Girls will often complain of the sensitivity of their bosoms. It’s not that I parade around roughhousing titties, it’s just that I’ve noticed an accidental lateral nudge is enough to rile them into grimaced claims about pain that’s the feminine equivalent to a kick to the balls.
No, madame, breasts are not your equivalent to balls. Those are called “ovaries,” and, fortunately for you, they are tucked away in your stomach cavity, where they are immune from dodgeballs and little boys’ feet. I had the revelation at the age of 10, lying face up beneath the monkey bars that, if I were a luckier man, my testicles never would have dropped. By the time boys reach the age of 16, studies show that two out of five will have endured a forceful kick to the groin, each one more painful than any inconvenient jiggling you may have felt in your chest. And that statistic is probably higher when you consider dangers outside of bullying.
As the distinguished owner of a nutsack, I would like to tell you a short story about pain. The scene is the bewitching hour, one Friday night. While balancing on a fencepost, alcohol and masculinity have combined to create the imagined belief that I am NBA superstar Earl Boykins preparing for a 42-inch vertical leap. The cigar in my mouth emits a jet-like trail of smoke as I whoosh through the air toward the adjacent roof ledge, and I clasp the shingles in a climactic moment worthy of a cymbal crash. My drink-laden motor skills fail at the task, and I plummet toward earth, painfully subject to Newton’s laws. Though a picket fence stopped earth and my testicles from ever meeting, a meeting three weeks in duration was held between black and blue on my scrotum.
The male testes, which dangle precariously from the body like those fragile glass Christmas balls we break one of every year from the tree, are covered in pressure sensitive nerves capable of detecting small amounts of force and amplifying the feeling of any contact made.
The female breast, on the other hand, consists of fat, fibrous connective tissue, fat, milk tubes, lymph vessels and fat. Fat, besides being stored energy, is medically described as a cushion for our vital organs to protect them from trauma.
Wait, girls are complaining about being hit in cushioning, and comparing it to taking a blow to hypersensitive capsules of the essence of life? Seems like if I’d have only had a pair of tits to protect my testicles, I wouldn’t have walked funny for a month after my fence ride, or had to wear that pinching jockstrap in junior high baseball. And I certainly don’t see women being made to wear protective boob-straps to defend their so called liabilities.
But ladies, I cannot overlook birth, or as I like to call it, “The Ultimate Pain” or “The Biological Stretching Contest.” At the time of delivery, your uterus is 25 times its pre-pregnancy size, and the cervix, like a magician, will produce a 10 centimeters opening out of thin air. That, and you have to deal with what is arguably a bizarre sort of stomach indigestion for nine months. Makes me feel sheepish for worrying about whether that quarter I swallowed playing quarters three weeks ago will make it through my large intestine.
Since ultimately both sexes can die of pain shock, I see no point in trying to pick a winner. Pointing out that a kick to the balls hurts more than a shot to the boobs would be pointless since women spend the better half of their lives in hormonal turmoil anyways. All we really need is, from this day forward, a gender-wide commitment to devote the male groin and the female chest to sexual pleasure, not to injury.
For questions, comments or to wish Daniel a happy 22nd birthday today, preferably not gifting him with a kick to the balls, write to dgingras@calpoly.edu.