There are Reddit communities for almost everything, but a few give even the most terminally online people pause.
On any given day, a 2,300-person subreddit is actively devoted to fantasizing about glansectomy, the surgical removal of the rounded, nerve-dense tip of the penis. A separate 3,500-member forum orbits an even more comprehensive desire: penectomy. Both fall under the umbrella of what’s called “nullo” culture, a subculture defined by the wish to remove all external genitalia and achieve a smooth, featureless groin. For most people scrolling past these forums, the reaction probably stops at visceral horror. For researchers who study this population, however, the picture is much more complicated.
According to a study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, when men with castration interests were asked why they wanted genital ablation, roughly 40% said they wanted to achieve what researchers described as a “eunuch calm” and freedom from sexual urges. Around 30% found the fantasy itself sexually arousing, and a similar percentage cited cosmetic reasons, specifically the desire for a smooth genital appearance.
The overlap between those motivations- people who want the surgery and people who are turned on by thinking about it is a significant feature of this community, not an outlying exception.
The Extreme Online Subculture Where People Fantasize About Removing Their Genitals
Psychologists note that a subset of these men may be experiencing body integrity dysphoria (BID), a condition recognized by the ICD-11 in which someone experiences an intense, persistent mismatch between their actual body and how they feel it should be. For some, that mismatch centers on genitalia specifically, a state researchers have described as male-to-eunuch gender dysphoria. It’s not the same as a desire to transition to female; these men don’t want female anatomy either. They want, in clinical terms, nothing there at all.
That distinction matters enormously when the fantasy starts looking for real-world outlets. Most people with these desires never act on them — a 2024 Sexual Medicine study found only up to 4% aspire to go through with genital ablation in reality. But when someone does try, the risks are catastrophic. Performing any version of this outside a sterile surgical setting courts sepsis, severe blood loss, and death. Even within one, no reputable surgeon would perform an elective penectomy or glansectomy without medical necessity, such as penile cancer, which accounts for around 820 new UK cases annually. “This is serious stuff,” Dr. Jeff Foster told Metro.
“Most importantly, no reputable surgeon would do this procedure unless it was medically implicated.”
The consequences of what happens when that surgical guardrail is removed played out in a London courtroom in 2024. Norwegian-born Marius Gustavson, who called himself the “eunuch maker,” was sentenced to a minimum of 22 years in prison after running a pay-per-view website where subscribers paid up to £100 annually to watch live castrations and penectomies, many performed in non-sterile conditions at his London flat. The site eventually attracted more than 22,000 subscribers and generated roughly £300,000 before authorities shut it down.
Documentary filmmaker Marcel Theroux, who interviewed voluntary eunuchs for a film about the case, told LADbible that the people he spoke with showed clear signs of genuine psychological distress. “They’re looking for a way of resolving their conflicts, this unhappiness they feel,” he said, “and it made them very vulnerable to Marius, who was offering himself as a solution.”
The nullo fantasy, as a purely mental exercise, occupies a complicated gray area. The problem is that it doesn’t always stay there.
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