North Carolina woman charged with "castration"

A drunken woman who grabbed a man's genitals at a party and did sufficient injury to require him to have about fifty stitches has been charged with "malicious castration." This is the first time that the charge has ever been brought in Lillington, North Carolina. The perpetrator was also charged with assault causing serious bodily injury.

Castration involves the removal, not the injury of, the testes. No testes were removed. The article about the incident does not say whether the woman was also charged with sexual assault, which she should have been. But it does give one pause: Is "sexual assault" too "feminine" a crime to record against a man? Might he then have been humiliated the rest of his life? Or, on the other hand, if there was a sexual assault charge, then why add a charge of castration, which didn't even take place?

If the tables had been turned, and the man had grabbed the woman's genitals and seriously injured her, he, too, would have been charged with assault causing serious bodily injury, and (in some circles, depending on whether he was running for governor of a western state) with sexual assault. But there is no way in hell he would ever have been charged with "malicious castration." (Let's face it--until 1977, Blue Cross/Blue Shield paid to have American women's genitals mutilated.)

Though what the North Carolina woman did was despicable, I hope she has an attorney who fights this especially sexist charge.