land, detached from their pelvises which resemble the smooth blobs of the Ken dolls that caused this tragedy in the first place.
Women: It is up to us to collect them, nest them, and nourish them. They require oats and protein. Once winter sets in, we must knit them sweaters for warmth. If we do not, they will perish, and we will be unable to pass on the genes of superior men like Ben Shapiro.
It is, once again, our responsibility to restore and protect their manhood, lest we face the wrath of The Barbieus Moviecarum.
I’m in the process of publishing my memoir. Check it out at www.mariacassano.com/numb.
For more stories about women keeping penises as pets, follow Fourth Wave. Have you got a story or poem that focuses on women or other disempowered groups? Submit to the Wave!
