I can talk about the medieval Europe case.

The explicit reference I suspect the linked article is citing (my uni doesn't subscribe to that journal, sorry) is the fifteenth-century Malleus Malificarum, a manual for hunting witches. The text actually devotes quite a bit of space to the discussion of whether witches actually steal penises, or only make it seem like they did. Being the Malleus Malificarum, it also includes a few rather sensational exempla. Such as, for example, the witches who steal 20-30 penises kind of as pets, and keep them alive in birds' nests, where they "appear to" move around, "eating oats and grass." BUT, Kramer stresses, it really is just an illusion! When a local man went looking for the penis he thought he'd lost, Kramer and Sprenger write, the witch told him he couldn't take the biggest one, because it belonged to the local priest. "Really and truly," they right, he had been deceived, and only felt the smoothness where something in fact was.

The MM (and potentially folk tales on which it's building) are hardly the birth of this tradition. Textually--who knows about the oral tradition--there is a looooong medieval discussion of the relationship between magic and impotence. Again, this is not a phenomenon unique to the Middle Ages (Robert Biggs finds it in ancient Mesopotamian incantations), but it has a very specific cultural context.

The medieval Church became very concerned with regulating marriage and reproduction. Since impotence--true impotence--was grounds for the unthinkable, divorce, they were very, very concerned with situations of impotence. Canon (Church) law is developed in the Middle Ages through specific cases that came before an ecclesiastical court (and a bunch of other things), so whatever you want to say about "actual" belief in sorcery, you can see how a couple wanting a divorce might claim impotence--and people who did not want to grant the divorce would go hunting for the magical cure, such as finding a lockbox and throwing it into a river (that's a thirteenth-century example).

By 1400 or so, though, the situation in the legal texts at least had pretty much played out. The guidelines for recognizing sorcery-caused impotence and various cures had been drawn up, laid out, and accepted. But the situation on the ground was changing. Instead of individual sorcerers working harmful magic for their own benefit, people started to fear witches: Satan's minions, attacking whatever was central to life and Christianity. No surprise that fertility was a big component, right? References to witches causing impotence start to appear earlier in the fifteenth century, and then the 1486 MM goes all in.

There is, of course, an undershade of misogyny and specifically beliefs about women's sexuality underlying the European situation as well. Whether or not women's situations grew worse in the late Middle Ages/Reformation is a HUGE scholarly debate. I will say that around this time, there is a very big explosion in texts discussing misogyny on both sides (well, within a medieval framework--this is not Feminism 101, just to be clear). So whether or not things were actually getting worse, some people (women and men!) were starting to raise the idea that women being discriminated against was not always a good thing--and there was quite a literary backlash. (Of course our sources are educated people, but that's also who was writing the MM). Hence "Malleus MalificArum" is the Hammer of Exclusively-Female Witches.

This kind of investigation is cool--taking a look at something that is "trans-historical" and showing how it makes sense within a particular context. Hopefully some people with interests in other times and places can chime in, too.

~~

Catherine Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (2006)

Moira Smith, "The Flying Phallus and the Laughing Inquisitor: Penis Theft in the Malleus Malificarum," Journal of Folklore Research 39 (2002)

Robert Biggs, Mesopotamian Potency Incantations (1967)

totally crediting Rider for the Biggs citation

The Malleus Maleficarum seems pretty concerned with what exactly witches can and can't do to a man's "virile member", but other pieces of the general European witch craze show no evidence at all of having a penile component. At Salem, for example, the initial "victims" were girls, and the reported symptoms of bewitchment were unrelated to genitals. So, I'd say yes, at least at first, but that it's a mistake to blame the whole phenomenon on a single condition.

I think it's also worth linking the timing of the witch craze to both the rise of superstitious beliefs during the Early Modern Period and to crop failures resulting from the Little Ice Age. The effect of witchcraft on crops is another recurrent theme of the MM, and also seen in other outbreaks of witchcraft hysteria. (It's also been suggested, and I like the notion, that the concurrent werewolf trials of France were a direct result in increasing contact between hungrier wolves and humans as the changing climate forced them to seek out other food sources.)