by Roy Blount
Gently! For, as everyone knows or should quickly be advised, balls are not only potency’s source but also the tenderest things known to man. Achilles’ mother made him 99 percent immortal by holding him by the heel and dipping him in the river Styx. Mother Nature makes the average Joe 99 percent tough by holding on to his nads. Back when these were a jealously guarded male property, the standard riposte to women who claimed that men knew no pain like that of childbirth was “You ever get kicked in the balls?”
Actual testicles are also homely. Of all the external organs of man or woman, they look most like they ought to be internal. (No wonder that a starkly nude man is described as “balls naked” or “standing there with his balls hanging out”) If they grew on the backs of our necks, we would grow our hair long and wear high (soft) collars. Bulls’ balls, hanging down like a heavy-rinded gourd and swaying gravely with the pace, are prepossessing, but human ones look like vaguely pulsing yolks inside a pouch made of neck wattle. Sort of fetal, yet sort of old. And here resides the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
The surface of that pouch, the scrotum, is described by Gray’s Anatomy as “very thin, of a brownish color and generally thrown into folds or rugae [not to be confused with reggae]. It is provided with sebaceous follicles, the secretion of which has a characteristic odor, and is beset with thinly scattered, crisp kinky hairs, the roots of which are visible through the skin.” In spite of all this, a fellow may well share, with a kindhearted friend, an affection for his balls at times, and may also take pleasure in them quietly at home, alone.
A desirable thing for McHeather
Was tickling his balls with a feather.
But what he liked best
Of all the rest
Was knocking them gently together.
Folks have been known, I have heard, to put fish food on them and lower them into a guppy tank. Still, they are not the kind of thing you want to wear on your sleeve, or to take out and wave, in and of themselves, at strangers.
Testes might be prettier, but would be even more vulnerable, were they not cloaked five times anatomically. The scrotum comprises two layers: the integument (the thing with the odor and rugae) and the dartos tunic, which is made up of muscular fibers that are—I would say unregrettably—not striped. Then come three membranes: the cremasteric layer, the internal spermatic fascia and the tunica vaginalis (which, interestingly enough, is Latin for “pussy jacket,” I believe). The outer layer of the testis itself—and this will come as no surprise to anyone who in adolescence suffered a condition of unrelieved excitement known as “love nuts” or “the blue balls”—is bluish white.
The reason males get sterile if the mumps “go down” into the balls is that this outer layer, the tunica albuginea, is so inflexible that when the inner ball swells against it, the tubules are damaged. Ovaries, on the other hand, can expand and ride mumps out. Another thing that can happen to balls is hernia—the intestinal lining ruptures and crowds down into the scrotum. One more thing before the male reader’s stones creep out of sight (they do rise toward the abdomen in response to fear): There has been nearly a 70-percent rise in testicular cancer in the United States since 1972. Some researchers suspect that too-snug bikini briefs are the cause. (Are you listening, Jim Palmer?) The good news—quickly—is that victims of this cancer can be cured in 95 to 100 percent of cases if it is caught early enough. (Look for lumps.)
Sumo wrestlers do exercises enabling them to retract their balls at will. The question remains: “Why are the testes located outside of the body?” I am quoting now from The Missing Dimension in Sex, by Herbert W. Armstrong, pastor general of the Worldwide Church of God.
The Great Architect had a very good reason—but men never learned this reason until quite recent times. … Today it is known that the cause was, simply, that these marvelous and mighty little “factories” generating human life do not perform their wonderful operation of producing life-imparting sperm cells at bodily temperature. They must be kept at a temperature several degrees lower! …
The scrotum … is made up of a kind of skin different from any other in man or woman! It is a non-conductor of heat! It is made up of folds. [Remember the rugae?] In cold temperatures … these folds shrink up, and draw the testes up tight against the body … lest the outside temperature become too cold for these marvelous little “laboratories.”
But, in very warm weather, they stretch out, until the testes are dropped down a considerable distance farther from the warmer-than-normal body.
Thus, this scrotum … acts as an AUTOMATIC TEMPERATURE GAUGE! ….
If you think “mother nature,” blindly, and without mind, intelligence or knowledge, planned and worked all this out, you are welcome to your ridiculous opinion! It was not dumb and stupid “MOTHER nature”—it was the Supreme FATHER-GOD—who instructed CHRIST, who “spoke” and commanded, and the Holy Spirit was the POWER that brought it into being.
Men—even pastors general—tend to get defensive when discussing balls. And understandably so. Women, said Margaret Mead, are “much fiercer than men—they kick below the belt.” That opens up a large area of discussion. You can look at it this way: Since decent men refrain from physically bullying women, and since they ungird their loins before women, it is cruel and perverse of women to undermine those loins, to be “castrating.” Or you can look at it this way: Men have it both ways in the battle of the sexes by exploiting their testosteronic strengths, on the one hand, and by using their balls’ sacred inviolability as a defensive weapon on the other.
Woman has been known to keep man down by self-fulfilling disparagement of his masculinity. Man has been known to batter woman and then to expect her not to damage his fragile ego (down there beneath the rugae) by telling anybody. A man who abuses women often justifies himself by calling them “ball-’ breakers.” A woman who takes pleasure in kicking men in the crotch, literally or figuratively, often justifies herself by calling them insensitive to any other kind of feeling. There is a real sense in which women have men by the balls, and there are real grounds for a cultural imperative against women’s taking that advantage. But there is also a sense in which men have women by the lack of balls. Freud said that the female equivalent of the male fear of castration is fear of the loss of love. Maybe, if enough women wear Charlie perfume and get gold American Express cards, that will change.
It’s a complex matter. Men may speak with relish, among themselves, of “real nut-cutting politics”—or at least I know a man to whom Richard Nixon once spoke thus. Nothing gets so surefire a laugh in a certain kind of movie as somebody getting kneed in the balls. There is something almost macho about a baseball catcher rolling in the dirt around home plate from having caught a ball in the balls. (The Middle Irish for testicle was uirgge.) As long as he is not crying.
Balls are big in sports IT TAKES LEATHER BALLS TO PLAY RUGBY. To make every effort is to “go balls-out.” Ballplayers are probably the only people who often scratch their balls, and adjust them, and hustle them, on national television. Baseball players sometimes amuse themselves by tapping teammates in the groin with a bat and crying, “Cup check”—if the tapped teammate is wearing his aluminum cup, he is all right. Another thing a player may do is to take the cup out of a teammate’s unattended jockstrap and replace it, in the little pocket where the cup goes, with something like a live frog. (A frog’s testes, by the way, are attached to his kidneys. That may explain why he pees a third of his body weight every day. If frogs ever found out about beer …) Pranksters may also put hot liniment in the part of the jockstrap that makes contact with the rugae. In The Bronx Zoo, his memoir of a year with the Yankees, Sparky Lyle recalls what he once did during batting practice in Anaheim.
The gates had just opened, and I was in a crazy mood, so I zipped down my fly and took my nuts out. I was standing in the outfield in my uniform with my balls hanging out, shagging flies, having a good old time, and I must have been doing this for about five minutes until Cec
il Upshaw noticed me. He cracked up. He was laughing so hard, he was drawing a lot of attention, so I stopped. I put my nuts back inside. The next day when I came to the ball park, [Manager Bill] Virdon called me into his office. He said, “I have a favor to ask of you.” I said, “What’s that, Bill?” He said, “Please don’t shag balls in the outfield with your nuts hanging out anymore.”
Balls are, I believe, the only sexual organ that people remove from animals and eat. Zorba the Greek ate goats’ balls raw. Less ballsy people get together and enjoy the fried testes of calves (mountain oysters, prairie oysters, calf fries), roosters (rooster fries), pigs (hog nuts) and squirrels (squirrel nuts). All of these are good and taste different.
Schoolboys talk about balls a lot. “You got a ball?” “Yeah, I got two of them.” How do you tell if a woman’s ticklish? Give her a test tickle. The Ruptured Chinaman, by Wun Hung Lo. Man overboard yelling in a deep voice, “Help, help!” Then, in a high voice, “There’s sharks in these waters.” Somehow or another, every boy by the age of ten has seen photographs of African natives with elephantiasis (always pronounced “elephantitus” by boys) of the balls. And he has heard stories of men who were tortured by having their balls clapped between bricks. And he knows of a teacher or a coach who is so big, and peculiar, because he elected years ago to have one ball removed—which is probably not what Andrew Marvell had in mind when he wrote, “Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball.”
Students of the liberal arts also know ball lore. Errol Flynn gelded lambs with his teeth. Henry James’s asexuality, if not his prose style, may have been the result of a genital injury suffered in youth. Jean-Luc Godard lost a testicle in an accident right before making the movie Numero Deux. The Hollywood producer Walter Wanger shot off one of the balls of an agent, Jennings Lang, in an L.A. parking lot, with regard to Wanger’s then-wife, Joan Bennett. The French title of the Bertrand Blier film Going Places, in which one of the two leading characters is shot in the balls, is Les Valseuses, which literally means “the (female) waltzers” but is slang for “balls.” Picasso is said to have remarked of Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave, “Look at the balls. They’re so tiny. It says everything about Michelangelo.” Picasso’s are said to have been bigger than average.
Balls abound in figures of speech. Don’t get them in an uproar. Wouldn’t give him the sweat off mine. Get your rocks off. Pocket pool. Brass ones. Nuts to you. Don’t bust my balls. Make a balls of something. “Ballocks in brackets” is, according to Eric Partridge, “a low term of address to a bowlegged man.” (The way orchids got their name, in case it has been bothering you, is that their roots look like testicles. Having only one ball is monorchidism. Having undescended balls is cryptorchidism)
According to Stuart Berg Flexner in Hear America Talking, men in this country commonly called testicles “balls” by the 1880s. Flexner cites such other terms for ballsiness as gumption, spunk, grit (from the early 1800s), sand (1870s), guts (1890) and backbone (1905). “Balls has meant manly courage since about 1935,” says Flexner, who doesn’t mention ballsy. The Underground Dictionary, 1971, defines ballsey (sic) as “very forward, aggressive and impulsive. When used to describe an aggressive female, it can have a negative or positive connotation, but it is always complimentary to males.” Times change. Aggressive is still, I think, ambivalent when applied to women, but ballsy now is not only favorable, it’s almost tender.
When, around 1924, American newspapers came to grips with the “rejuvenation” craze (older men seeking renewed vigor through injections of goat-ball essence), the papers “found it necessary,” wrote H. L. Mencken, “to invent a new set of euphemisms. So far as I have been able to discover, not one of them ever printed the word testicles. A few ventured upon gonads, but the majority preferred glands or interstitial glands, with sex glands as an occasional variation.” Not even Mencken ventures upon balls.
So perhaps it is not surprising that throughout most of American literature, balls have been conspicuous, if at all, by their absence. You have to read The Sun Also Rises carefully to gather that Jake Barnes has had his shot off in the war. “What happened to me is supposed to be funny,” says the Hemingway man, keeping his cool, but he also mentions that an Italian officer saluted him in the hospital by saying, “This man has given more than his life.”
But balls’ low literary profile is more than a matter of prudery. You don’t run into many testicular symbols, even, in literature. Oh, maybe Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee; East Egg and West Egg; the first two strikes against Mighty Casey. But what are those few instances compared with all the dragons, snakes, mushrooms, fairies (the male ones that wear red caps, get into everything, and shrink and grow unpredictably), trees, towers, guns, poles, rocket ships and umbrellas (not Mary Poppins’s, I guess) that betoken you know what.
Not even Freud finds much drama in balls, per se. He does propose that tripartite symbols such as the cloverleaf and the fleur-de-lis represent the whole male cluster. And he had a patient, “the wolfman,” who was so afraid of being afraid of what he was really afraid of—being castrated by his father—that he preferred to be afraid of being devoured by a wolf. (Today, of course, analysands avoid vulpine-ingestion phobia for fear of being diagnosed too brusquely.) But castration complexes run to dreams of long, upstanding things being lopped off. To Freud, “the more striking and for both sexes the more interesting component of the genitals” is “the male organ.”
The male organ, is it? So why doesn’t anybody want to be called a prick, a schmuck or a real hard-on? Why is it ballsy that everybody wants to be?
Maybe we are just going through a phase. Maybe it will pass. Maybe the Balls Boom grows from a dawning awareness that the world cannot afford, now that the phallic warhead has grown so overwhelming, to let truly potent nations exercise their balls anymore. So everybody talks about balls. But real balls, as we have seen, don’t call attention to themselves. It may be that all this talk is just a lot of balls.
I might point out, however, that it takes some balls to leave this business dangling on such a low double entendre.
THOUGHT SHE WAS EVE
We were good together,
Nothing up our sleeve.
She didn’t know me from Adam
And I thought she was Eve.
Those were the those were the those were the days,
Oh what a beau- what a beautiful phase,
When I said, “Hello, Madam,”
She didn’t know me from Adam
And I thought she was Eve.
We met in an upstairs shower
At a friend’s home New Year’s Eve.
She entered through the curtain
As I was about to leave.
And I stayed, I stayed, I stayed for a while
Because she gave me, gave me a smile
When I said, “Hello, Madam,”
She didn’t know me from Adam
And I thought she was Eve.
The two of us were naked,
I thought we were free.
If she knew anything different,
She didn’t let on to me.
Oh those were the, those were the, those were the days,
Oh what a beau- what a beautiful phase. …
But then a snake came creeping,
And I, at least, knew shame.
It turned out Lois Ambrose
Was actually her name.
And there was Adam Ambrose
And also Art McKee
And eight or nine more fellows
That she didn’t know from me.
Oh that was the end, was the end of the days,
Oh what a beau- what a beautiful phase,
When I said, “Hello, Madam,”
She didn’t know me from Adam
And I thought she was Eve.
AFTER PINK, WHAT?
EVEN WHEN WE WERE kids and navels were really something, Eddie Utterbund foresaw that the kind of magazines we perused in his garage would go furthe
r than the rest of us dreamed. The day would come, he kept telling us, when we could walk right into a nice drugstore where everyone knew us, put down half a dollar, and see everything.
“Aw, naw,” we’d say.
“Yeah, yeah, they will. They’ll show the hair and everything.”
“Of old hoars and things.” That was the way we thought you spelled it. Because we’d never seen it spelled.
“Naw. Of majorettes.” We didn’t believe him. I don’t think we even wholeheartedly wanted to believe him. It was too much. But Utterbund, except that he didn’t figure inflation, was right.
And he grew up to be a media consultant, so I still run into him occasionally. He has maintained a strong interest in skin magazines. I remember he predicted a couple of years ago, “Next they’ll show pink.”
I was ashamed to admit I even understood what “show pink” meant. “Aw, no,” I said. “Who really wants to look at pink? Anyway, pictures of it.”
“Hm,” he said, as if to imply that I protested too much. “They’ll show pink. They’ll show purple.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s there.”
Utterbund’s concern with that kind of thing has always struck me as too explicit or something. But after all, one does wonder these days—just as one once wondered about logical positivism or dissent—where dirty magazines can go next. So when Utterbund called me the other day and said he was himself planning to start a new “breakthrough” dirty magazine and needed a contributing editor, I agreed to meet him for lunch.
“What is left for dirty magazines?” I asked him.
“Well, obviously,” he said, “there are lines that still haven’t been crossed.” He was having the huevos foo young. He likes Cuban-Chinese restaurants because they remind him of an act an uncle of his once saw in pre-Castro Havana, featuring a donkey and bound feet. “We haven’t had glossy intromission yet. Or even a full erection in the slicks.