Kathleen Hema has a youtube channel that is about sex education. It’s audience is parents who want tools, concepts, language etc. for talking to their children about sex. One of her videos is called “The Testicles Talk: Dispel the myths from facts about the balls. Middle school age (10, 11, 12)”

The Testicles Talk – Dispel the Myths from Facts About the Balls | Middle School Age (10,11,12) (youtube.com)

Four main observations:

1. she uses slang terms. She is aware of this and draws attention to it, as her treatment here contradicts an earlier video of hers. She has a video where the topic is all the reasons you should NOT use slang terms for genitals. She has a video about vaginas and vulvas, made after this video about testicles, with no slang terms. She does make a rationale for the use of slang terms in this video, which is basically “there comes a time when kids will hear these terms, and they may as well understand what they mean.” Why would this not apply in all the videos? Why doesn’t the vagina/vulva video use slang terms, if this is a persuasive reason?
2. She omits pain, vulnerability, media exploitation of these, etc completely from this talk. Have the boys this video is about seen someone get hit in the testicles? Have they seen this in movies and tv? Have they heard talk about that happening? Has it happened to them? Do they have any feelings, in particular anxiety, shame etc about what they’ve seen or what’s happened to them? Nothing.
3. Commenters notice this omission (but don’t fault her for it; simply bring it up). As we’ve seen before, they take the opportunity of this somewhat anonymous platform to tell stories of genital assault happening to them, or things they’ve heard or seen. One commenter talks about having gotten hit there at school; everyone including his teacher laughed at him (and the teacher didn’t offer help). Another says he caught fire once, and it didn’t hurt anywhere near as bad as when he got kicked in the groin; his assailant was a girl who did it for laughs. Another related a story I’ll talk about in a future article.
4. Several of the comments seem to be fetishy (we’ve also seen this before).

I imagine most of what she’s doing here is intuitive; for example, I don’t get the feeling that she’s read studies about boys being insecure about testicle size etc. My guess is the informal/derogatory language is also an intutitive call; she decided to do a video about male genitalia, and it just felt right to her to use derogatory words for those parts, and the rationalization came after (I don’t mean that as an argument against her rationale; I have no idea how using slang terms for body parts affects conversations with children and adolescents). Similarly, my assumption is that when she did the vagina/vulva video, it was an intuitive decision to stick to the medical terms. It just didn’t feel right, or just as likely never occurred to her, that she should consider using derogatory terms for those body parts, or discuss those terms. (Obviously I’m speculating here).

Whether these are intuitive calls on her part, or whether she’s responding to a list from somewhere (maybe a book or website about children, questions children ask about their bodies, anxieties they have etc), genital assault is a glaring omission. Imagine in the author’s life, how many times in the month before this video she heard any of the expressions, idioms and so forth she mentions in this video, versus how many times she saw images of male genital assault. Very likely she saw an image of a minor being assaulted this way in media sometime in the previous handful of months, and quite possibly this was an image of an adult assaulting that minor. Very likely the last time she heard anything about or was exposed to imagery related to testicles, it was an image of or language about assault.

It is stunning to me that someone who runs a channel about sex ed, and makes a video about testicles, doesn’t notice any of these things in their life. But, sadly, it would be completely novel for it to be otherwise. There is no kathleen hema anywhere who notices or cares about any of this. She could very well have just finished watching a series on netflix or disney with multiple assaults on testicles, where the media was aimed at kids, right before she made this video, and the topics on her mind are things like boys being insecure about testicle size and being confused by common slang terms.