This blog will mostly be about boys and men getting kicked, punched, kneed, grabbed etc in the genitals. I’m going to call this male genital assault, mga for short*. I’m writing this blog because

1. I find this kind of assault deeply troubling, so I want to investigate it and talk about it, and hear others talking about it (or read them writing about it)
2. It’s widely prevalent…you see it in tv and movies all the time, and it appears to happen in real life a lot, particularly to kids. Anything that happens a lot deserves observation and discussion. Anything that happens to kids seems especially important. Anything potentially problematic that has to do with sex (or with gender) is worth talking about, and probably unhealthy not to talk about. This topic overlaps all those areas, sex/gender, kids, and violence. So it seems very healthy to talk about, and very unhealthy to not talk about.
3. No one talks about it. There’s exactly one study and very little conversation. The “conversation” that exists usually goes nowhere. You probably discovered this on your way to my blog.
4. since there is basically no discussion, investigation, research etc., we don’t actually know how bad this is. Is it completely harmless and irrelevant? Does it fuck people up mentally and emotionally? Is there correlation, say, between genital assault and suicide? School shootings? How often does it happen? What’s the range of harm…is it usually no big deal, or usually much worse than we assume? I don’t know, and neither do you.
5. It appears that it upsets others too. It’s hard to see this generally, but you’ll see it in discussion threads, comments and so forth. So a population is upset by a category of violence that overlaps with kids and sexuality. That should be a no brainer, and the confusing part is how it remains free of scrutiny.

The more I investigate (and the less I find), the more unique this topic becomes. It seems to be everywhere, but no one talks about it, and no one has studied it. Mga might be very harmful, physically, psychologically, and socially…we don’t know though, and we (as a society) don’t care. I think it’s fair to categorize mga among the worst physical things that can happen to a man (would a man rather get a bad injury to his genitals or to any other part of his body? Is there anything physical that a man fears more than his genitals getting hurt? Certainly it’s on the very short list). Do we believe that the worst thing that can happen to a guy is at the same time unimportant or inconsequential? It seems strange that we treat it the way we do, and that we’ve thought about it so little.

Eventually I realized that, as ill-suited as I am to the task (I have no relevant expertise, I’m not a researcher, I’m not a writer), I have to write a blog about this, because no such blog exists. My hope is that I do a good enough job for actual experts/writers/researchers to get interested in this and blow my blog out of the water.

I’m also writing this for anyone who thinks about this topic, and especially anyone who’s ever been affected by it. Maybe you’re a parent and you’re concerned about your kids…either that they will be victims of mga, or perpetrators, or they already are, or you’re concerned about these scenes in the movies and TV they watch., and you don’t know how to think about it. Maybe you’re a victim, and you’ve never heard anyone tell you that what happened to you is fucked up. Maybe you’re in charge of kids…you’re a teacher, coach, babysitter. Maybe you’ve tried to bring this up, and gotten silence and blank faces, or mocking laughter. If no experts or scientists ever bother with this, but one victim gets validation from reading my blog, or one responsible adult gets some insight, I’d feel like it was worth the effort.

 I’m focusing right now on females as assailants, but I’ll also talk about male assailants. The work that I’ve done so far suggests to me that 1) male assailants and female assailants, to a large extent, are in different categories (so it makes sense to pick one and focus on it) and 2) that female assailants are the correct focus if we want to understand why we ignore the topic.

I probably have other assumptions, like “mga is bad” for example, which will guide and might bias my efforts. I’m mostly not worried about my own biases though…I think it’s probably silly to think that I could check my own bias without a community of people engaged in the same topic. So I’m just going to pursue whatever information or leads seem interesting, and think and write about them as best I can.

Please send me your thoughts. If you have theoretical ideas, if you have knowledge, if you can recommend sources, if you have personal experience you want to share, please send these to me. I know of no other topic like this, where no one discusses something so prevalent and ugly. So I can fairly say that you change the world a little bit by talking about it with anyone; please consider talking about it with me.

Thanks for reading.

*If anyone has a better idea for this term, do let me know!  I’m not in love with it, but I can’t think of anything better, and I don’t want to say ” boys and men getting kicked, punched, kneed, grabbed etc in the genitals” over and over. So it’s mga for now.

There’s the term “ballbusting,” and I actually thought about calling my blog “against ballbusting.” Ballbusting is the porn and fetish term for mga. I guess I decided that I want to reserve the term “ballbusting” for porn and fetish. I also realized, after a lot of thought, that I’m not against ballbusting, defined this way. If it’s a fetish, if consenting adults want to do this, I have zero problem with it (although there’s a seriously problematic grey area I will address at some point). Theoretically, I have zero problem with ballbusting porn as well. I say “theoretically” because I have a number of concerns about both the effects of porn and about how the porn industry works. But…maybe there could be a porn industry that isn’t exploitative, and maybe people can use porn in a healthy way. So while I have concerns, it’s not my place to assert that porn can never be healthy, or that the porn industry would crumble without eggregious exploitation. My position right now is that porn that contains ballbusting is fine with me, as fine as any porn is, and the question of how OK porn is generally is outside the scope of this blog.