The Family Jewels

In the garden of Eden lay Adam,

Complacently stroking his madam.

And loud was his mirth,

For on all of the earth

There were only two ball,s and he had'em.

Those were the days. Now everybody has balls, or claims to Fellows used to seek ladies of sensitivity, gentleness and full blouses. Now the "ballsy" woman is in. The stereotype of gay men as people with exquisite taste in home furnishing is giving way to that of people with full baskets. There are even signs that ballsiness is regaining widespread acceptability in straight men. And it was no slur on Billie Jean King when people said it took balls for her to go on TV and admit to having had a lesbian affair.

In New York, the cable-TV personality who calls himself Ugly George--his own pair rendered clearly if unwelcomely evident by tight pants--roams the streets of Manhattan "looking," as he mutters in voice-over. "for goils with balls," Which is to say girls willing to pose naked for his TV show, which, whatever else may be said of it (yuck. ptui). has . . . balls.

Balls are a politically morally, sexually neutral quality. Israel has them, and so does Qaddafi. Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, Roy Cohn and Mother Teresa. Barbara (continued on page 184)Family Jewels(continued from page 115) Walters and Abbie Hoffman. J. R. Ewing and Dolly Parton. Balls' wholesale dissemination may have begun when Nor-man Mailer, laboring in the two-"fisted" shadow of Ernest Hemingway (who wrote often of castration), described Truman Capote as "a ballsy little guy," and Capote began quoting Mailer on that point with high-pitched relish. Or maybe it was in 1960. when Jasper Johns executed a work called Painting with Two Balls, encaustic and collage on canvas "with objects." The objects were a pair of metal spheres stuck into a crevice of the painting. If a painting can have balls, why not a woman? Now an Australian New Wave group called Mi-Sex sings:

It's got bolls,

It's got balls.

It's written on the walls,

Graffiti crimes in the shopping malls.

There are dildos these days with balls you can fill with hot water and squeeze.

Nuts, grapes, stones, testes, testicles, cojones, huevos, gonads, the family jewels. Testis, the singular, is Latin for "witness." The ancient Romans, it is sometimes explained, held their hands over their genitals when taking an oath. But if that were true, you'd think you'd run across, in perusing ancient texts, such expressions as "Cross my balls and hope to die" (testes meos traicios et mori spero) and "I swear on a stack of testicles" (a cumulum testium juro). Serious dictionaries prefer to speculate that testes got their Latin name from being deemed witnesses of virility. And yet what are balls shaped like? Eggs. It works out neatly, in a way. Balls have a feminine shape, and they send the male off in search of other feminine shapes.

Of course, Shere Hite has recently made the highly debatable assertion that it is only conditioning that makes men "feel that a vital part of being a man is to [ugh] orgasm in a vagina." But there is no denying that each ball contains 800 convoluted threadlike "seminiferous tubules" (altogether some 1800 feet in length), wherein sperm are produced by the hundreds of millions. And between the tubules is interstitial tissue whose job is to secrete testosterone--a hormone that stimulates mustaches, aggressiveness and heavy muscularity, all of which have traditionally aided men in their quest for places to sow the sperm. Still rather neat so far.

But that is not the whole story. All those sperm cells, those teeming halves of little babies, impel the male not only to show up at female doors with corsages (incidentally, orchid is Greek for "testicle." which may account for the pride with which girls used to wear them on prom dresses, sometimes called "ball gowns") but also to kick ass, climb, wander, make money, jack off, outdrink friends. build high-rises, drive Alfa Romeos very fast and force some less hairy prisoner to do the laundry. They impel the male to do nearly everything, in fact, except settle down and help take care of whole little babies. So things don't always work out so neatly. Especially when women, too, get heavily into balls. (The average human testis weighs one ounce: fortunately for the underendowed, they are all but impossible to weigh. A sperm whale's run around 50 pounds apiece.)

As a matter of fact, with androgyny all in the currency, balls in straight men have lately been looked down upon. "Macho," every bit as invidious a term as "bitchy," has been used to take the bloom off of everything from shotguns to law enforcement. Alan Alda. a prime example of unpushy, sympathetic, increasingly boring Seventies masculinity, has described machismo as "testosterone poisoning." But androgyny has not always been regarded with favor. Hercu-line Barbin, a 19th Century French girl. was found at the age of 22 to have a woman's urethra, and something approaching a vagina, and an organ that might have been a small penis or a large clitoris, but also two undescended testicles. So she had to be reclassified as a man, who eight years later killed himself. Now, once again, as Jimmy Carter has given way to Ronald Reagan, and social services to bombers, balls in the male have come back, along with jelly beans. Moderates are called wimps in the Congress. Wayne Newton, mustached. throws his weight around in Vegas.

Meanwhile (even though Rosalynn has given way to Nancy), the macha woman continues to be, you might say, the nuts. In her book Machisma, Grace Lichtenstein hails "the scent of power, of female potency, catered to by advertisements for perfumes with names like 'Charlie' and 'Babe.' It is the reason for the television commercial that shows a young woman leaping in triumph after a racquetball victory over a man." The "adventurous, ballsy, gutsy . . . voracious . . . fierce" macha woman, says Lichtenstein, "jumps at the chance to climb Annapurna. . . . She picks up the check at lunch with a male companion in an expensive restaurant and flashes a gold American Express card. . . . She subscribes to Field & Stream and hides Vogue in the bathroom. . . She lets male campers know that her backpack is five pounds heavier than theirs. . . . She prefers Clint Eastwood movies to Dustin Hoffman ones. . . . She manages to let slip how many men she's dated in the past week. The macha woman 'goes for it.' "

A touching tackiness in all that, as in a newly freed slave wearing spats. The macha woman should bear in mind balls' down side. They can make you want to stockpile armaments, screw sheep and pound the piss out of somebody for no good reason. What war boils down to is who's got the most balls. "Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow." "Nuts." "Eyeball to eyeball and they flinched."

Hitler, he only had one ball.

Göring had two, but they were small.

Himmler

Had something similar,

But Goebbels had no balls at all.

•

If people of every persuasion are going to go around having balls, then we had better examine the whole testicular concept rigorously, in the round. (Now, cough.) But gently!

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 guy 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." 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 in-tegument (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 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 U.S. 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 nonconductor 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 becomes 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 sure-fire a laugh in a certain kind of movie as somebody's 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, the bumper sticker goes. 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 its kidneys. That may explain why it pees a third of its body weight every day. If frogs ever found out about beer. . . .) Pranksters may also put hot liniment in the part of the jock 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 Cecil 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." 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. Legend has it that 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. 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 monor-chidism. Having undescended balls is cryptorchidism.)

According to Stuart Berg Flexner in I 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 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 interstitual 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 realize 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, "You, a foreigner, an Englishman, have given more than your life."

But balls' low literary profile is more than a matter of prudery. You don't run into many testicular symbols, even, in any literature. Oh, maybe Tweedledum and Tweedledee: 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', 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 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 lupine-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.