What do you call a man with one testicle?

Geoffrey Jones.

The poor sod used to have two but he lost one when his now ex-girlfriend Amanda Monti ripped it off.

Ouch.

Ripped it off. With her bare hands. I can barely sit on this seat thinking about it without my own testicles trying to jump up into my stomach at the thought.

Whenever I reject my wife’s advances she sighs and makes a cup of tea. She doesn’t grab my balls and pull one of them off. But that’s what happened to Mr Jones. After rejecting lovely Amanda’s advances she grabbed his balls and pulled on his left testicle, ripping it out of his scrotal sack - through his pants - and, as you do, put it in her mouth: giving a whole new dimension to the “spit or swallow?” dilemma. She chose to spit. Regrettably Mr Jones will live the rest of his life with one lonely bollock.

How on earth does that work anyway? Is the guy’s scrotum made of toilet paper? Or is Amanda Monti the love child of Freddy Kruger? I can ponder these questions safe in the knowledge that this ball-buster is locked up for bodily harm, despite her protests that “I am in no way a violent person.” Ummm, no, of course not. Who wouldn’t want to bed you Ms Monti?

This story certainly deserves a place in my Weird Wednesday series: not only for the bizarre subject matter but also for the reactions the story gets when you tell it to people. Many more people find it amusing than utterly horrific: particularly women. One female member of staff where I work laughed so hard that if she had bollocks they would have fallen off. The same thing happens when you mention the story of Lorena Bobbitt who hacked off her husband’s penis while he was sleeping and unceremoniously flushed it down the toilet because she discovered her husband had been unfaithful. Monti got two years; Bobbitt got a suspended sentence. Both sentences are insults to the poor buggers who fell victim to these nutters not to mention to men generally. I’ve discovered that many women think “well, it served him right for sleeping around.” But when things are the other way around the hilarity is absent. OK, women don’t have bollocks to rip off or penises to flush down the toilet, but female genital mutilation is rarely laughed at: by men or women.

It’s an odd state of affairs. We’re told that this is a man’s world. The facts speak otherwise, surely?

Discrimination against men is rampant. Just today I read a report which calls for more lenient sentences for women who are guilty of non-violent crimes because of the damage it does to them to be separated from their kids. Nowhere does the report acknowledge that men guilty of the same sorts of crimes might also miss their kids, and vice versa. Men are in effect being told that they are optional as far as their children are concerned. In fact, this is just a reinforcement of the message preached by our family courts for years: judges treat men much less favourably in divorce proceedings involving children, often on the grounds that child need their mothers more than their fathers (I’ve never seen a bit of credible research that supports this). Affirmative Action is often pushed as a way to remedy the supposed inequalities between men and women in terms of careers, but few would call for affirmative action in child custody disputes. On top of this we have numerous support groups for divorced women, single mothers, and abused women. There are very few organisations and groups for men; in fact men claiming to have suffered abuse are frequently laughed at.

There are numerous kinds of anti-man discrimination in the media too: for instance have you ever noticed that when some disaster is reported that you’re informed about the number of women and children who are killed as if that means the disaster was worse than it would have been had it been all men who died? Or consider movies: far more men than women are used as cannon fodder, and when a women dies it’s almost always one who is depicted as evil, or else it’s to make the scene more gruesome. The idea seems to be that when men die it isn’t quite so bad as when a woman dies.

More recently we had the spectacle of politicians competing with each other to see who can be the most outraged that more men aren’t locked up for rape. The argument went like this: a very small number of reported rapes lead to conviction so we need to do something to make sure more men are put in jail for rape. Hardly anyone mentioned the foundation on which our court system rests: that you are innocent until proven guilty. Even fewer mentioned that not every report of a crime meant that a crime happened. Fewer again cared to talk about how bad a false accusation of rape is. The debate was carried out as if everyone who complained of rape was in fact raped and that more men needed to be convicted to improve the statistics.

I could go on (perhaps to discuss how men are generally treated more severely by our criminal justice system), but I‘ll resist the urge. Whenever I talk about these things I often get a similar reaction to the one I get when I discuss libertarianism with the uninitiated: bewilderment mixed with that “did I just hear you correctly” look on the face, as if the person’s brain has short-circuited: cannot compute! CANNOT COMPUTE!!! Certain ideas seem to be ingrained in so many people: collectivism is a given for most, racism is white people abusing blacks, and sexism is when women get treated unfavourably.

I must admit I get a bit of a kick challenging ideas that so many people think are obvious. But the fact that so many think these ideas are obvious is to me very weird indeed.

Stephen