Let’s take a break from biting geopolitical observations and balanced economic ruminations for something simpler:Foreign cultures are weird. Or, more accurately, weird cultures are foreign.Consider “Koro,” a belief that one’s genitals are retracting into one’s body or have been removed.Although the term originated in Asia — Koro is Malay for “head of the turtle” — recently, the most dramatic cases have taken place in Africa.Assisted by juju and witchcraft, “penis thieves” have used their dark powers to steal the manhood from unsuspecting Africans.Nervous victims have suddenly suspected their penises have disappeared or diminished and, in a moment of irrationality, blamed their newfound femininity on an unfortunate bystander.Reports of penis thefts come in waves, like when angry mobs beat 12 suspected penis snatchers to death in Ghana’s Capital in 1997, or when 13 suspected sorcerers were arrested by Congolese police last year, according to an April Reuters article.Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu did some of the first reporting of African Koro in a letter to Transcultural Psychiatric Review. In 1975, a policeman escorted two men into Ilechukwus’ office in Northern Nigeria, one of which had accused the other of stealing his penis.After the doctor declared the alleged victim’s condition to be normal, he “looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared.”This is why journalists use the word “alleged.”What happened in Ilechukwus’ office is most likely a combination of the power of suggestion and basic anatomy.Penis thefts usually occur during a period of emotional excitement. The “fight or flight” impulse also results in decreased blood flow to the genitals.It could be called the “first thing’s first” response.When the “first thing’s first” response is combined with a firmly held belief that evil juju can steal ones’ mo-jo, it is easy to see how these things can happen.Or maybe this is just an elaborate way to explain away a lesser endowment.”It’s real,” said one witness in the aforementioned Reuters article. “Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny.”Either way, the absurdity of the situation is matched by the credulity of the participants. Either way, foreign cultures are weird.Cultural perceptions can make your penis disappear.Sometimes cooler heads must point out that the Emperor is naked, or that the Emperor still has a penis.But from the proper frame of mind, our own culture can seem just as foreign.Americans have never believed in Juju, but we did suffer from a long spell of voodoo. As far as I know, no American has ever been lynched because of accusations of penis thefts, but we did have a shameful history in Salem, Massachusetts.Come to think of it, there are still horoscopes in less-advanced newspapers.About three-fourths of Americans believe some cosmic Jewish Zombie makes you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.We can generalize it: Cultures are weird.——Contact Daniel Morgan at [email protected]