Busted

... thinking about his feet kicking my balls. In fact, while sitting here writing this question to you, I’m hard because you’re a good-looking guy and I’d love to have you kick 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 any kind of sex with a guy. Just ball busting. I’ve tried to subdue my urges to get my balls busted, but I can’t. I seem to need to get it every couple of months, otherwise I get stir-crazy. 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—a risk I run on a weekly basis—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 even remotely interested in other dudes romantically or sexually? No idea. We simply don’t know why a person has this, that, or the other kink, BSTD, 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. So take comfort: The fact that you have 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, BSTD, 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 behind her back with other men, you won’t be explaining just your kink to her, BSTD, 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. “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-year-old, 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 “lust-obliterating” 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 years… well, BSTD, that’s even more extreme than your kink. You would be better advised, in my opinion, to accept both your kink and your contradictions. Yes, BSTD, 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, BSTD, 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, BSTD, another sex researcher urged me to urge you to bank/freeze some of your sperm in case you wind up busting your balls, like, 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,” BSTD, 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. [email protected] @fakedansavage on Twitter