I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned an obvious contributor to that-witch-stole-my-penis: testicles do retract, and penises do shrink, as an unconscious response to fear! Not all the way into the body cavity, obviously, but they do retract and shrink to a very clear effect. (It's a reflex that is probably there to, well, safeguard our balls.) You can see how this works now: if you get really afraid of an imaginary penis-stealing witch in the neighborhood, your bits will noticeably retract, thereby confirming your fear of the penis-stealing witch. The very real sensations you perceive as a result of the cremaster actually doing its work will be amplified and interpreted by your witch-believer brain in the way you'd expect.
Not only that, don't penises shrink in response to the cold? I noticed in the koro story, the thing that happened before the guy noticed his penis was smaller was a cold draft came in. So imagine someone who had never noticed that being cold or anxious made penises smaller, one night a cold draft comes in and he notices his penis is smaller, and now he's anxious, and now it's all shrinking inward!
And now the guy goes "oh god, my penis is shrinking!", everyone around him hears this, it was probably a little cold and now all the guys are anxious and checking their own penises, and becoming more hyperaware of just the random shrinking and expanding that penises do just in ordinary life, and boom, you got a spontaneous social contagion.
And if a guy has a sufficiently large gut, or bushy pelvis, or small penis, he might lose track of its presence altogether, and conclude that it's disappeared!
It also helps to remember that we're talking about people who had pre-scientific ideas about how human biology works where "when that happens, that's a witch doing it" can seem more intuitive than it might from the perspective of someone influenced by modern understanding of biology. We're pretty good at having our theories of how the world works fill in the details of basic sensations. See also culturally determined expressions of hypnagogic hallucinations.
It reinforce this comment, the penis is a hydraulic system, and it lengthens and contracts under autonomous nervous control. A lot of things affect that, but fear, anxiety, confidence, etc. are significant. Also, the actual anchored base of the penis is near the anus, nearly half of the hydraulic system is invisible. So a 25% change in the total length of the penis causes a 50% change in the visible length. (So a lot of this retraction actually is into the body.) A psychological epidemic of fear of penis-stealing witches is likely to cause a physiological epidemic of penis shortening.
What I find strange about all of this is it seems to have been known since forever, at least in rough outline, in American popular culture. E.g. the movie "Little Big Man" has the leading man say, when his wife goes off to give birth and turns him over to her three sisters who have been unlucky in love, "Three young and healthy women with no man for who knows how long. The very idea kinda shrunk me like a spider on a hot stove."
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned an obvious contributor to that-witch-stole-my-penis: testicles do retract, and penises do shrink, as an unconscious response to fear! Not all the way into the body cavity, obviously, but they do retract and shrink to a very clear effect. (It's a reflex that is probably there to, well, safeguard our balls.) You can see how this works now: if you get really afraid of an imaginary penis-stealing witch in the neighborhood, your bits will noticeably retract, thereby confirming your fear of the penis-stealing witch. The very real sensations you perceive as a result of the cremaster actually doing its work will be amplified and interpreted by your witch-believer brain in the way you'd expect.
Not only that, don't penises shrink in response to the cold? I noticed in the koro story, the thing that happened before the guy noticed his penis was smaller was a cold draft came in. So imagine someone who had never noticed that being cold or anxious made penises smaller, one night a cold draft comes in and he notices his penis is smaller, and now he's anxious, and now it's all shrinking inward!
And now the guy goes "oh god, my penis is shrinking!", everyone around him hears this, it was probably a little cold and now all the guys are anxious and checking their own penises, and becoming more hyperaware of just the random shrinking and expanding that penises do just in ordinary life, and boom, you got a spontaneous social contagion.
And if a guy has a sufficiently large gut, or bushy pelvis, or small penis, he might lose track of its presence altogether, and conclude that it's disappeared!
It also helps to remember that we're talking about people who had pre-scientific ideas about how human biology works where "when that happens, that's a witch doing it" can seem more intuitive than it might from the perspective of someone influenced by modern understanding of biology. We're pretty good at having our theories of how the world works fill in the details of basic sensations. See also culturally determined expressions of hypnagogic hallucinations.
It reinforce this comment, the penis is a hydraulic system, and it lengthens and contracts under autonomous nervous control. A lot of things affect that, but fear, anxiety, confidence, etc. are significant. Also, the actual anchored base of the penis is near the anus, nearly half of the hydraulic system is invisible. So a 25% change in the total length of the penis causes a 50% change in the visible length. (So a lot of this retraction actually is into the body.) A psychological epidemic of fear of penis-stealing witches is likely to cause a physiological epidemic of penis shortening.
What I find strange about all of this is it seems to have been known since forever, at least in rough outline, in American popular culture. E.g. the movie "Little Big Man" has the leading man say, when his wife goes off to give birth and turns him over to her three sisters who have been unlucky in love, "Three young and healthy women with no man for who knows how long. The very idea kinda shrunk me like a spider on a hot stove."