I’ve been read­ing Yahoo answers for a while, par­tic­u­lary threads per­tain­ing to men’s health and male gen­i­talia and abuse issues.

The insen­si­tiv­ity of many female opin­ions regard­ing the pri­vacy and dig­nity of a man’s or boy’s body has been curi­ous in the least.

One of the more dense claims I get is that men’s tes­ti­cles are placed exter­nally so that women could abuse them in times of need. This is really the equiv­a­lent of say­ing that women, as a whole, are weaker and more frag­ile than men because they (women) were intended to be men’s infe­ri­ors. So it is a rather offen­sive view to hold.

Another thing to deal with is the macho pos­tur­ing about girls or women allegedly being able to “eas­ily” take down a man or what­ever the word­ing, based on the sim­ple fact of the tes­ti­cles’ vul­ner­a­bil­ity.
Though it is not incor­rect to believe that a woman can severely hurt a man under cer­tain con­di­tions, it is some­what wish­ful to think that a woman can ‘eas­ily’ over­whelm a man in real com­bat. This argu­ment is opti­misti­cally derived from the exis­tence of a few inches of sen­si­tive tis­sue on a man’s body, while ignor­ing the rest of the male body which is supe­rior in deal­ing with as well as in dish­ing out dam­age.
Appar­ently most women are very much aware of this fact in their refusal to put them­selves in harm’s way, in their choise of male secu­rity as well as in car­ry­ing weaponry. How­ever, women and girls can engage in macho pos­tur­ing (boosted by Hol­ly­wood movies and tv) over ‘infe­rior’ male bod­ies if they wish for surely no nor­mal man will chal­lenge them to ‘roll’ as that would be a con­tra­dic­tion of very basic,unwritten gen­der rules which hardly need fur­ther elab­o­ra­tion.
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Another thing I would argue is that there is no social call­ing for females to engage in this above men­tioned pos­tur­ing as women are not judged accord­ing to the phys­i­cal stan­dards that men are. In other words, there is no urgent need for women to be stick­ing it to the men (slight pun) who, as a gen­eral rule, are leav­ing women alone and not putting women down for women’s nat­ural, phys­i­cal con­fig­u­ra­tion. A man who would boast about tak­ing on male goril­las com­forted by the fact that male goril­las pos­sess tes­ti­cles would be con­sid­ered loony at least (the anal­ogy is some­what extreme in that goril­las are in a world of their own and it is doubt­ful if any man could truly hurt the aver­age gorilla but the prin­ci­ple is the same) and so it is hurt­ful when a boy takes up body­build­ing for the rest of his youth and is con­se­quently ridiculed by a 100 pound girl over hav­ing ‘weak­nesses’. Since men’s attrac­tive­ness in the eyes of women is at least par­tially based on dom­i­nance and power, one can imag­ine why it feels offen­sive and demor­al­iz­ing to be ridiculed in such a way by a female. It could be con­m­pared to a case of a brawny man pranc­ing around as a trans­ves­tite and claim­ing to be more aes­thetic (by female stan­dards) than an inter­na­tional beauty queen.

Another mod­ern myth of our time posits that the tes­ti­cles are an evo­lu­tion­ary ‘design flaw’. I think a lot of this stems from the fact that men lead more vio­lent lives from child­hood on, and prob­ing around for chinks in the armor, so to speak, may seem sen­si­ble given this set­ting which is alien to most girls (who man­age and sur­vive their own world of more indi­rect abuse). After all, men are con­sid­ered the sex of action (as opposed to the sex of ges­ta­tion) and men face the pres­sure of liv­ing up to this imagery of a pow­er­ful killing machine (ordi­nary men often face being com­pared to world class female ath­letes and teased for mov­ing less weight than an extra­or­di­nary women for exam­ple). The vul­ner­a­bil­ity (not strictly but our image of what con­sti­tutes good health and fit­ness in women would be con­sid­ered skin­ny­fat and/or ema­ci­ated in a man) of women is cel­e­brated as a beau­ti­ful and nat­ural thing while per­ceived vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of the male body are high­lighted for ridicule as sup­pos­edly men would have to be fleshy steel all over to live up to a made up image of ‘true’ mas­culin­ity. BTW: the exter­nal loca­tion of the tes­ti­cles has ben­e­fits such as eas­ing the detec­tion of can­cer.
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An objec­tion or a point that is some­times raised is that men or boys laugh about pri­vate abuse so it must not be that bad or so. Well, laugh­ter can be very much a defense mech­a­nism to deal with hurt­ful knowl­edge, as a psy­chol­o­gist could reveal. As pre­vi­ously described, the ‘man’s world’ can be a vio­lent with place with vio­lent expec­ta­tions and men have to deal with it some­how.
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And the fact that some boys or men may laugh about it does not mean girls and women should be fol­low­ing suit. In address­ing the issue, males have an inher­ent under­stand­ing of the issue that a female can never have for obvi­ous rea­sons. In a sim­i­lar man­ner, girls may per­haps joke about a seri­ous issue that con­cerns females such as rape, to each other but they would con­sider it offen­sive if a male chimed in act­ing like he has it fig­ured out.

What do you guys thin