A Brief History of Men Getting Their Dicks Chopped Off, and How You Can Avoid It

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Over the weekend in China, father-of-five Fan Lung had his dick chopped off twice in one night by his furious wife. First, after his wife discovered an explicit email Fan had sent to his lover from her phone, he was de-penised with a pair of scissors while he slept. While he was lying in the hospital recovering from having his dick sewn back on, his wife crept into his room, chopped his peen off again, and threw it out the window. It's all a bit Oscar Wilde: to have your penis chopped off once might be regarded as misfortune, but to lose it twice looks like carelessness.

First off, if Seth Rogen hasn't optioned the rights to this story already so he can turn it into a 90-minute chuckle-times rom-com, he's missed a trick (in act three, Seth's protagonist discovers the true meaning of love after watching his bloodied prosthetic dick being eaten by a dog following a 15-minute chase scene through downtown LA. James Franco is the voice of the dog. The working title is Dick Slice).

Second—and this is quite bad—police haven't yet managed to find the penis in question, and the general consensus is it got eaten by a stray animal.

"It doesn't matter that he's lost his fertility," his lover, Zhang Hung, told Central European News. "He has five children already."

What an extremely chill reaction to your boyfriend getting his dick chopped off twice.

Maybe Zhang Hung's apathy just comes from already being saturated with stories of guys waylaying their penises. And that's understandable: Ever since John Wayne Bobbitt was uncocked in 1993 by his wife Lorena, high-profile de-peenings have been going on around the world.

In a way, Bobbitt is the poster boy for having your dick chopped off by your wife. His case, and the grimly high-profile trial that followed it, was worldwide news in the early 90s, leading to a short-lived porn career for him ( John Wayne Bobbitt's Frankenpenis is an actual video that exists), a greater awareness of the issue of domestic violence and the term "bobbittize" to enter medical parlance.

For a while there, it was kind of feared that Lorena Bobbitt's whole chop-off-a-penis-with-a-kitchen-knife-then-throw-it-out-of-the-window-of-a-moving-car schtick might become a widespread thing: As of 1995, there were 100 documented cases of bobbitization, with many attributed as copycat crimes. But chopping off a dick isn't new—although the running theme is pretty much always revenge.

In ancient China and Heian-period Japan, de-donging, along with castration, was one of the main criminal punishments handed out to men. Documented cases of people taking the law into their own hands go back as far as the 1800s (a man in Luiba, China, had his dick chopped off with a shaving knife by his daughter-in-law after he tried to have sex with her), but really started to get going in the 1970s.

Between 1973 and 1980, there were 100 cases of Thai women chopping their husbands' penises off (mainly for their adultery, but often following prolonged domestic abuse)—so many that doctors started to specialize in penis reattachment. With penis reattachment becoming vaguely widespread, cock loppers were forced to become more creative when it came to the throwing-a-penis-out-of-a-window junk disposal bit: In 2011, Catherine Becker made headlines after severing her husband's genitalia and dropping it down the garbage disposal. There's no walking that off.

More recently, there have been various cases of penis loss—in 2013, a Floridian escort used her teeth to attempt to chop a john's penis off, but instead just demolished his balls; in 2012, Peruvian Julia Munoz Huaman chopped off her sleeping boyfriend's penis and flushed it down the toilet. And closer to home, last year a bewildered Middlesborough man was found wandering along the A66 at 4:30 AM in a distressed state looking for his penis. And now Fan Lung, with his double-dip dick attack.

Anyway, here's some easy-to-follow advice if you're looking to not get your penis cut off: Don't commit adultery or domestic abuse, and if you absolutely must have an affair, don't message your girlfriend from your wife's phone.

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