A short essay I wrote on ballbusting and the media.
Hit 'em where it hurts.
How ballbusting went from being a taboo to being a popular media meme and widely accepted entertainment currency.
Hitting people in the balls is wrong. It's painful, it's humiliating and embarrassing and it's a gross violation of an individual's personal space and dignity. It is banned for this reason in all contact sports including boxing and martial arts. In the Bible it's written that any woman who helps his husband in a fight by squeezing his opponent's testicles should have her hand cut off.
It's no wonder then that in the first half of the 20th century ballbusting was largely absent from popular media. Notions of public decency prevented it from ever being shown as a form of entertainment.
This began to change however, slowly at first, towards the middle of the century.
During the fifties there were a few sparse incidents of ballbusting being shown in cinema. One of the films from that era that depicts a groin kick is
Thunder in the Sun. The makers of movies such as these must have been taking some risk considering the moral climate of the time.
As the Fifties drew to a close to make way for the Sixties attitudes to do with sex and public decency would start to change and a greater number of film makers would begin to push the envelope with what was deemed acceptable to be shown on film. This included ballbusting. By the end of the Sixties attacks to the groin had appeared a few major film studio's films including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Point Blank.
It was in the Seventies however that the meme really began to take off, being featured far more frequently in films in general and featuring in bigger and bigger Hollywood successes. There are several explanations for this phenomenon that I would suggest. One of them is the pushing of the boundaries of what was deemed publicly acceptable that started in the Sixties. Another is the popularity of the Kung Fu genre and a growing interest in martial arts and self defence, many systems of which include groin attacks as an integral part. Another possible reason for it's popularity in the Seventies was the growing resentment towards men and male dominance that came with the increasing awareness of feminism and women's rights. Perhaps the biggest reason for this increase though was capitalism. Films such as Diamonds are Forever, A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist showed that groin attacks could be shown in some of the highest grossing movies without
any negative effects on box office performance.
This set the scene for the total explosion of ballbusting in popular culture that occurred in the early Eighties and even more so in the mid to late Eighties.
If film makers in the Seventies had realised that having ballbusts in their films would not impact negatively on them financially, film makers in the Eighties
were begining to regard ballbusts as being a positive bonus in terms of audience approval. By the mid Eighties films began to appear that had ballbusting as a reoccurring theme such as Sudden Impact, The Legend of Billie Jean, Recruits and Lady's Club this continued into the late Eighties with films such as Feds, Assault of the Killer Bimbos and Total Recall. In fact, a look through the lists of the highest grossing films for each year of the Eighties shows a constant re-occurrence of films that feature ballbusting. Also by the mid eighties ballbusting had become so acceptable in the media that it had even featured in children's films such as The Goonies, something that would have been unthinkable even in the early seventies.
Also by this time groin attacks were appearing more and more in the news media. Often such attacks would be reported with a humourous tone with the tabloid newspapers especially capitalising on any pun they could make regarding the male genitalia. News reports such as these continue sporadically to this day with sometimes even attacks on children being seen as fair game for humour.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCBtvrEq1ZE
Ballbusting in the media continued to grow in the nineties but interestingly by the turn of the century the way people began to view groin attacks would begin to change, largely thanks to a T.V. show called Jackass. In Jackass men would purposefully allow themselves to be kicked in the groin for entertainment. This inspired many other men and teenage boys to allow themselves to be kicked in the groin while the event was filmed and then uploaded to the internet for everyone to see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiNbc5uVVbM
This makes a change from the ballbusts that had occurred in the media previously which had been entirely non-consensual.
Another thing that changed regarding ballbusting and the media due to the internet was the growing awareness of ballbusting as a sexual fetish. There are now many sites dedicated to the phenomenon with fetish videos entirely dedicated to people who are turned on sexually by ballbusting, some of which even appear on popular video sharing sites such as Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e82CNeee8I
Cuntbusting or groin attacks on women have also appeared in the media from time to time although far less frequently than attacks on men. There may be several reasons for this, one being that women are still generally regarded as the weaker sex and are far more fiercely protected than men, while men are regarded generally as being stronger and more aggressive, being responsible for the large majority of all homicides and assaults, and so men make much more satisfying targets for groin attacks in the public mind especially since a groin attack to a man hurts more and is therefore more entertaining.
So while hitting people in the balls is wrong in general, it can also be, under the right circumstances, a lot of fun, for the person doing the hitting and the person being hit. Just as long as those people trust each other and are doing it consensually.
