"'Waking Up Less than Whole:'
The Female Perpetrator in Male Victim Kidney Theft Legends."

Southern Folklore LIV:3 (1997): 196+.

            I was teaching in New Jersey with "John Doe," [1] a 23 year old, single, white American. I had sensed some chemistry between John and me, but we hadn't talked much. One Monday, he sat across from me and recounted the following narrative. His style of delivery was intense and outraged.

I heard this story this weekend, and I said to myself, that's a story I've got to tell Danusha.

 

My friend Rick had gone in to the city. You wouldn't believe what happened to his buddy. They went out to a club in Manhattan, and were looking for women. His buddy found a really gorgeous, I mean just perfect, woman. Long, thick brown hair, tall, knock-out figure. She invites him back to her place, so he goes.

 

Rick went back to Jersey.

 

A couple of days went by when he didn't hear from his buddy, so he gets worried and calls him. The guy had an incredible story.

 

The last thing he remembered was leaving the club with this woman. He woke up in some cheap hotel in the Bronx, in bloody sheets. He felt around his back and found stitches. He got out of there and went to the doctor. His doctor checks him out and says, "Man, somebody who really knew what they were doing, cut out your kidney!"

 

            As my coworker told this story, he sat in a way that emphasized his broad shoulders and well developed biceps, thus appearing both sexually attractive and physically strong.

            Later I saw versions of this narrative in newspapers (Morgenstern 1991, Brunvand, 1991). Brunvand's version was very much like the one I had heard from my co‑worker:

The story tells of a group of young men who went to New York City for a weekend of fun. One of them was attracted to a woman he met in a bar, and told his buddies he was going to spend the night at her place and would get in touch with them later. They didn't hear from him until late the next day when he phoned to say, 'I think I'm in such and such a hotel in room number so and so, but something's wrong with me and you'd better come and get me.'

 

When the friends arrived at the hotel room, they found their friend in bed and the sheets spattered with blood. He was very weak. When they helped him out of bed, they discovered a fresh surgical closure on his back and still more blood, so they rushed him to a hospital. There, doctors discovered that the man had had one of his kidneys removed, and they concluded that he had been drugged so his kidneys could be taken for sale on the black market for human organs (Brunvand, 1991).

 

I clipped one such article for my coworker, assuming he'd be chagrined to see that something he believed an actual event was, in fact, a legend. He wasn't set back at all, though. In fact, he told me that he was writing a film script based on the story, because he found it so compelling.

            In the early 1990's, organ theft legends were being told, and making headlines, around the world. In Guatemala, legends of the theft of organs from local children by American tourists led to outbreaks of anti-American violence and a governmental crisis (Shonder, 1994; New York Times, 1994). In the United States, a writer tapped an organ theft legend for a television script (Morgenstern, 1991). Politicians and journalists in various countries treated organ theft narratives as true (Moravec, 1993; Campion‑Vincent, 1990; Schrieberg, 1990; Shonder, 1994).

            This paper does not argue that traffic in human organs never occurs. Sadly, there is evidence that it does, and often under conditions of extreme state or economic coercion (e.g., see Palmer; Wallich and Mukerjee; and Ross, Sawyer, and Donaldson in the bibliography). Legends of organ theft may or may not be influenced by the actual organ market. This paper does argue that something other than or in addition to actual organ traffic inspires organ theft legends. Organ theft legend details contribute to the conclusion that these legends are expressive art rather than histories or journalism faithfully representing events in consensus reality. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has pointed out that organ theft legends often do portray conditions under which successful organ transplants could not occur (Leventhal).

            In a typical Guatemalan organ theft legend, the body of a small child is found with various organs removed. Cash may be stuffed into the mutilated corpse's pants pockets. There is a note in the chest cavity, written in English: "Thanks for the organs." (Shonder, 1994: 1). Shonder's theory that these legends express and create hostility toward American tourists may indeed be true (Shonder, 1994:2); in any case, reports of the legends preceded anti‑American graffiti, assaults on American Peace Corps volunteers, rioting, and arrests of and violent attacks against at least two Americans who were explicitly accused of organ theft (Shonder, 1994:1, 2; New York Times, 1994). Campion-Vincent (1990), writing on organ theft legends throughout Latin America, also takes up the themes of south v. north and indigenous and Hispanic v. Anglo hostility. She points to the rise in First World - Third World adoptions (15‑16) and "the plundering of raw material by developed countries" (23) as triggering factors in formation and dissemination of the legends.

            Discussions of organ theft legends have tended to lump variants together (e.g. Moravec, 1993; Brunvand, 1993). Such lumping may impede analysis. Legends of the theft of organs from the bodies of murdered children in Guatemala differ in important details from the variant John Doe told me. In this variant, which was also popular in the early '90's, a cross-gender organ theft is perpetrated on a First World adult male engaged in leisure-time activities. Legend variants require variations in interpretation. The gender and ethnicity of both organ thieves and their victims, the setting of the legend and the setting in which organ theft narratives are told, and aspects of the story which are highlighted or completely absent, can illuminate the deeper meaning of superficially similar narratives which exploit the motif of organ theft.

            While I have never been in a setting where a legend depicting organ theft from a Third World child has been told to me as true, the adult male victim organ theft story popped up again and again. Cal Grant, a 23 year old European-American and fellow student at the University of California at Berkeley, told me this one in 1993:

 

All right. So this guy is um jogging on the beach. It's in the Caribbean. I can't remember if it's Bermuda or what. So he's on vacation and he's jogging. He's jogging at night. I remember that part. Yeah - and he was already warned at the hotel not to. Basically, he's mugged. They use chloroform, the whole thing. He woke up in the bushes, and he feels some pain. He finds stitches in his back. So he goes to the hospital, and his kidney is gone. Otherwise, he's in perfect health, but he's missing a kidney.

 

When asked for an analysis of this narrative, Grant said,

When I heard it, I was amazed. It was like a rape. It's about fear of intense violation. Theft of the most intimate thing you have. Also, it's about the fear of experimentation and the medical field. You know -- mad doctors, like those people who gave women thalidomide.

 

            Francesca Royster, a 26 year old African-American graduate student at UC Berkeley, also interviewed in 1993, remembered having heard a story that, in significant details, was like the one I had heard from John Doe. She had heard the legend at her undergraduate university in Kansas. "It may have been at a fraternity party, or at work," she said. Her overwhelming impression, she said, was that it was "a very male environment." When asked for an interpretation of the legend, she said that it was probably meant to communicate "that this is the price you pay for casual sex." "Jane Doe," 19, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student, said that she had heard a story very like John Doe's, with the exception that, at the end, the protagonist wakes up with an intravenous tube feeding into his arm. Jane could not remember where she had heard the story, and she declined to offer an interpretation for it.

            The legend has not died out. On November 21, 1996, Chad Ryan Thomas, a Caucasian, 20 year old Indiana University undergraduate, forwarded the message below to the folklore student list. He had received it from an old high school friend, also a white IU undergraduate male. Thomas' post prompted a flurry of replies stating that the readers were familiar with versions of this legend. Posters to the list reported versions similar to those quoted above.

 

"Reason to not party anymore" - A TRUE STORY This guy went out last Saturday night to a party. He was having a good time, had a couple of beers and some girl seemed to like him and invited him to go to another party. He quickly agreed and decided to go along with her. She took him to a party in some apartment and they continued to drink, and even got involved with some other drugs (unknown which). The next thing he knew, he woke up completely naked in a bathtub filled with ice. He was still feeling the effects of the drugs, but looked around to see he was alone. He looked down at his chest, which had "CALL 911 OR YOU WILL DIE" written on it in lipstick. He saw a phone was on a stand next to the tub, so he picked it up and dialed. He explained to the EMS operator what the situation was and that he didn't know where he was, what he took, or why he was really calling. She advised him to get out of the tub. He did, and she asked him to look himself over in the mirror. He did, and appeared normal, so she told him to check his back. He did, only to find two 9 inch slits on his lower back. She told him to get back in the tub immediately, and they sent a rescue team over. Apparently, after being examined, he found out more of what had happened. His kidneys were stolen. They are worth 10,000 dollars each on the black market. (I was unaware this even existed) Several guesses are in order: The second party was a sham, the people involved had to be at least medical students, and it was not just recreational drugs he was given. Regardless, he is currently in the hospital on life support, awaiting a spare kidney.

 

            When asked, via e-mail, for an interpretation of this story, Thomas wrote in reply: "I'd say it has something to do with the fear of being personally violated. That is, loosing one's "self" through foolish behavior. Most variants I've heard involve the victim passing out drunk or having a one-night-stand, and waking up less than whole. Thus, the legend is something of a warning against such behavior."

            In the kidney theft narratives cited above, a relatively young and single, but certainly adult, First World male leaves his workaday world for a world of potential pleasure. Unlike Third World organ theft legend victims, he is not in his daily milieu, and he is not a child. In five out of the six stories, he meets a single, young female whom he finds sexually attractive. He accepts her invitation to take a further step away from his normal life and into the unknown world to which she is inviting him. In going with her, in most versions, he loses contact with his male companion, his last connection with his familiar world. No companion for the exploited child is mentioned in Guatemalan organ theft stories. A kidney, rather than a heart or any other organ, is removed. After the organ theft, the protagonists of these stories are not dead, but still living. Theft sites are not gruesome cavities, but expertly stitched. The man is not cast into the gutter, like the Guatemalan children, but awakens, not only in a bed, but, in one version, hooked up to an intravenous tube; in another, in a tub of ice. Thus setting, precursors to and aftermaths of organ theft, and the characters involved, differentiate the organ theft narrative variant I will discuss from legends of organ theft from Third World children.

            Storytelling environments, as well as story characters, provide a clue to story meanings and purposes. The adult male victim legends were not told in a Third World nation on the verge of political and social collapse, but in a First World nation where the macro environment was one of relative peace and security and the micro environment was one of sexual charge. In the John Doe version, a male tells a female coworker a story. These two people have been attracted to each other, but, as they are coworkers in a cramped setting where overt flirting would be frowned upon, other ways must be found to communicate attraction and its exact form, and to offer a charter for the nascent relationship. Grant's version was told to him by a peer, another young, single male. Royster's version was told in a "very male environment" as part of a discussion on the price of sex. The email version's first sentence is a warning, presumably directed at other young males analogous to the story's receiver, forwarder, and protagonist. This paper will argue that these details of adult-male-victim-kidney-theft legends create and maintain a narrative environment in which women and Third World men can and do perform, metaphorically, acts against First World men. These acts, this paper argues, are metaphors for and projective inversions of acts which First World men have often wanted to perform and have performed on women and minority group men.

            As Ruth Benedict, William Bascom (Benedict, 1935:xvi; Bascom, 1954) and others have pointed out, folklore can be used to discuss fears and desires that are forbidden to mention openly. Alan Dundes has discussed the use of folklore to express fears and desires which are inverted and projected onto their intended targets, the group the speaker wishes to act upon. "Projective inversion refers to a psychological process in which A accuses B of carrying out an action which A really wishes to carry out him or herself" (Dundes, 1991 :353). As an example of projective inversion, Dundes cites an American legend from the 1960's which told of a group of black boys who castrated a white boy in a public restroom. In real life, majority whites have lynched and/or castrated black males. Dundes sees this legend as an example of projective inversion. The purpose served: "...the wisher can through projective inversion punish in fantasy not himself but the victim of his aggression" (Dundes, 1980:54).

            In the John Doe, Royster, email and two of Moravec's versions, the kidney thief is a sexually attractive female engaged in dating behavior with a young, single male. In the Grant version, the perpetrator can be presumed to be black. Tourists in the Caribbean are told to be wary of native pickpockets and rapists. Natives, for their part, have expressed resentment of tourists and hostility toward former colonial regimes. In the John Doe version, the female perpetrator may also be a dark-skinned minority group member. She has dark hair and her prey becomes conscious in the Bronx, a borough with a high African American and Hispanic population.

            In recent decades, women and minorities have become more audible and visible in declarations of grievances against white men and traditional power structures. Some men, in this onslaught of minority voices, have felt intimidated and silenced. Men's Movement gurus like Sam Keen, Shepherd Bliss, and Robert Bly have identified men as the real victims. Some read Men's Movement pronouncements as part of a backlash against the political gains won by women and minorities (e.g. Faludi, 1991:304‑312). Men unconnected to the Men's Movement have also voiced feelings of victimization. In a cover article of March 29, 1993, "White Male Paranoia," Newsweek polled white males and others on various questions like, "Are white males more frequently targets of antagonism from women and non-whites than they were five years ago?" to gain support for its thesis - that many white males feel victimized by women and minorities (Gates, 1993:51).

            Common knowledge often does not support the image of majority group men as victims of women and minorities. Many people are aware that the most common violent crime in North America is an assault by a male on a female in the female's own home. Every fifteen seconds, according to the FBI, a woman is battered (Salter, 1991 :A-I S). Most rapists are male. Socialization of females includes cautions usually absent from socialization of males. Women and girls are taught to restrict their behavior, hours spent outside, clothing, verbal expression and body language so as not to precipitate male attack. Economically, as most people know, women lose out to men. Working women earn a fraction of what men earn.

            Research would not seem to support the image of woman as emotional predators. Several studies have indicated that married men have lower rates of alcoholism, unemployment, depression, illness, and suicide than single men, while the reverse is true among women (Heyn, 1997:11). Psychologist Lillian Rubin conducted a survey in which she asked informants if they would remarry if something happened to their spouses. Almost all the men said yes; almost half of the women said no. In real life, divorced or widowed men remarry quicker and in greater numbers than divorced or widowed women (Levitt, 1993:160). A recent book, Cutting Loose; Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, charts the happy and successful transition of women from unhappy wives to content divorcees (Applewhite). The author's informants describe marriage as an institution that stifles and restricts women.

            Quantifiable and spotlighted victims of male-female conflict tend to be women. Too, our culture upholds the ideal of the strong, silent male who would be diminished by openly and in detail recounting his sense of having been diminished in his encounters with women. Dramatically viable accounts which adequately and in a socially acceptable way communicate a male sense of victimization in encounters with women and minorities are in short supply. Folk narrative processes can fill this vacuum.

            The male protagonist in the above-cited legend of kidney theft from adult First World males is in a highly vulnerable state, in liminal space and time different from everyday life. This man is not seen at the height of his authority and security. He is not in an office, fixing a car, leading other men. He is engaging in behavior which, by definition, demands vulnerability and a relaxation of normal caution and strength. Dating, drinking, and vacationing are activities which promise pleasure in exchange for heightened vulnerability. These behaviors are encouraged by society. In these behaviors, though, the kidney theft legend protagonist goes against normal cautions and takes one step too many into the liminal, unfamiliar world which he cannot control.

            The adult male victim is away from home. Much has been written about the danger and lack of important knowledge contemporary urban legend characters fall prey to when they leave home turf (e.g. Lindow, 1989; Klintberg, 1976). Legend associations of foreign turf and danger are no doubt inspired by the lack of native savvy and language a foreigner experiences in any unfamiliar situation, as well as by hostilities between ethnic groups. In the email version, told in a racially homogenous region in the Midwest, we are not told that the protagonist enters another culture; however, he does take three steps to remove himself from his day-to-day life. He goes from one party to yet another, and at that second party, he takes "unknown" drugs.

            Someone unfamiliar with the East Coast might distance Grant's Caribbean further from California than New York City is from New Jersey, but this would be a mistake. As seen and described by their residents, New York City and New Jersey are worlds apart. New Jerseyans living very close to the city may regard it as a decadent cesspool of crime, violence, and exotic others, while New Yorkers, Woody Allen, among them, often describe New Jersey as a tame place without culture or interest. Young people in New Jersey, especially young men, may go to New York City in search of drugs or manhood-testing adventures.

            In the John Doe version, the protagonist is attracted to a sexually aggressive woman. In the Catholic, ethnic, neighborhoods John Doe and I lived and grew up in, sexually aggressive women are often spoken of as unsavory freaks. It was widely understood that it was the man's job to be the aggressor, and the woman's job to play her role of the pursued craftily and well. The woman in John Doe's version is not playing the passive part assigned her. She displays agency. This agency serves evil ends; she is an aggressor, and a predator. The man is proved foolish for responding to her invitation, an invitation that could have served as a red light to him that something was very wrong and dangerous about the woman. In the John Doe and Brunvand's versions, there are other young, single males, the victim's companions, who do not depart with a woman. They have had their fun; they knew where and when to draw the line and go home. They follow the rules, even in the liminal states of release and pleasure. They do not forfeit their kidneys.

            In both the Grant and Doe variants, a young, First World male commits a strategically flawed lapse of manly caution and reserve. In the Grant variant, that lapse occurs as part of the pursuit of pleasure in a tropical paradise. In the cross-gender theft variant the protagonist lowers his guard for intimacy. These two lapses in manly control are motifemic equivalents, since both allow the kidney theft to occur. If Dundes is correct in arguing that "If A and B both fulfill the same motifeme, then...allomotifs are both functionally and symbolically equivalent" (Dundes, 1980:92) this equivalence may suggest that roles men feel they must assume when on vacation for pleasure and release in a geographically and racially alien land, and roles assumed when meeting with a female for romantic intimacy, are similar. Romance and exotic lands, in the above cited kidney theft legends, assume the function of enemy territory in which the wise male is guarded, cautious, and in control of himself and others, and where the man who abandons himself to sensual or personal pleasure risks losing a vital organ - "Theft of the most intimate thing you have," as Grant put it.

            In the Grant version, the man has been specifically warned at his hotel not to jog at night. When I heard this legend, those two words: "jogging" and "at night", reverberated within me as fragments of a memorized, culturally relevant saga or prayer might. The Central Park Jogger was a woman, never named in reputable press reports, who went jogging at night in New York's Central Park in April, 1989 (Wolff, 1989). She was set upon by a gang of perhaps twelve young minority males, who repeatedly raped her and beat her so badly that bits of her brain were later found on the sidewalk. Her case became infamous throughout the country. [2]

            Black males in America have often been explicitly associated with sexual threat, not just to women. In real life, black males have been castrated to obviate their ability to pose a sexual threat to anyone. In films, "Cape Fear," for example, rape by black men has been referred to as an expected part of prison life for the white man who cannot defend himself. Some black men, for their part, have not always been above capitalizing on this image to frighten others. In 1991, Mike Tyson threatened his next opponent in the boxing ring, Razor Ruddock, "I'll make you my girlfriend" (Lipsyte, 1991).

            The dark-skinned kidney thief of the Grant version and the female kidney thief of the other versions are allomotifs. There is no overt sex in Grant's version; however, I believe that clues like "Jogging" and "at night" indicate that these allomotifs have a deep connection. My associations of his story with the raped Central Park Jogger and stereotypes of superphallic black men may have been my own, only; however, when Grant was asked, "What do you make of this story?" he replied, "It was like a rape." This interpretation, if correct, would support the assumption by many feminists that racism, sexism, and homophobia are related because they all spring from similar fears and desires in the traditional American power group of white males. Those fears and desired will be discussed further below.

            There is overt sexuality in the versions other than Grant's, sexuality which may be unconnected with the kidney theft; however, we can associate one typical descriptive word used for the kind of surgery performed on the victim in these legends -- invasive -- with conceptions of vaginal intercourse. A woman has no organ designed to penetrate a man's body, and, with her own body only, a woman can't penetrate a man the way that a man can penetrate a woman. For the male projective inversion to work, narration has to endow the female antagonist with some equipment.

            The male imagination, in less sophisticated times and places than our own, has met this requirement in various ways. At one time, women, in the form of succubi or nightmares, were thought to be able to rape men in their sleep (e.g., Hufford, 1982). Folk beliefs about standard intercourse have sometimes depicted it as an act in which the female's body injures the male's body by depriving it of valuable semen, mysterious energies, and perhaps even the time of the male's life.

            In his book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Tom Laqueur writes of historical concepts of the female body as an inferior version of the man's body. There is an American folk belief that a man loses a day of his life for every sex act. Football coaches, it is said, have warned their athletes to abstain from sex before games, in order to store the power and energy that is supposedly lost during sex. Hindus believe that abstaining from sex results in a concentration of vital energies, increased insight, and greater fertility (e.g., O'Flaherty, 1973).

            Succubi and magical sperm have lost much of their narrative punch for the audiences and tellers of the legends under discussion here. In contemporary America, a more scientific and more superficially feminist worldview prevails. To embody and express the threat some men feel from women, and the assumption by men that women and other oppressed groups, like blacks, want to do to white men what white men have either been doing or have wanted to do to them for so long, and that they can, another weapon must be put in the hands of the female or minority antagonist.

            Medical science, in the form of surgery, provides a fitting weapon. Medical science provides the necessary bodily invasion. Doctors invade patients' bodies in various ways, with needles, surgical tools, oral and rectal thermometers, etc. The antagonist of the kidney story, either a woman or a dark‑skinned male, invades the protagonist's body with surgical tools and needles. The protagonist awakens with stitches, implying needles. In Jane's version, he awakens to find an intravenous tube in his arm; the audience witnesses the protagonist's penetration. The email version employs lipstick, a woman's weapon in sexual contest, often portrayed in advertisements as a woman's phallus. The lipsticked message is written in capital letters, the email version of screaming. While actual scars play a relatively minor role in this version, the all-caps lipsticked message across the victim's chest creates a vivid image in the audience's mind. This red scrawl, visual analog to a bloody scar or brand, signals conquest for the female, who had deviously "seemed to like him," and reduction to defeated slave or ox status for the male.

            While women have been understood as taking something from the man in sex, either his magical sperm or his life force or both, women also give something, a something often less material and of greater social importance. In popular belief, the man is meant to enjoy sex, while the woman may only endure it. The man, every time he sleeps with a woman, gains stature and reputation. He has "bagged" her, he has "scored." Every time a woman sleeps with a man not her husband, she risks being considered a slut and someone who "gives it away." She gives her power, her reputation, pleasure. To compensate her, a decent man may be expected to reimburse the woman via the security of marriage or at least some material token, dinner or a gift, for example.

            The male protagonist of cross-gender kidney theft legends is feminized in that he is penetrated, and also in that he gives away a part of himself while the taker presumably waltzes off, nothing the worse for the encounter, profiting some vital part of the man. As Thomas states, the story expresses "the fear of being personally violated ... loosing one's 'self' through foolish behavior;" the victim, after indulging in pleasurable experiences that increase vulnerability, awakes "less than whole." "Whole," of course, is a word sometimes used to describe a woman in her virgin state. Whereas a man in a winning encounter with a woman might be able to boast that he "took her cherry," or "broke her heart," the woman in this story can boast of having bagged the foolish protagonist's kidney.

            Why his kidney? Why not some other organ? The theft of a kidney adds verisimilitude and a contemporary feel to the story. Kidneys are the only popularly known transplantable organ that one can survive losing and appear the same after losing. Another organ that people frequently hear of transplanting, the heart, requires death of the donor for transplantation.

            It is important for the message this story wants to convey that the victim survive in such a way that " Otherwise, he's in perfect health, but he's missing a kidney." The legend does not wish to tell us that women will kill men outright, so a heart is not stolen. Instead male victims feel intimately wounded, in a way that isn't even immediately obvious to them. In the John Doe version, the protagonist must feel around to his back and find stitches to discover that something vital has been removed. True to the traditions of real manhood, the victim's loss must not be apparent to others. Like a guy who's been hurt but refuses to wear his heart on his sleeve, the protagonist of our story may be the only one who knows what happened to him.

            Another candidate for organ amputation is the penis. There are legends, though, that fill the niche that demands that degree of crudity and obviousness. In these variations on the vagina dentate motif, the woman, either during a rape or consensual fellatio, accidentally or purposely bites off the man's penis. In l99l, Kathy Gelhar, a 25 year old UC Berkeley graduate student, told me this vagina dentate legend from her undergraduate days at Dartmouth: A FOAF (friend of a friend) had read in Glamour magazine that doing exercises that involved squeezing a pencil in her vagina would tighten her grip and increase her lover's pleasure. Sure enough, one day she forgot to remove the pencil and she skewered her lover with it during sexual intercourse.

            Penis amputation and mutilation legends appeal to a different audience and go for a different effect than adult-male-victim-kidney-theft legends. Penis amputation/mutilation legends would not have appealed to John Doe, who espoused feminist ideals and had refined taste. A penis amputation legend would have immediately alienated me, which was apparently not my coworker's goal. These legends are meant for laughs or to overwhelm the listener with disgust, producing the "gross out" effect. They are too obvious to leave the hearer with any lingering feelings of discomfort or anxiety. Too, they impute no expertise to the woman, and there is no sense that the amputated penis will be utilized.

            The kidney theft legend, using a more subtle symbolism, open to wider interpretation, leaves the audience with a vague discomfort. The loss of a penis is obvious; the loss of a kidney, less so. The man without a kidney can still function as he did before in the world of love or other sensual pleasure; only he need be haunted by the awful price he paid for one night of vulnerability.

            In penis amputation stories, the woman's technique is crude - she may use teeth, an ancient blunt weapon. Kidney theft legends exploit anxieties about the refined touch supposed to be common to both medical professionals and women. Like women, medical professionals are people who are supposed to be caregivers, who approach the man's body with what is meant to be a gentler and defter touch. Like women, medical professionals are allowed access to men's bodies in their most vulnerable state. Like women, medical professionals may use the intimacy they gain with the man to harm the man in insidious ways. The weapon of invasive medical science devoid of its "heart" trails associations of Grant's "mad doctors" from Auschwitz to Frankenstein movies, from thalidomide to the surfeit of distasteful news stories covering custody wars over babies conceived in nontraditional ways.

            The kidney theft legends discussed here are not primarily about the evils of medicine without conscience. If they were, victims and perpetrators could be of the same gender and/or ethnicity, and thefts would occur in hometown hospitals, not in exotic vacation spots. These stories are about the price men pay for vulnerability, sensual pleasure, and intimacy. That price is invisible, expert, intimate exploitation. To create an antagonist capable of exacting this cost, modern medicine is harnessed as the villain's frightening weapon of choice, rather than nocturnal visitations in spirit form, or straightforward intercourse, as in folklore items of a past era.

            Bengt Holbek points out in Interpretation of Fairy Tales that one power tales have is the ability to turn a feeling into a concrete image. We may not know what the wolf in little red riding hood symbolizes, Holbek writes, but we experience how it makes us feel (Holbek, 1987:409). Similarly, we may not know what kidney theft symbolizes, but we know how the protagonist must have felt when his body part is stolen, without his permission, while he is surrendering himself to sensual pleasure, and when the thief intends to use the body part again. The man must have felt used.

            "To be used" is a common metaphor for being sexually exploited. This connection reveals why it is so important that the body part removed not be a penis -- there are few practical uses for amputated or mangled penises of which the average person is aware. Almost everyone has heard of kidney transplants. Similarly, It is important that the amputator have skill. Narrators stressed the villain's skill. In Grant's version, the victim must go to a hospital to discover what has happened to him. In John Doe's version, the villain is specifically "somebody who really knew what they were doing." In Jane's version, the victim is rigged up to life-support equipment. This skill mirrors the conviction of someone who has been used that his exploiter is so diabolically clever in the ways of causing human pain that the victim "never knew what hit him." The skill of the perpetrator adds to her perniciousness and the pathetic appeal of the protagonist. No obvious garden-variety hussy hurt our hero; he was used by a pro.

            The kidney wound is always in the victim's back. He truly has been "stabbed in the back." The narrated act of reaching round to discover the source of blood in the sheets, in the John Doe version, or being instructed on where to seek injury by an emergency medical technician, in the email version, adds to the exquisite sense of vulnerability and cluelessness of the protagonist.

            Cross-gender male victim kidney theft legends told in an all-male environment help maintain a fictional world in which women are dangerous and profit from intimacy. In this world, a man's exploitation of women and his distance from them are necessitated, not by male paranoia, but by women and their invisibly wicked ways. In Grant's version, it is pleasure and abandonment themselves which are implicated, along with Third World colonial thieves.

            Such legends told by men to women in one-on-one encounters serve a different purpose. An American proverb states: "Men use intimacy to get sex; women use sex to get intimacy." Men want sex but don't want to give intimacy; women want intimacy, but are cautious about having sex; so goes popular belief. When John Doe told his legend to a woman to whom he was attracted, he was working to create an atmosphere conducive to sexual contact without any provision, by him, of emotional intimacy. The demonstrably predatory nature of women justifies a man's wariness and resistance to giving and sharing. While introducing "facts" that might justify hesitance to being intimate, however, John Doe was making himself physically close to a woman and displaying his attractiveness, thereby creating conditions conducive for sex.

            So far I have argued that efforts to fix on precise interpretations of organ theft legends should note differences between variants in the gender and ethnicity of thieves and victims, and in the legend settings and settings where legends are told. I think comparisons across variants might also provide further interpretative insight. Third World victim and First World thief organ theft legends usually cast children or babies as the victims. Adults could be cast, but they are not. Children and babies may have been chosen as the victims in these legends in order to convey the maximum amount of innocence and vulnerability possible. There is no way that children or babies could have committed any act that made them deserving of organ theft. Babies could not negotiate with international organ merchants. On the other hand, these victims are in unsatisfying but needful exchanges with all-powerful foreigners. Shonder describes how "very cute" Indian children in "colorful indigenous clothing" (Shonder, 1994:2) are a vital and necessary part of Guatemala's tourist industry. Tourists fondle Indian children, photograph them, and give them candy. This brings tourist dollars into the country's shaky economy. Campion-Vincent discusses the spread of First World adoptions in the Third World. In both cases, Third World children are engaged in vital exchanges with First World adults, exchanges in which they have little or no power and can only hope for a crumbs-from-the-table largesse.

            It may be that this perfect innocence and vulnerability of babies and children, and their powerlessness in exchanges in which they can only wait for largesse in one variant of the organ theft legend, can shed some light on the adult male organ theft legends. Perhaps male tellers of this tale also feel vulnerable and innocent and wish to convey that feeling. Perhaps they, too, feel, when entering into an exchange with women, as if they are powerless and can only wait for whatever largesse they may experience.

            In this paper I have attempted to show how attention to a contemporary urban legend could reveal possible truths about how men view women, their own bodies, and minority groups. Circulation of legends of theft of male organs by females serves to create a narrative reality. In this reality, women prey on men, not men on women; women enter and violate men's bodies; and women get something, both a material and a metaphorical something, from the sexual encounter, while men are lessened, both physically and emotionally "used." Too, while women and dark ethnic minorities have liberation movements, it is men who are the real victims.

            I believe the legend gives voice to men's fear of women and minority groups, and their fear that women and minority groups want to, and can, do to majority group men what majority group men can do and have done to women and minority groups. This fear would not have been overtly expressed by John Doe, but I believe they surfaced in the legend he chose to tell as a prelude to courtship.

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