Amputation Love

Here is the paper I wrote for my Sex and Sexuality in the 20th Century seminar. I revised it (ever so) slightly to make it more readable on a browser. I also cut all the endnotes, and the bibliography, in order to make it less useful for any would-be poachers. If there are passages for which you would like to know the source, drop me a line and I'll give you the reference.


Amputation Love:
A Brief History of the Erotic Stump


Monopede Mania

In early autumn of 1972 a young medical student read a revelatory letter in Penthouse magazine. The Penthouse letter closed "…one of these gentlemen being the G. I. who became my husband and who is still fascinated by the stump of a female amputee." The shock of finding someone who shared his particular erotic interest, "the stump of an amputee," prompted him to take the magazine to Dr. John Money, the one man he thought might sympathize with his plight, and be willing to learn more, and perhaps even help those suffering from this odd "fetish." That one letter to Penthouse prompted the collaboration of the young graduate student, Gregg Furth, and Dr. John Money to write one of the earliest medical articles on the erotic fascination with stumps, and with the compulsion to self-amputate.

So popular was that first letter in Penthouse, that the magazine went on to publish a letter about amputation love in almost every issue between 1973 and 1978 in a sub-section of the letters column titled "Monopede Mania." So-called amputee lovers contacted each other and a magazine dedicated exclusively to amputee erotica and romantic stories titled Fascination was published in 1978 by a young amputee woman named Bette Hagglund. Profits from the magazine helped pay for the first Fascination conference in 1985. The advent of the internet in the 1990s helped members of this community find each other and exchange their stories, which in turn helped shape their identity. The desire to be with an amputee, or to become an amputee, did not start in the 1970s. The erotic attraction of being with an amputee, or becoming an amputee goes back much farther.


A Brief History of Amputation Love in Popular Culture

In his 1555 essay "Of Cripples," Michel de Montaigne writes "No one truly knows Venus in her perfect sweetness who has never lain with a lame mistress." De Montaigne asserts that this is a common proverb in Italy, and that "the same is said of men as well as of women." He writes that this attraction to lameness is an ancient concept extending back to the classical period. The queen of the Amazons proclaimed that "lame men perform best." References to the desire for self-amputation can be traced back a little more than two centuries. A French surgeon writing in 1785 tells of a persistent patient who demanded to have a limb removed. Upon a successful amputation he wrote the doctor to express his happiness and undying gratitude. This first attempt to classify this desire, however, can be attributed to Dr. von Krafft-Ebing, who categorized the sexual attraction to disability as a "fetich" in 1894. Interest in amputation love has developed along two separate lines in the twentieth century. This interest appears periodically in the popular culture, and occasionally in the medical literature. For the purposes of this paper "amputation love" covers both phenomena of erotic desire to be with amputees and desire to be an amputee.

In The Unknown (1927), Lon Chaney has his arms surgically amputated to win the love of Joan Crawford who fears the embrace of men. In the 1930s and 1940s a popular series of stories was printed in Britain in the magazine London Life by Mr. Wallace Stort depicting the plucky courage of young amputee women. In a letter to London Life about these stories "Gladys" writes "Though I am considered a very pretty girl, he [her husband] has confessed that the greater attraction I had for him was my missing foot." Gladys also writes about her early interest in amputation in Paris in 1929 where "there was a craze among the Smart Set to have their little toes taken off." Gladys had her "left little toe amputated" for the "thrill" of it. In an article for London Life about why he chose to write about amputees, Stott notes that "there have actually appeared matrimonial advertisements inserted by individuals seeking wives lacking one or more limbs!" He recalls reading such a matrimonial advertisement in an English paper in 1906 requesting "a young lady of about 19 or 20, pretty, fond of dress, a devotee of tight-lacing and high heels, and with only one leg, the other having been amputated, preferably at the thigh. Write, enclosing a photo and giving particulars of amputation."

Flannery O'Connor's short story "Good Country People" published in 1955 has as its protagonist a sexually active amputee. Surreal film maker Luis Buñuel broached the topic of attraction to amputees in his 1970 film Tristana, starring Catherine Deneuve as the amputee and Fernando Rey as the older man attracted to her. In 1973, a year after its first letters about attraction to amputees, the October issue of Penthouse magazine kicked off a five-year run of a segment called "Monopede Mania," ostensibly letters from people with fetishes about amputees. The remarkable interest spawned by the Penthouse letters prompted a small underground economy focused on amputee fetishism. The first magazine dealing exclusively with the erotics of amputees was started in 1978 by Bette Hagglund. Fascination was published quarterly and consisted of romantic fiction about amputee women and the men attracted to them. Fascination is no longer being published, but Hagglund now co-produces a website called Overground. The first Fascination conference was held in 1985. Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, published in 1983, celebrates a cult of intentional amputees.

By the early twenty-first century popular culture references to amputation were not hard to find for the interested researcher. In the Seinfeld episode "The Dinner Party," the George Costanza character dismisses the possible reality of Penthouse Forum by noting that if those letters are real then "an unusual number of people in this country are having sex with amputees." Hustler (February 1997) and Playboy (July 1987) both ran pieces about amputee fetishism, but not in the committed, multi-year way Penthouse did. A contemporary cable television series, Dexter, has as its antagonist a man with a sexual fixation on amputees. A character in the cartoon series Family Guy in the episode "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story," enters an adult bookstore and asks for amputee pornography. The off-Broadway play Armless by Kyle Jarrow won the Overall Excellence Award at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2006. The film Boxing Helena (1993) depicts a man who fantasizes about amputating the limbs of a woman to gain control over her, knowing that if he can care for her literally she will learn to care for him emotionally. This film is not highly regarded among the amputation love community because those attracted to amputees wish to escape the stereotype that their desire masks a dark compulsion to control the erotic target. In fact, many devotees claim the attraction to amputees is that they are able to overcome so much, (Alison Kafer calls this the sexy supercrip). Shock Jock Howard Stern held a Miss Amputee beauty pageant in 2005. The foregoing list is not exhaustive. References to amputation love abound in popular culture.


The Controversy over Amputation Pornography

The existence of amputee pornography has prompted some debate over the last quarter century. Advocates argue that it empowers amputees, while detractors argue that it turns disability into a commodity, and provides non-disabled men the opportunity to engage their fantasies of controlling helpless women. R. Amy Elman understands amputee pornography to be violence against women, and argues that it is an especially culturally damaging form of pornography. Elman notes correctly that it is mostly men sexualizing disabled women, rather than the reverse. She sees this as an extension of the role of pornography to degrade women and portray them as weak, ineffectual, and subordinate to men. Elman understands the fetishization of disability as a signifier for abuse against women. The disability, including lack of limbs, is a way to portray women as especially vulnerable, reinforcing the cultural stereotype of the weaker sex. Elman, however, mischaracterizes Money's work in her essay. Interestingly, her article also ignores the most significant periodical of amputee eroticism, Fascination, which is published by an amputee and sympathetic to erotica featuring amputees. Nor does Elman's article address the wealth of pornographic fantasy about self-amputation. Similarly, many of the complaints Elman has about Boxing Helena are shared by members of the amputation love community. An indication of the hyperbole of this article can be found in the paragraph about necrophilia. Elman argues that the ultimate extension of disability pornography are stories about necrophilia, presumably the ultimate disability.

On the other side of the argument are people like Barbara Fay Waxman Fidducia who is an advocate for disability pornography, and see it as a way of illustrating that disabled and amputee women can be seen as sexual. Erotic portrayals of disabled women, including amputees, are considered potentially empowering. The author is careful not to make any blanket assertions about the benefits of erotic images of disabled women, but suggests that portrayal of such women as sexual enhances the likelihood of real disabled women being understood as sexual beings. Fidducia and Elman both write about the same Playboy magazine pictorial layout of Ellen Stoll. Fiduccia quotes Stoll as saying that posing for Playboy was a statement "against the labels and the restrictions put on me by my appearance." Fiduccia also offers a broader example of disability pornography, including material produced by the disabled for the disabled. "The representation of amputee women as silent sex objects is not without contradictions. Amputees themselves produce many of the images that are for sale over the internet." Fiduccia notes an additional level of empowerment that "all the profit for the videos and photos is given to the models themselves." It should also be noted that while much of the medical literature focuses on the amputation of major limbs, arms and legs, the pornographic literature covers every imaginable variation, from missing digits to radical mastectomies.


Amputation Love and Medical Categorization

Simultaneous with the debate in popular media over disability sexuality and the eroticization of the stump was a debate in the medical literature about how to understand these phenomena. The person most responsible for establishing amputation love as a serious avenue for medical research was Dr. John Money. In 1977 Dr. Money published the first, and for many years most important, article on amputation love.

Dr. Money is best known as one of the foremost advocates and researchers of gender identity disorder in the United States. Over the course of his long career at Johns Hopkins Money helped many people locate the resources and therapy they needed to embark on gender reassignment surgery. He was also instrumental in persuading Johns Hopkins to perform such surgeries.

Dr. Money writes about amputation love as "eroticization of the stump," and points to the role the Penthouse letters section played in bringing about awareness and a sense of community from those who experienced these desires. Once his attention was directed to amputation love he began researching this field of erotic identity, and coined two words to address the two separate phenomena. The first term, Aptemnophilia, is Greek for "amputation love," and was used by Money to describe those who found themselves sexually attracted to people with missing limbs. Acrotomophilia was coined to describe people that wanted to become amputees. For many people located by Money the desire to be with an amputee overrode their identity as a heterosexual or homosexual. Their fascination with the stump took primacy over more prosaic sexual identities.

The first case study approached Money because Money was at the forefront of gender reassignment surgery in the 1970s. This would-be patient described himself as a "cryptic transsexual." It was not his genitals he wanted removed, however, but his left leg. This person wrote that "the image of myself as an amputee has… accompanied EVERY sexual experience of my life." Money writes dispassionately of this man's several attempts to self-amputate his leg. The second case study also strongly associates amputation with erotic desire.

This second case study expresses some frustration that sex reassignment, and cosmetic surgeries are allowed, but his surgery is refused. The logic is inescapable. Both transsexuals and those with the desire to self-amputate need extensive surgery to accomplish the re-alignment of their external image to coincide with their internal image. Why should one be accepted while the other is not? There are two answers. The first answer revolves around issues of disability. It took years before transsexuals were able to successfully argue that becoming a woman, or losing the ability to procreate, were not disabilities. Those who wish to self-amputate have yet to successfully make the argument that losing a limb is not a disability, despite the desire of many those who are amputation-by-accident to not be categorized as disabled. The second answer is sexuality. Just as homosexuality had to be distanced from sex in order to start gaining societal acceptance, so has the desire to be another gender, or to be an amputee, been forced to play down their own sexual aspects.

Money’s second case study mentioned how he contacted other wannabes through "underground" ads in community newspapers. Contacting others who shared this interest remained difficult until the magazine Fascination began building a community of people with shared interest. Money believed that amputation love was similar to gender identity disorder, a belief that is still widely accepted.

Money may not have realized it at the time, but there was a deeper history to these phenomena than he indicated in his first article. In his groundbreaking work Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing cataloged every sexual perversion and deviance he could locate. Of course, these human desires and behaviors were assigned to the realm of deviance and aberration based solely on Krafft-Ebing's own sense of what was normal and what should be allowed by civilized society (normal, for Krafft-Ebing, was procreative sex). Krafft-Ebing termed these sexual acts "fetiches." One of the deviant behaviors he located was a man who was sexually attracted to disfigured feet. He cites an example of an amputation fetich from Lydston "A Lecture on Sexual Perversion" that refers to "a man who had a love affair with a woman whose right lower extremity had been amputated. After separation from her he searched for other women with a like defect." The attraction to disfigured feet, for the German Krafft-Ebing was a disturbing sexual anomaly. For thousands of years in China, however, foot-binding was a highly erotically charged expectation of a certain class of women.

In his book Sexual Aberrations (1925), Wilhelm Stekel coins the more specific terms "paraphilia" and "parapathia" to refine the broad definition of fetish. He does this to break up fetishes into a spectrum of illness, from erotic eccentricities, which the analyst need have little concern, to pathological fetishes, in which no connection can be made with another person, and the erotic focus is solely on an object. Somewhere between these two extremes lay the paraphilias, the attraction to "misshapen creatures." He includes in this group "men who choose women who have one leg amputated or who wear crutches."

In 1948 Magnus Hirschfeld cites a case presented by Krafft-Ebing. Hirschfeld describes the Krafft-Ebing case of a young man who as a child pretended to be lame, using two brooms as crutches. As he grew older he began to fantasize about lame girls, until eventually "his excitability became so great that the sight of a limping girl in the street was sufficient to bring about ejaculation." Hirschfeld goes on to write "the predilection for limping women is by no means rare, and is well known to prostitutes… [E]ven the stump of an amputate leg may serve as a fetish. In the region of the Great Boulevards in Paris there is a one-legged prostitute who has been plying her trade there for years, and who has a steady clientele, mainly composed of Englishmen."

In 1978, one year after Money's article coining the words apotemnophilia and acrotomophilia, the academic journal Sexuality and Disability debuted. This journal covered a broader area than Fascination, and concerned itself with the sexuality of disabled people being better understood by doctors and researchers. The debut of these two periodicals during the same year points to the cultural hurly-burly that was leading to broad re-definition of identity across many classes and to the parallel interests of popular culture and medical culture. This might also be seen as a key date in "political correctness." The Civil Rights movement, followed by the Women's rights movement, then the Gay Liberation movement, as well as the American Indian Movement and the Chicano movement, created intense societal discussions over who possessed the responsibility for defining categorical identities. Each group insisted that it was their own responsibility to define themselves. This led to black men refusing to tolerate the identity of "boy," of women insisting on the honorific of Ms., and of homosexuals reclaiming the pejorative "queer." It also sparked a fledgling disability movement where terms like cripple and disability were called in question.


Devotees, Pretenders, and Wannabes

For the amputation love community that developed over the course of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s self-identity resolved itself into Devotees, Pretenders, and Wannabes (DPW). Devotees are people who have an erotic fascination with amputees, stump lovers in the vernacular. Pretenders are people who fake limb loss, sometime simply by riding around in a wheelchair, but other times by binding their limb to their body so it cannot be used. Predictably, wannabes are people that want to be amputees. The internet boom of the 1990s allowed people with these interests to create online communities. One important lesson that arose out of this community was to play down the sexual aspects of these desires when speaking with the media or with doctors. Those who are seeking medical assistance to remove a limb currently categorize their desire as an identity disorder. They portray amputee identity disorder as closely parallel to gender identity disorder. Just as medical procedures are allowed for gender identity disorder (which involves the amputation of the penis in male-to-female procedures), so should medical procedures be allowed for those who have always carried an internal image of themselves as an amputee. Internet support groups also provide information on relatively safe methods of self-amputation.

Dr. Richard Bruno writes of a patient who is sexually attracted to men with amputated leg(s) This case study provides an example of a relatively typical pretender. The desire to be with an amputee, or to be an amputee, is disproportionately a male desire, but, as Bruno's article indicates, women are a non-trivial minority of the DPW community. Ms. D.'s sexual attraction to men grows into a desire to be seen as a cripple, and she begins pretending to be a cripple who needs a wheelchair when she travels out of town. Acting out these fantasies carried a strong erotic charge. Despite her pretense to be disabled, Ms. D. never wanted to actually become disabled. She eventually dated and married a man with post-Polio Syndrome who wore leg braces and needed crutches to walk.

Dr. Michael First presents a case report on Thomas, a 39-year-old teacher and example of a wannabe. Thomas had elective surgery on his left leg to have it removed above the knee. For Thomas the primary reason for the removal of the leg was so that he could feel "whole." With the leg removed his real-world image finally matched his self-image. In addition to this alignment with his internal sense of identity, Thomas also reported a strong sexual desire to becoming an amputee. Thomas goes through a trajectory common to many wannabes. He spends several years pretending, before finally seeking therapy. He is prescribed various medications which do not alleviate his desire. Several of the amputees in the documentary Whole (2003) describe this same arc. Drugs do not help. It seems the only thing that can satisfy the compulsion is to actually have the amputation. After therapy failed Thomas began his search to find a surgeon who would comply with his request. Thomas echoes a familiar sentiment of those who have had successful amputations – "My only regret is that I did not have it done sooner."


Amputation Love in the 21st Century

By the early twenty-first century the culture and language of amputation had changed dramatically. In the year 2000 a Scottish hospital board denied Robert Smith's request to perform surgery removing a healthy limb. The limb he was scheduled to remove belonged to Gregg Furth, the young medical student who had first brought the Penthouse letter to the attention of Dr. John Money. In his two previous operations Smith had successfully performed amputation of healthy limbs, but the board finally decided it could not condone such operations. The surgical denial was picked up by the local media and quickly spread around the world. Most people wondered how any respectable doctor could agree to such an extraordinary operation. Did removing healthy limbs fall under the medical oath of doing no harm? What kind of doctor would agree to what was obviously the request of a disturbed individual?

Two important facts were lost in this firestorm of controversy. The first is that such desires for amputation have a long history, and seem to arise in individuals who are not otherwise disturbed or mentally incapable. The second is that Smith is a conscientious and capable surgeon. He did not seem to be pursuing wealth or celebrity, instead, after careful research and interviews with the would-be patients he concluded that the anxiety of living with this disorder was greater than the removal of the offending limb. In fact, the men involved in the first two successful operations claimed that it was the best decision of their lives, and that their only regret was that they did not have the operation sooner. Smith also discovered that people with this compulsion often attempt self-amputation, or pay for black-market amputations, which can put their lives in danger. Wannabes also sometimes self-inflict damage to themselves in an attempt to create a situation where the limb must be severed.

Certainly there is a long history of amputees, of both the intentional and unintentional variety, wanting to lead independent lives, regardless of the shape of their bodies. This is how it came to be suggested that disabled people be considered as differently-abled. To be disabled suggests the inability to lead an autonomous life. Nearly every limbless person bristles under the condescension that comes out of ignorance. If disability becomes differently-abled, then what is the rationale behind preventing amputations for cosmetic or identity reasons? The conclusion finally reached by Dr. Smith, and a few other practitioners, is that the life of anxiety lived by people with the compulsion to remove a limb is worse than a life with a missing limb. For these doctors allowing the limb to remain is the way to do harm. To remove the limb is to alleviate suffering and misery, which they see as their primary, honor-bound duty.

Debate over disability is one of the two significant hurdles to allowing elective amputation surgery. The second hurdle is because of its sexual nature. To allow surgery because it is "just sexual," is fraught with the dangers of normalizing "deviant" sexuality. Western culture sex is understood as normatively procreative, anything that falls outside the bounds of procreation is considered deviant, unhealthy, immoral, and potentially dangerous to the fabric of society. For this reason the DPW community has adopted the language of identity disorder, and played down the sexual aspects of their passion. The recent documentary, Whole (2003), only mentions the erotic aspect of this obsession once in passing.

Another important language distinction is the difference between the devotees and the wannabes, the aptemnophiles and the acrotomophiles. Sometimes people have both, erotic desire to be with an amputee, and the desire (often with erotic overtones) to self-amputate. Dr. Robert Smith suggests "John Money confused the apotemnophiles and the acrotomophiles." Smith thinks the devotees "are paraphilic, but not the apotemnophiles." In other words, the devotees have a sexual fetish, and the wannabes have an identity disorder. Unfortunately, the distinction is not so sharp, since many amputation lovers share both qualities. DPWs are lumped together because they share certain family resemblances, but it is a mistake to say they share the same identity.

The Socially Constructed Body

The idea of the ideal body type changes over time and over space. In addition to the cultural ideal body type there are the internal ideas of ideal body type. People constantly change their bodies, from steroids to Rogaine, from cosmetics to anorexia, from exercise to tremendous consumption of fat and sugar, people push their bodies to conform to certain ideas by using wigs, nose jobs, breast augmentation, penile implants, and manicures.

Desire for self-amputation was first seen as a psychosis centered on self-mutilation, but came to be understood as an identity disorder. This shift in definition was due in large part to the ability of the wannabes to articulate their desire within the parameters already constructed by others who dealt with identity disorders, especially the transgendered.

The rise of amputation love raises several important questions. The first is the question of popular culture's effect on personal identity. Are there people who self-identify as wannabes only because they have been exposed to the idea in popular culture? Carl Elliot suggests that the increase in the number of sexual reassignment surgeries over the course of the twentieth century is due to the creation and acceptance of transgendered as a medical category. A recent article in the Village Voice seems to bear out Elliot's warning that coverage in popular media leads to interest by those who otherwise never would have considered such behavior. An interview with a middle-aged male self-amputee reveals "the desire was born in the 1990s after he read a couple of articles about the phenomenon in men's magazines like Penthouse and Nugget."

The growing interest in amputation love in the last third of the twentieth century took place in an era of growing awareness of the body as a malleable category. Books like Our Body, Ourselves helped women re-invent the popular image of the female body. This radical re-thinking of the body as a category demanded that the category of disability also be re-thought. The label of disability is often imposed on people who do not self-identify as disabled. If a person who wants to remove a limb does not consider it a disability, who, then, has the right to categorize it as such?

Extraordinary Body Manipulation as a Form of Liberty

Finally, intentional self-amputation raises the question of ownership of the human body. What can you do to your body? At what point does the decision for body manipulation cease to be yours and belong to the community in which you live? Amputation love did not simply rise out of the popular culture of the twentieth century. Evidence of attraction to amputees and others with disabilities, as well as evidence of the desire to self-amputate can be traced back for centuries. What has changed is the greater liberty to define oneself. There is no question that certain self-modifications are acceptable, some are even encouraged. It also seems that the limit to these modifications is when the person undergoing these changes becomes a burden on their family or extended community. So, while many amputations should be understood to be an acceptable, if odd, indulgence, the visceral reaction many have when hearing about intentional self-amputation suggests it will be some time before such extraordinary body manipulation is widely accepted by Western societies.