San Francisco Weekly May 2, 2012 : Page 43

sfweekly.com Savage Love BY DAN SAVAGE I am a straight 29-year-old guy and I’ve been into ball busting — having my balls kicked and stomped — since I was 14. The fucked-up thing is, I only enjoy getting my balls busted by other guys. I’ve been hit in the balls by girls, and it doesn’t do anything for me. I thought I might be bisexual, since I want guys to kick me in the balls, but I don’t get turned on by the idea of sucking cock or getting fucked by a guy, only ball-busting. I’ve tried getting busted by girls, watching videos of girls kicking men in the balls, etc., but I never even get hard from it. Sometimes I can see a good-looking guy on the street and I’ll get hard just thinking about his feet kicking my balls. In my current relationship, I’ve snuck out and met with guys I’ve found online to have my balls busted. It feels like I’m leading a double life, but I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought of trying a rela-tionship with a guy, but I don’t know how that would work since I’m really not into having sex with a guy. I’ve tried to subdue my urges to get my balls busted, but I can’t. I’m confused and really just don’t know what to do about it. I was hoping that you might have some advice or insight to explain why my brain is so messed up about all this and what I can do. Balls Smashed to Death At the risk of my inbox filling with angry e-mails, I’m gonna quote the late psychologist and sexolo-gist John Money. He was wrong about a lot of things, from gender being socially constructed to “affectional pedophilia” being harmless, but Money was on to something when he wrote about paraphilias, aka kinks. “A wide range of sexuoerotic diversity has its counterpart in the diversity of languages historically manifested in the human species,” Money wrote in his book Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/ Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence, and Ma-turity . “[Sexual] diversity may be an inevitable evolu-tionary trade-off — the price paid for the freeing of the primate brain to develop its uniquely human gen-esis of syntactical speech and creative intelligence.” So why does having your balls busted by other dudes turn you on when you’re not otherwise inter-ested in other dudes? No idea. We don’t know why a person has a kink, and almost everyone has at least one sexual interest that is seen as kinky by those who don’t share it. But it probably has something to do with your big, complex brain and the way it makes big, abstract, and sometimes seemingly random connec-tions — the kind of connections that lead to syntacti-cal speech, creative intelligence, and crazy-ass kinks. This kink isn’t proof that there’s something wrong with you. It’s proof that you’re human. Which is not to say that a kink like yours is eas-ily incorporated into a person’s sex life. As one sex researcher I shared your letter with put it, your kink involves an “override” of your usual erotic “target in-terest,” i.e., women. While that kind of override is not unheard of, it’s not something that’s easily explained to a girlfriend. And as your encounters with other men pose no physical risk to your female partners (you’re not exactly gonna catch an STI getting kicked in the nuts), you can certainly justify getting your balls busted on the DL. But secret double lives are stressful, and most people leading them eventually get found out. And when your girlfriend inevitably stumbles over — read: snoops and finds — evidence that you’ve been sneaking around with other men, you won’t be explaining just your kink to her, but your betrayal, too. So is there anything you can do about your kink? “These problems are often highly treatable,” said Dr. Paul Fedoroff, who is a neuropsychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, and the director of the Sexual Behaviors Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre at the University of Ottawa. “Typically, a low-dose SSRI works magic.” SSRIs, or “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” are a class of drugs that are usually prescribed as antidepressants. SSRIs can crater a person’s libido, as is commonly known, but they can also, according to Fedoroff, help a person overcome an unwanted sexual interest or compulsion. “I had one patient who used to tie his testes with rope and then hit them with a hammer,” said Fedoroff. “He was referred to me by a urologist when he asked for surgical castration. I pre-scribed an SSRI, and a month later he told me, ‘That [was] the craziest idea I ever had.’ He had no further interest in ‘ball busting’ and said his life would have been different if he had found this medication earlier.” Fedoroff also had some thoughts about why you want to do this with men. “The last time I saw a case like this was about four hours ago,” said Fedoroff. “This was a 50-year-old, highly successful businessman, a lifelong het-erosexual who self-described as ‘dominant’ with women, [yet he was] advertising on the internet to find men he could perform oral sex on.” For some straight men, “being dominated by another man provides more ‘humiliation’ than being dominated by a woman.” Fedoroff isn’t the only doctor out there medicat-ing kinksters. In his absolutely terrific book The Other Side of Desire (which is where I first ran across that John Money quote), journalist Daniel Bergner profiles a foot fetishist so paralyzed by shame that he seeks treatment from a shrink who prescribes him a drug that “cures” him. The drug? The “lust-obliterating” Lupron, an antiandrogen that is some-times used to “chemically castrate” sex offenders. Now, I’m generally a fan of Western medi-cine — prescription drugs, invasive procedures, hospital cafeteria Jell-O — but I think taking SSRIs or chemically castrating yourself to sup-press an urge to get kicked in the balls six times a year ... well, that’s even more extreme. You would be better advised, in my opinion, to accept both your kink and your contradictions. Yes, your kink will probably shock even women who have a few kinks of their own. But if you present your kink to your girlfriends as just one fun, crazy, weird, hard-to-explain-but-endearingly-quirky aspect of your sexual expression, they’re likelier to react to it positively. And if you look for women in the fetish/ BDSM scene — where straight men are sometimes known to engage in S/M play with each other — your chances are better of finding an open-minded woman who isn’t threatened by your kinks. You might find a woman who wants to watch. Finally, another sex researcher urged me to urge you to bank/ freeze some of your sperm in case you wind up busting your balls permanently. Your nuts can take only so much abuse — people have ruptured and even lost testicles when ball-busting, sack-tapping, or CBT went too far. (It can even kill you: tinyurl.com/bustedballs.) As it doesn’t take a lot of force to make a guy feel like his balls have been “busted,” ask your ball-busting bud-dies to pull those punches, kicks, and stomps. Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage. E-mail Dan Savage: mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC SAN FRANCISCO 2 0 12 pa r t y B E ST O F X-CHANGE | ADULT | PARTY L IKE A SAN F RANCISCAN MAY 17TH @ RUBY SK YE 8P M -1 1 P M | 2 1 + HEALTH WELLNESS | EMPLOYMENT LIVE MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT HOSTED BAR & MORE! T I C K E T S ON S A LE NO W ! s f w e e kl y.co m / be st o f 2 01 2 I T E D $ 4 0 TI CK E T S [ TIC K E T S $2 5 ] LIM S OLD A T TH E D O OR 43 | SERVICES | SF WEEKLY M AY 2-M AY 8, 2012

Savage Love

Dan Savage

I am a straight 29-year-old guy and I’ve been into ball busting — having my balls kicked and stomped — since I was 14. The fucked-up thing is, I only enjoy getting my balls busted by other guys. I’ve been hit in the balls by girls, and it doesn’t do anything for me. I thought I might be bisexual, since I want guys to kick me in the balls, but I don’t get turned on by the idea of sucking cock or getting fucked by a guy, only ball-busting. I’ve tried getting busted by girls, watching videos of girls kicking men in the balls, etc., but I never even get hard from it. Sometimes I can see a good-looking guy on the street and I’ll get hard just thinking about his feet kicking my balls. In my current relationship, I’ve snuck out and met with guys I’ve found online to have my balls busted. It feels like I’m leading a double life, but I don’t know what to do. I’ve thought of trying a relationship with a guy, but I don’t know how that would work since I’m really not into having sex with a guy. I’ve tried to subdue my urges to get my balls busted, but I can’t. I’m confused and really just don’t know what to do about it. I was hoping that you might have some advice or insight to explain why my brain is so messed up about all this and what I can do. Balls Smashed to Death At the risk of my inbox filling with angry e-mails, I’m gonna quote the late psychologist and sexologist John Money. He was wrong about a lot of things, from gender being socially constructed to “affectional pedophilia” being harmless, but Money was on to something when he wrote about paraphilias, aka kinks. “A wide range of sexuoerotic diversity has its counterpart in the diversity of languages historically manifested in the human species,” Money wrote in his book Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/ Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity. “[Sexual] diversity may be an inevitable evolutionary trade-off — the price paid for the freeing of the primate brain to develop its uniquely human genesis of syntactical speech and creative intelligence.” So why does having your balls busted by other dudes turn you on when you’re not otherwise interested in other dudes? No idea. We don’t know why a person has a kink, and almost everyone has at least one sexual interest that is seen as kinky by those who don’t share it. But it probably has something to do with your big, complex brain and the way it makes big, abstract, and sometimes seemingly random connections — the kind of connections that lead to syntactical speech, creative intelligence, and crazy-ass kinks. This kink isn’t proof that there’s something wrong with you. It’s proof that you’re human. Which is not to say that a kink like yours is easily incorporated into a person’s sex life. As one sex researcher I shared your letter with put it, your kink involves an “override” of your usual erotic “target interest,” i. e., women. While that kind of override is not unheard of, it’s not something that’s easily explained to a girlfriend. And as your encounters with other men pose no physical risk to your female partners (you’re not exactly gonna catch an STI getting kicked in the nuts), you can certainly justify getting your balls busted on the DL. But secret double lives are stressful, and most people leading them eventually get found out. And when your girlfriend inevitably stumbles over — read: snoops and finds — evidence that you’ve been sneaking around with other men, you won’t be explaining just your kink to her, but your betrayal, too. So is there anything you can do about your kink? “These problems are often highly treatable,” said Dr. Paul Fedoroff, who is a neuropsychiatrist, a forensic psychiatrist, and the director of the Sexual Behaviors Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre at the University of Ottawa. “Typically, a low-dose SSRI works magic.” SSRIs, or “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” are a class of drugs that are usually prescribed as antidepressants. SSRIs can crater a person’s libido, as is commonly known, but they can also, according to Fedoroff, help a person overcome an unwanted sexual interest or compulsion. “I had one patient who used to tie his testes with rope and then hit them with a hammer,” said Fedoroff. “He was referred to me by a urologist when he asked for surgical castration. I prescribed an SSRI, and a month later he told me, ‘That [was] the craziest idea I ever had.’ He had no further interest in ‘ball busting’ and said his life would have been different if he had found this medication earlier.” Fedoroff also had some thoughts about why you want to do this with men. “The last time I saw a case like this was about four hours ago,” said Fedoroff. “This was a 50-yearold, highly successful businessman, a lifelong heterosexual who self-described as ‘dominant’ with women, [yet he was] advertising on the internet to find men he could perform oral sex on.” For some straight men, “being dominated by another man provides more ‘humiliation’ than being dominated by a woman.” Fedoroff isn’t the only doctor out there medicating kinksters. In his absolutely terrific book The Other Side of Desire (which is where I first ran across that John Money quote), journalist Daniel Bergner profiles a foot fetishist so paralyzed by shame that he seeks treatment from a shrink who prescribes him a drug that “cures” him. The drug? The “lustobliterating” Lupron, an antiandrogen that is sometimes used to “chemically castrate” sex offenders. Now, I’m generally a fan of Western medicine — prescription drugs, invasive procedures, hospital cafeteria Jell-O — but I think taking SSRIs or chemically castrating yourself to suppress an urge to get kicked in the balls six times a year ... well, that’s even more extreme. You would be better advised, in my opinion, to accept both your kink and your contradictions. Yes, your kink will probably shock even women who have a few kinks of their own. But if you present your kink to your girlfriends as just one fun, crazy, weird, hard-to-explain-but-endearingly-quirky aspect of your sexual expression, they’re likelier to react to it positively. And if you look for women in the fetish/ BDSM scene — where straight men are sometimes known to engage in S/M play with each other — your chances are better of finding an open-minded woman who isn’t threatened by your kinks. You might find a woman who wants to watch. Finally, another sex researcher urged me to urge you to bank/ freeze some of your sperm in case you wind up busting your balls permanently. Your nuts can take only so much abuse — people have ruptured and even lost testicles when ballbusting, sack-tapping, or CBT went too far. (It can even kill you: tinyurl.com/bustedballs.) As it doesn’t take a lot of force to make a guy feel like his balls have been “busted,” ask your ball-busting buddies to pull those punches, kicks, and stomps. Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.

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