Castration 
Subtitle: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood
Publisher: Routledge
Published: October 2000
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780415927857
First sentence: graduate student concluded, "She's a bit too much woman for me." Yessir. Which is why, although Tori Amos is arguably the sexiest woman on the planet, most of the fans who show up to see her in the flesh ("star-fuckers," as she puts it) are female.
Description: "Castration is a history of the meaning, function, and act of castration from its place in the words of Jesus in the Gospel According to Matthew and the early Church - where Augustine and the Fathers shaped the basic philosophic concepts of sexuality and chastity - to its secular reinvention in the Renaissance and its twentieth-century position at the core of psychoanalysis.".

"Taylor connects castration to the ancient (and continuing) human drive to re-engineer our own biology. In the medieval love story of Abelard and Heloise a violent castration makes Abelard a better theologian. In the year 2000 a sterile but otherwise functioning man is a boon to the woman who desires sex without the burdens of pregnancy.".

"Ranging from allegory to zooarchaeology, Castration turns an unusual and discomforting topic into a thoroughly enjoyable narrative on man's obsessive relationship to his genitals, his sexuality, and his manhood."--BOOK JACKET.