If you’ve never personally experienced it, I recommend it. When someone is near to me and holding my nuts, I become calm and fixated on the sensation of warmth and comfort that accompanies that activity. Or this thing you can do to cats to ‘deactivate’ them temporarily (this works on most cats and only seems to disorient them). So to have this photo narratively redirected this way to two men comforting each other was kinda brilliant.īall cupping makes me think of Temple Grandin’s squeeze box, where a physical action or restraint can almost instantly soothe someone who’s overstimulated. It may not be something that most people are even aware of, but I know for me, especially, having someone calmly and firmly holding my balls immediately calms me and puts me in a very focused mental and emotional zone nearly instantaneously. But to have something that added narrative context to such a beautiful photo really got me thinking: there’s a strangely universal comfort among all men to the cupping of the balls.

Ordinarily, like I said about my tumblr, image captions are just people shouting “omg!” or “me too!” or whatever. “No one knows what to say in the loser’s locker room.”

But more than that is the quote that’s attached here by the curator of He’s Got Some Balls: It’s so calm and so respectful and (womany and ridiculous as it sounds) even loving. Firstly, that’s just a beautiful image, any way you look at it.