Psycholijay looks at the “ball-kicking analogy”.

Subtitle: Jay gets mad at the internet again.  

                So I ran across this the other day and once again another black layer of tar was added to the dried up bitter core of cynicism that I have where my soul used to be. Many of you may have noticed I despise people oversimplifying complex issues because it leads to people thinking that there are simple solutions to complex issues. Regardless, somebody decided to make a poor analogy, and in response I’m going to look at it in the hopes of exorcising some vitriolic distain before it festers long enough in me to give me cancer of the everything.

“Hi, guys. Imagine if one day you got kicked in the nuts, really hard, on purpose.
You doubled over. Felt the pain. Nearly passed out. Nearly puked.
Then you got kicked again. And again.”

                Okay, I’m imagining it, thanks… I’m also imagining the laugh track, the comedic timing, and the laughter of passers-by. Also; if we’re assuming I’ve been kicked in the balls by a woman I’m picturing the well documented knee-jerk response onlookers have which is “What did he do to her to deserve that?” because, you know, assault against a man’s primary sexual organs can be justified so dismissively.

“Imagine it happened to you when you were 12.
Imagine it was an 38 year old woman who did it.
Imagine it was your mother’s friend and business partner.”

                Interesting fact: the women you are describing is an equal opportunity “Ball kicker” and will kick the proverbial balls of underage girls as well as boys. This does not require much imagination because this “Ball kicker” represents a demographic that routinely escapes persecution because of the reluctance of people to acknowledge that women are just as frequently instigators of assault and sexual assault as men are. Equality and all that. Let’s face it; people would be faster to lynch “uncle bad touch” at an accusation from a 12yr old then they would “auntie bad touch”.

“Imagine you told your parents and they didn’t believe you.
Imagine they never mentioned it again.
You learned to keep quiet about it.
You learned to be scared.”

                This is the point my blood pressure goes up another precious notch. You’re suggesting that being kicked in the balls or having somebody pin you down and force themselves on you is to equivalent to say; Uncle/Auntie bad-touch copping a quick feel/grope while their parent’s back is turned. The latter being the most insidious and most common of sexual assaults against minors.  I cannot imagine any parent, (and I have met some daaaaaaamn crappy parents) who would show disbelief or indifference when faced with a crying, screaming and clearly physically damaged child.  But let’s assume your injuries and obvious trauma was somehow met with cold indifference because you are being raised as the unnatural clone-baby of Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and the Führer Dad is too busy invading Poland to listen to you and Premier Dad thinks you are weak and a waste of space. A child might react how you describe, but they are more likely to become emotionally violent and volatile, a kid that has a lot of serious emotional and behavioural difficulties. You paint the picture of some meek little wilting wallflower when, in fact, this kind of treatment would create a chair-throwing, foul-mouthed, finger/toe-breaking, spitting, biting, emotionally unstable ball of screwed up emotions that I have to do my best to unravel and strengthen out so they can have a vaguely normal life as an adult. Kids don’t “learn” meekness and passivity unless they experience constant and unrelenting physical abuse and privation. Even “Genie” who was kept hidden in a basement for nearly 14 years in a state of privation and regularly beaten by her parents would fight back on occasion. Individual incidents of abuse create kids that fight back, and they fight back against everything and everyone.

                I’m mildly vexed that you seemed to ignore the fact that there are a dozen different charities and government institutions for “ball kicking” that you can turn to if your parents won’t listen, not to mention the teachers in the school you’ll spend half your developing life with. It’s also worth pointing out that young boys and men who ask for help from these charities because of abusive women are routinely turned away, laughed at, or referred to abusers hotlines.

“Imagine that later your father explained that women just wanted to kick men in the nuts, so as a boy you had to be careful.
Imagine he had very detailed practical advice on this.
Imagine you started spending your life planning on avoiding being kicked in the nuts.”

                I love how crap/unrealistic advice here comes from the father. I get it Dad = Bad, Mother = Devine being of truth and light. Wouldn’t want to alienate your audience by depicting a mother as a shitty parent would you? Telling your child that some women are predatory and dangerous is not bad advice, because some people are predatory and dangerous. Giving your child advice about how to avoid the bad people is not bad parenting, kindly go and fist yourself with a rock-salt glove for depicting this as a bad thing. We created fairy tales to teach children basic rules about “bad people” in a way their minds could understand, as they grow up we build on this to gradually reveal to them the terrible truth that the world can be a dangerous and scary place but we can mitigate that by taking care of ourselves.  If you’re planning/ruining your life based around the possibility of what might happen based on irrational fear then you need psychiatric help for anxiety disorders, and before anyone starts throwing rape statistics at me I remind you that if we are talking about proportionate response here, men are the OVERWHELMING majority of victims of every single form of violent crime (including rape; even by the biased definition of “only a penis owner can be a rapist,” thank you US prison system). Yet somehow the basic steps men take to try and avoid being the victim of crime are not considered to be unfair or somehow demeaning.

“Imagine you became aware that women, including much older women—even elderly women—were always looking at your nuts. Women on the street would follow you. They’d tell you what a nice package you have. They’d tell you you’d be hot if you just showed off your nuts a little more.”

                This analogy I don’t have a problem with, the behaviours is invasive and weird. But it also ignores the fact that predatory women don’t behave like this. Men are more overt with their intentions in this respect, typically in social interactions men are not subtle.  They don’t drop any kind of hints, they don’t dance around an issue in the hopes the other person will pick it up, they tend to state, plain and simple, what their intentions are. Thus; sometimes these kind of behaviours are merely what you see on the surface, weird/creepy “compliments”.

                To continue this “imagine” game along your thread: “imagine an industry focussed around the power and beauty of men’s balls, imagine you saw them all the time in advertisements, movies and other media. Imagine you could get away with a speeding fine by flashing a bit of ball at a female cop, imagine if you could feel sexually empowered at the women who would go out of their way to be nice to you because you’re showing a bit of ball today.” The analogy falls down when you point out that there is a very real power behind female sexuality, and while industries and some women enjoy exploiting that, it doesn’t make it “bad”.  Like all things of power; people feel drawn to it, hence the weirdo comments, and the proverbial people who walk around with their “balls swinging” because they like to feel the empowerment showing a bit of ball gets them in society from the opposite sex. Again; this is a very complex and multi-faceted part of western society, and you can’t dismiss it with your crap “ball” analogy.

                Lastly, women tend to abuse much more subtly. Groping, “hugging” and manipulating vulnerable boys into situations where the only natural recourse in their minds is sexual activity, an example you won’t see in the papers but I have seen at work would be “You’re sick, but don’t worry, your mother has medicine for you.”

“Imagine you started wearing clothes to hide them. You bought uncomfortable protective gear.
All the posters and advertisements in all the magazines featured men’s crotches, though frequently not their heads.
Women’s feet were frequently featured in prominent juxtaposition.”

                Uncomfortable protective gear you say? Almost like the gear men wear in sporting events where being kicked in the balls is a real danger?  Mien Leben! All those poor athletes are victims of the vicious “ball kicking culture” or.. or… they are taking steps to protect themselves in an environment where the danger of injury is increased, like all sensible people.

                As for the second part of this? Show me one advertisement where the overriding message is “Rape that bitch” to sell their product (and anti-rape ad’s don’t count). You’re conflating natural, healthy respect and desire of human sexuality and making it all into a sinister metaphor about how all sex is now rape. Grow up.

                And if you do view all human sexuality with rapey implications, seek therapy.

                “Imagine most of your friends all told you about getting kicked in the nuts.

Imagine none of them had ever told anybody else.

Imagine all the older girls at school would make jokes about kicking you in the nuts.

Imagine all the laughter. The jokes are all so funny.

Jokes.”

                Are you even from plant earth? I don’t have to imagine this, it’s a thing. People make fun of guys being kicked or otherwise damaged in the balls all the time. In facts when a guy gets his penis cut off popular female celebrities and their all-female audience get to go on public TV and have a good old laugh about it. “Hahahah that guy’s life is ruined and he’s been mutilated! Hahahah Girl power! Amirite ladies?!”

                Find me one all-male (audience included) talk show where they have an entire segment dedicated to having a good ‘ol laugh at some poor women who’s been raped and I’ll concede this point.

“Imagine you went to church and were told that God made girls to want your body, so you should protect your nuts at all costs.
Imagine the minister said it was your responsibility as a maturing boy not to do anything that would make girls think about kicking you in the nuts.”

                Okay, ignoring he whole “power of female sexuality” because we’ve already been over that, as somebody who’s worked with teenagers I can tell you that when you start growing into a man or a woman you start to enjoy the power your new body gives you. Boys revel in lifting heavy things, being tall, running for miles and being able to play sport at a much higher level than before. Girls enjoy the social power they get as blossoming women, they love the attention their new “boy magnets” get off teenage boys who are going to struggle to rein in those biological urges with all their hormones flooding their systems, girls of this age can literally convince their classmates to murder one another and/or kill themselves and they’ll do it, that is a LOT of social power. Boys are taught to control their strength and use it responsibly, the adage “don’t hit girls” springs to mind here, but there are hundreds of other ways that parents and the schools system tries to teach boys how to rein in the impulse to exploit the power of their post-puberty bodies, girls are told this too but their lessons are different because the power they wield is different. I'm not suggesting that girls encourage their own attacks, but I am saying that with power comes responsibility and it's important to teach girls to use that power responsibly for their own protection. There are bad people out there who don't care how many time you try and "teach them not to rape" because they have long ago decided that societies laws don't apply to them.

                Though I agree that throwing religion into the mix is needlessly confusing and borderline unethical.

“Imagine you found a girlfriend, and you loved each other.
One night, you were fooling around and she kicked you as hard as she could in the nuts, and it all came rushing back.
Imagine she acted like obviously you wanted to be kicked in the nuts, mocked you for getting emotional.”

                “Hey, remember that time the person you loved unconditionally accidentally raped you? No, me neither.” Seriously, this is retarded.  You don’t “Accidentally” rape your SO, and most human beings have care and compassion for people they are intimate with and would be horrified at the thought that they had hurt them in such an invasive and horrible way. You’re constructing a strawman of such insane proportions that I’m tempted to declare an open-air festival around it before we set it on fire and take a tonne of drugs.

“Imagine you told the police, and they asked you what you’d been wearing before she kicked you in the nuts. Asked if you’d had a drink. Asked what you might have been doing before. Had you been naked? Kissing?
You had.
You left.”

                Man… man I need those drugs right about now.

                You are literally retarding the fight against sex crimes.

                You are telling women that the police won’t believe them when in reality they are required by law to investigate every sexual assault and rape allegation because of this very myth.

                The reason that they ask questions is because it’s a police investigation, you double-fisted fart-balloon! Establishing context, especially in a he-said she-said crime is key in getting a solid prosecution, especially when you have people who will abuse the law for their own ends using the system designed to protect victims. Even if you answer “yes” to all the questions you laid out the police will still investigate because they are required by law to do so, for their part they will likely invite the other person to the station to answer some questions and attempt to get them to confess and/or implicate themselves somehow because there is very little hard evidence to go on. What’s more because they can’t charge them based on an accusation they are not even required to attend the interview if they don’t want to, because your word carries as much weight as theirs (yay equality!) and we don’t yet live in a society where you can have criminal charges levelled at somebody based on a single accusation.

               Lastly, the reason police have to investigate impartially is because people lie, and people lie more when they see a clear advantage with little to no repercussions for their actions. if proving somebody raped in a he-said she-said case is hard, proving they lied about it in maliciously is almost impossible.

“Imagine there were laws that said that if a wife kicked her husband in the nuts it wasn’t assault.”

                I’m going to break this up, because I risk having some kind of rage-based seizure otherwise. The reason “marital rape” laws didn’t exist until recently was because it was covered by another law, ie: “rape”. We now have a super-special category of rape that happens within a marriage. This is to address the ‘ol “he said she said” thing again, when two people are in front of you and one is pointing the finger, you have to depend on a lot of circumstantial evidence, and let’s face it most of the sex that happens within the bonds of matrimony was consensual so it’s even harder to prove rape within this context, hence the special law that means it’s now easier to prove rape in this context, but only by women against men of course, in UK law women can’t rape men. On that note “imagine if you went to the police because some guy had kicked you hard in the labia, only to be told that men cannot be charged with labia-kicking by law”.

“Imagine you heard about men with ruptured testicles who had to pay for their own forensic reports”

               

                ‘merica! Welcome to ultra-capitalism. You can have low taxes, but your public services will reflect that. If you don’t like it you should have voted for Burnie.

“Imagine you saw statistics showing only 1% of kickings resulted in conviction.”

Imagine you lived in a world where people in prominence of media still pedal this myth. Imagine they only did it to stir the pot of outrage and indignation in order to further their careers at the expense of the fearful and desperate. Imagine what living shits they must be. Oh wait, you don’t have to imagine it, I’m seeing it in your twitter account.

For the record you lie.

And you are a terrible person.

“Imagine a girl was caught kicking a boy repeatedly in the nuts while he was passed out drunk.
Imagine the judge let her off, because she was worried about the damage to the girl’s future prospects. She was a star swimmer with a scholarship.
Imagine this happened all the time.”

Yes. Wouldn’t that be awful.

Imagine women got prosecuted so little for equivalent crimes that were the same standards used equally then 29/30 of their men wouldn’t be in prison. Imagine the government even wanted to close all women’s prisons in the UK…oh wait, you don’t have to imagine this either, it’s real.

“Imagine if one day men all started talking about how almost all of them had, at one point or another, been kicked in the nuts.
Imagine if women’s main concern was what false accusation might do to their reputations, and whether this new honesty might ruin the mystery of sex.”

                Imagine if the men turned around and started shaming the women that came forwards who had also been horribly assaulted? Imagine if the men that had allowed powerful women to kick them in the nutts in exchange for career advancement at the expense of other men who would not take such a deal began to label all women as potential abusers, and then turned around to declare this practice was now unethical and should be stopped. Imagine if women who expressed a very real concern that they were at risk from physical harm from the backlash of such an accusation had their careers ruined and were forced to publicly apologise to society in general and men specifically with the implication that they weren't allowed to speak as a women on a "men's issue" because only men are assaulted in that way. Imagine if the women openly stated that being blackmailed into ball-kicking against your will was much more sinister and litigious then exchanging ball-kicking for favours (though both still wrong) were blacklisted and subsequently forced out of their jobs by women. Imagine if we gave a whole gender the power to socially and financially ruin somebody based on a single accusation, and then derided those who worried that out of four billion people there would be those who would abuse that power. Imagine that.

                Imagine taking one very complex social phenomenon that effects millions of people and declaring one side virtuous, good and beyond reproach while the other to be liars, manipulators and minions of Satan. Imagine that.

                “Imagine a woman ran for President.

Imagine audio came out of her bragging about making it a regular practice to kick men in the nuts without even introducing herself.

Imagine she lost no support for this.”

                Imagine their rival for the presidency had openly declared that women were the real victims of ball-kicking. Imagine that. (Not disagreeing here though , Trump is named after a bowel movement for a reason).

I guess you had to find a way to get your political agenda into this somehow. This has nothing to do with “ball-kicking” and everything to do with you abusing a serious and vile crime in order to score points for your “side”. Kindly go and ram a cheese grater up your chocolate starfish. The political mess goes on for a while so I’m going to ignore that.

“Now imagine that being kicked in the nuts might result in you having to create, in your body, a genetic replication of the person who kicked you.
And imagine that the judge intended to make sure you’d have to carry it.
Imagine that was the *reason* she was chosen.”

                Imagine you could be forced to pay for a child your rapist had? imagine if they file for this and escape any mention of prosecuting you despite clear evidence they raped while you were under age Oh no wait, I don’t have to imagine that it happens. Your legal system is a wreck America, just sayin’.

“I can't imagine women's rage today, but this exercise, while abstract, helped me get nearer to it than I'd been.
Be kind to women, guys. Today and every day.
If you see somebody being cruel to women, or abusive, or violent?
Kick 'em in the nuts.”

                You do realize by your own analogy you have declared that an appropriate response to somebody being “cruel” to a woman is to rape them? Girls are plenty capable of kicking guys in the nuts on their own if they’re being abused or are the victims of violence, women don’t need some white knight to come swooping down to save them. They need to be told they can take an active role in their own lives rather than expecting others to “save” them. You don’t empower somebody by telling them they are weak. Stop telling women to be afraid, stop telling them they need to live in fear. It’s dishonest, it’s cruel, and it’s creating a generation of screwed up girls. You want to help women and girls? Start teaching them self-reliance, teach them to be masters of their own lives, teach them that to take steps to protect yourself is empowering and not a reason to be afraid. And for the love of almighty spider-Buddha stop telling them that their empowerment must come at the expense of boys and men. We are partners on this plant, not rivals.