Castrati were (B L E S S E D L Y "were"!) male singers castrated before undergoing puberty in order to retain...mostly...the vocal tone of their youth. The emasculations that created castrati took place in Italy from the 16th to 19th centuries in part because Roman Catholicism disallowed female singers in its services at this time. But select castrati also became renowned operatic singers as opera developed around the dawn of the 17th century. Before reading this question, were you familiar with castrati?

Beside the high vocal range castrati maintained, they experienced other effects of emasculation. Lacking the hormone that makes bones harden, they were generally quite tall, long-limbed and barrel-ribbed, the last quality allowing them to hold notes extraordinarily long times. And though Pope Sixtus V ordered all the tenor singers in the choir at St. Peters Basilica in Rome in 1589 to be replaced by castrati, the operation(s) that made a boy a castrato were never legal; and many boys died undergoing the procedure. Do, you, like I, find the practice of creating castrati perverse and abominable?

If there's an upside for anyone for some in the practice of making boys castrati, opera audiences, Catholics , and guests of royal courts were apparently treated to vocal styling no one has--legally, anyway?-- been able to hear in live settings for over a century. The Vatican banned castrati in 1903. For the fortunate few castrati who became opera stars, like Farinelli (born Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi,; a trailer for the 1994 based on his life accompanies this question), they became wealthy and sought after by women who could have them as intimate partners without fear of pregnancy. Does that kind of tradeoff for the loss of one's reproductive ability and masculine essence seem worth it to you?

At least one castrato from the practice's original era lived to witness the dawn of of sound recoding technology and have his voice preserved for posterity. Alessandro Moreschi was in his mid 40's when he recorded the song with this question. Though it's not this clip but another of Moreschi's recordings tat was uploaded to YouTube by someone claiming to be a modern day castrato. Which do you find more unsettling: the unnaturally feminine tone of Moreschi's voice here or the idea that there are still castrati in the 21st century?