May 25, 2026: After eleven years, I have moved this article to Medium. It's paywalled there. Thank you, thirty thousand people who have viewed this. If you pay $5/month to Medium, you can read my article and millions more by everyone who writes there.
Detail of Ethiopian painting commemorating the Battle of Adwa, Catalogue No. E261845-0, Department of Anthropology, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution. Photo by Joshua Sherurcij, 2007.
My books
If you are interested in castrated villains in fiction, please check out Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains. If you are interested in the Western literary treatment of castration in history, please check out Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty. Both are by Tucker Lieberman.
