Sack tapping is not some faceless virtual scourge. It is a human tragedy. Take the eye-watering tale of 14 year-old David Gibbons of Crosby, Minn. He had to have his right testicle removed after being punched, but the worst part is probably the fact that he had to go on the local news and talk about his missing ball while sitting between his parents on a couch. How is it that someone gets punched in the balls and they’re the one whose Google results are ruined for life?
I read this story with a growing sense of deja vu. Yes, I get that this is a serious issue…but it doesn’t seem all that different from the various juvenile and dangerous behaviors my classmates and I engaged in during our junior high years. No, we didn’t call it “sack tapping”, but the end result was largely the same. Of course, we didn’t have 500 cable channels, YouTube, and Google searches to chronicle the stupidity and spread the carnage from sea to shining sea. This was the mid-70s, so we were limited to one small town newspapers and three television networks, none of whom particularly cared about teenage boys bent of varying degrees of self-destruction. Yes, for millenia teenage boys have had a fascination with punching one another in the groin. Now we have easy access to video sites to preserve the evidence. Nice….
I’m not about to make light of a phenomenon that appears to be costing some teenage boys one or both testicles, but you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t get caught up in the furor over this “new” problem behavior. To someone who managed to survive his years as a teenage boy, “sack tapping” seems like merely a new name for a very old genre of juvenile male misbehavior. What’s next? Sniffing airplane glue? Sniffing Wite-Out? Inhaling gasoline fumes? The reality is that teenage boys have been trying to incapacitate and/or kill themselves and those around them since teenage boys were invented. Sometimes, it really IS a minor miracle that teenage boys survive the ordeal and become adults. In this case, it might also be considered a minor miracle that they survive with both testicles intact.
Yes, being a teenage is a contact sport….
