Just saying what everyone should already know, but doesn’t
I take it you’ve noticed the headline. But before I start, I have to share an anecdote to give the appropriate context. Last Friday, I was riding the skytrain with a friend when she slapped me for making an inappropriate joke about certain races and their proclivities. While the slap was not particularly hard, she asked if it had hurt. When I said no, she berated
another male colleague of ours for losing his shit when she had previously punched him in the balls with the same measure of force.
At which point I lost my shit. I mean up until that point, I’d thought everyone knew that getting struck in the testicular region fucking hurts. But apparently to a certain penisless population percentage (about 50 per cent) that fact might not be as clear as I’d like it to be.
I’ll start by saying getting hit in the nuts probably isn’t the worst pain; it might not even be the worst thing out there. I’ve never been sucked into an airplane turbine, but my guess is it’s probably worse than a swift kick to the old boys. This way we don’t have reopen the “which hurts more” debate: childbirth, or a knee in the family jewel. The reason for that is because pain lacks quantifiability. Without empirical pain units (which I’ve termed Godfuckingdammitwatts) we can’t compare pain
between two different events or people. Not to mention that emotional pain is a whole different can of worms. So that argument will remain closed.
Anyway, when you get hit below the belt, you don’t feel it at first. When you flick someone in the nose, they feel it immediately. You get flicked in the beanbag, you might have 10 to 15 seconds before the pain hits. This time is reserved for you to comprehend all the poor life choices that have lead up to this moment. Maybe you shouldn’t have been standing over that teeter-totter. Perhaps there were safer things to grind down than a hand rail. Hanging that pinata at waist level, not your best idea.
But in this trepidation, there’s also hope. The faint hope that you didn’t in fact get hit in the twigs and berries. Maybe it was just a graze, or maybe your thigh got mos — OH GOD, NOPE. FULL-ON HIT. YEP. THE EGGS ARE SCRAMBLED. GOING DOWN.
As for the pain, it’s what scientists call “referred pain,” similar to the pain in your left arm resulting from a cardiac episode. It hurts, but not where the injury actually occurred. In this case the pain permeates your whole torso, making it feel like someone is swapping around your organs. It’s seven or eight body blows, it’s thunder, it’s an elephant sitting on your chest. Nausea and loss of breath and vision are possible symptoms, depending on the amount of force.
Immediately after contact is made, you might have noticed in every YouTube video of someone injuring their wedding tackle, the owner of said tackle hunches over and Quasimodos it. This is an evolutionary reflex. Your body is trying to protect your nethers from whatever the hell just happened.
This evolved because back in the time of dinosaur vacuum cleaners, selective pressures were such that protecting your junk is more important than your ability to defend yourself from, say, velociraptors. Women reading this article, now you know: getting hit in the nuts really does hurt that much. Men reading this article, you may now return to your full upright positions.
