Why do we find it so funny when a man gets hit in the genitals? It’s a regular occurrence in football matches, usually when a defender accidentally blocks a shot with the most sensitive part of his body. Fans and commentators alike treat themselves to a good old snigger. The euphemisms start flowing – ‘caught amidships’, ‘the crown jewels’ and so on. Or, switching to cricket, when Graeme Swann commentated on his former team-mate Alastair Cook: ‘Something got trapped against his leg.’ That injury happened not as Cook was batting, but as he fielded in the slips. The ball evaded his hands and thudded, at considerable pace, into his – let’s throw in a euphemism of our own – ‘gentleman’s area’. So serious was the incident that Cook had to leave the field. Yet the Test Match Special team, and indeed Cook’s fellow player Joe Root, were chuckling away.
This is a confused appeal for enlightenment rather than a po-faced cry for gender equality
No one laughs at the equivalent injury to a woman, even a minor one ranking way below the horrors of FGM. What have the penis and the testicles done to deserve this treatment? Even other men, who have themselves experienced the agony, always crack up when they see it happen. This might make you think it’s a nervous ‘there but for the grace of God…’ reaction. But women don’t laugh at other women getting hurt, so it can’t be that.
It doesn’t matter how serious the injury is; they’re all comedy gold. As a child I read an article in my grandmother’s Reader’s Digest about a skiing accident. The victim’s scrotum, it said, swelled to the size of a volleyball. That’s not the sort of detail you forget. People’s reaction when I mention it is always to wince – and then laugh. Of course, the most serious case of all was John Wayne Bobbitt, the American who achieved worldwide fame in 1993 when his wife cut off his penis as he slept. Mrs B then took the severed member for a drive, throwing it out of the car window into a field. It was subsequently recovered and reattached to Bobbitt in an operation lasting nine and a half hours. The entire globe was in hysterics at that one.
To clarify: this is a confused appeal for enlightenment rather than a po-faced cry for gender equality. I’m as guilty as the next man when it comes to laughing. One of my fondest memories of the 1990 World Cup is from an otherwise nondescript group game in which the camera followed a striker as he ran back up the field. The director was tracking him because he’d just missed a shot on goal, but my friends and I had noticed that in the process the striker had taken a defender’s boot between his legs. ‘Wait for it,’ we said, referring to the famously delayed nature of the pain, ‘he’s going to feel it in a second… yep, he’s slowing down… whoa, there he goes!’ As the commentator interrupted his analysis of the goal attempt to ask why the player had suddenly collapsed in the centre circle, my friends and I chortled our hearts out.
Perhaps we’re so amused at injuries to Big Willy and the Twins (Denzel Washington, Inside Man, 2006) because said parts are so inherently absurd. That’s why they attract euphemisms like ‘Big Willy and the Twins’, and also why they invite ridicule for their appearance. The female anatomy is all curves and softness and graceful lines. But as sculptors have found for thousands of years, the male genitals ruin everything. They dangle, and nothing that dangles can ever be beautiful. There’s no getting round it, or indeed them.
What’s more, their positioning on the anatomy is a design fault. As the old joke says, God has to be a woman, because if she were a man there’s no way she’d have put the testicles on the outside. Evolutionary biologists might tell us they’re there to keep the sperm cool, air-conditioning for the survival of the species – but that doesn’t stop their placement being a design fault when five and a half ounces of cricket ball are heading towards you at 90 miles an hour. Is that why we giggle when impact occurs? Is it because the male – the arrogant half of the species that goes round doing all the posturing and warmongering and speech-making – has got his, or rather his body’s, comeuppance?
Achilles had his heel: for the rest of us men, the problem lies somewhat to the north.
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