I’ve often thought it odd that people equate testicles with strength, even before I ever read the (possibly wrongly attributed but persistent) Betty White quote about balls and vaginas. Balls are spectacularly vulnerable. I know. I’ve kicked a lot of them.
Luckily, I wasn’t the only one who questioned the phrase “grow a pair”. The excellent Steven Baxter recently wrote an article for the New Statesman about exactly that. Here’s a little nugget of it:
‘…It’s irritating nonsense, for several reasons. Courage isn’t inherently a masculine quality, of course, but there’s more to it than that. People often use the phrase “grow a pair” or “strap on a pair” as a way of belittling someone who has shown weakness, or vulnerability – someone who didn’t show the requisite assertiveness that apparently lives in the testes.
As well as that, it reinforces the very worst stereotypes of the “man’s man”: the rush to confrontation, rather than negotiation; a certain headstrong or even bloody-minded quality; the idea of maleness as something that is aggressive, rather than collaborative.
For those of us men who are more team players than the all-conquering alphas we’re supposed to aspire to be, it’s a tiresome thing. Not all of us are meant to shout and bellow and fight our way to success; some of us prefer other ways of doing things. It’s not through a lack of balls, but through a lack of unfeeling uber-competitiveness.
Must we still, in this new century, be talking of men as people who should be nasty, assertive, pushy, unpleasant, in order to be proper men? We’re not all Gordon Ramsay (who has a fondness bordering on obsession for talk of “big bollocks” when upbraiding some poor cookery sap on television).
But there’s something else, too. The real quality that testicles have is staring us in the face. Human males, unlike many other mammals, have external testicles, dangling merrily away from their undercarriage like a couple of lychees in an old leather purse.
This evolutionary quirk exposes the adult male to extremes of pain and suffering at a stroke. A well aimed kick from an attacker, or punch from a young child (children happen to be at the perfect height to connect with full force), and even the toughest man will be reduced to a quivering foetal position of helplessness. There are no words for the pain, which I am pretty sure is definitely entirely worse than childbirth (THIS IS A JOKE).
How humans could ever have believed that a benign (and in many cultures apparently male) creator decided to place a couple of pain grenades hanging invitingly down as they do is a question for anthropologists. What it means, though, is that men’s testicles, far from being a centre of our strength, are our most visible sign of weakness…’
Full article here.
