School is essentially prison with a daily furlough.

At least that was my experience, because it sure as fuck wasn’t Saved By The Bell. Hell, it wasn’t even Room 222!

There were showy lockdowns for drug searches when the school administrators actually had a self-serving, backroom-dealing détente with the drug rings. If anyone crossed my personal space and reached for my food while I was eating lunch, they got belted. Today, I can still make a shiv out of anything that can remotely break the skin. One of my most formative memories is my dickbag coach going too far with me after years of pushing; he ended up cowering before me behind his own desk in his own office like a disarmed prison guard cut off from backup.

Good times.

The thing I hated most about being an adolescent male: the vicious glee other males derived from kicking, slapping, punching, twisting, chafing, probing, or forcibly duct taping each other’s sex organs, orifices and erogenous zones. I felt like I was the only one who wasn’t an incipient sexual predator with a pathological need to inflict pain through acts that have deceptively dopey sobriquets. I’ve been hypervigilant of my balls for years down the line ever since.

My code: protect the dick.

That’s probably a good thing when you take into account the latest schoolyard humiliation sweeping our nation in retrograde: sack-tapping, involving a devastating, rapid-fire slap delivered to the balls of an unsuspecting target. Like strangulation or vodka eyeballing, it sounds hilarious on paper, but the possibility for injury can really smart. Often, this is a friend-on-friend form of mutual horseplay/group ritual and not the type of bully domineering you’d expect.

I’ve always thought that the male body is frightfully exposed and vulnerable down there — it’s a zone of nerves and soft tissue — and so I’ve always been very adamant about safeguarding it. I wore a cup during any and all soccer matches without fail, and was glad of it when a misplaced kick from an opponent once left a fracture in my plastic guard. Whenever a bully chick starts in on me, I instinctively turn my hip out toward her because that type will mercilessly go for the groin.

I enjoy watching Attack of The Show! or Web Soup mainly for the presences of sexy geeks Kevin Pereira and Chris Hardwick, yet their abilities to document the most epic self-inflicted and by-proxy sack violence committed willingly for the camera astound me. I have to avert my eyes, while their tolerance for young men rendering themselves infertile is apparently boundless. I find myself wondering if these dinks who have turned scrotal violence into a spectacle sport are doing permanent damage to themselves all in the name of YouTube hits and the chance for ten seconds of basic cable airtime.

Just the act of sack-tapping when misjudged/dealt too roughly can tear or even rupture a testicle, so I don’t even want to guess what some of these more elaborate stunts can result in (and how many are staged?). There have to be some trips to the emergency room that ensue, and urologists are reporting a marked upswing in the number of repartive procedures they perform on young men in a year’s span. Yes, that all-in-good-fun punch to your groin dealt by a smirking douche asking you what the capital of Thailand is could even cost you one of your closest friends.

Men. That’s all I can say.

So enjoy as several future Sean Cody models endanger their livelihoods for your edification:

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com