I spend a fair amount of time teaching women to kick men in the balls, and I’ve learned that this activity tends to generate controversy. Here, according to actual adults who have actually said these things to me, are some reasons you should not kick a guy in the balls:
1. It will make him angry.
I should hope so. I’m not sending him a friend request. If I kick him hard enough, there’s a good chance I’ll render him unable to act upon his anger. That’s my goal. His feelings are his problem.
2. It will make him hurt you worse.
Statistics say otherwise. And anyway, he’s already demonstrated his desire to hurt me. Why should I give him carte blanche to decide how much he’s going to hurt me? I’d rather be an active participant in that decision-making process.
3. Groin kicks aren’t really that devastating; I’ve seen lots of guys get hit in the balls and it hardly fazed them.
This response (almost universally from men) is so common I’ve come to think of it as “groinsplaining”—you can see it many of the YouTube comments in the videos linked above. These people rarely volunteer to demonstrate their own iron balls in a real kicking situation, but they confidently assert that men in general can shrug off all kinds of damage to the groin. All I can say is, I’ve seen two-year-olds take down grown men via the groin, and toddlers don’t even have any training. I do. I like my odds.
4. We shouldn’t be teaching people how to kick men in the balls; we should be teaching men not to do anything that would make us have to kick them in the balls.
Hey, that’s a great idea! Do you have a detailed, research-based plan for teaching all men everywhere to behave themselves all the time? And do you have funding for your efforts, and buy-in from politicians and community leaders, and a network of trained, experienced instructors who can effect this change? If not, better get started on your grant proposal. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here teaching people how to kick guys in the balls. That’s what I do.
5. Telling people they should kick an assailant in the balls is the same as telling victims who didn’t kick their assailant in the balls that they did something wrong.
No, it isn’t. It’s a practical way to reduce the number of future victims by giving them more viable options to disrupt and survive an assault.
Fact: We have the power to damage the bodies of men who try to hurt us. You’re saying we shouldn’t let people use that power. I’m offering people more choices; you’re trying to take them away.
6. Kicking a guy in the balls just makes the world a more violent place.
Maybe, in the short term. But if it stops him from killing someone, or putting them in the hospital, isn’t that a net win for non-violence? The Dalai Lama thinks so.
One in four women will have good reason to kick a guy in the balls at some point in her life. Luckily, it’s not rocket science. Anyone can do it! And ball-kicking’s efficacy is beyond dispute, as the men of MMA so nobly helped us illustrate here. Gentlemen, if any of you are reading this, and conscious: Cheers, and get well soon (the non-wife-beaters among you, anyway).
AIA REPORTING FOR DUTY
okay, so!
There is a trick to it. You do NOT want to soccer kick the dude because that’s a little projectile aiming at a littler target.
It’ll do in a pinch, and it’ll hurt, but it won’t incapacitate, which is what you want. You don’t want “ouch!” Or even “FUCK!”
You want him puking on the floor, and this is how we do:
There’s two ranges where a groin kick works: close and mid-range.
Say someone grabs you face to face, or pins you to the wall, and your hands are blocked. Now you’re close-range. What do you do? You come in closer, as close as you can, and with every ounce of adrenaline and aggression in your body, you do a can-can kick.
You know the first step in the can-can, where you raise your knee up as high as it’ll go as strong as you can?
Do that, as hard as you can, repeatedly.
If that doesn’t work, here’s the alternative. You’re going to take your hand, grasp between the thighs underhand. Its going to feel like you’re “cradling” the testicles. Dig your fingertips into the fragile skin BEHIND the scrotum. Then, once you have a good grip, you turn your hand into a vise, with your fingers digging inwards to the material. If you do it right, you should feel the testes INSIDE the scrotum. You want, whenever possible, to hook your fingers under them.
Then, with your hands in a claw and your fingertips latched behind the testes, you turn your hand sharply, as though you were turning a doorknob. Simultaneously, haul your elbow back and up as hard as you can.
If done properly, this technique can tear the scrotal tissue, and done with enough force, can tear the testes out of your attacker’s body.
No matter HOW pissed he is, he’s gonna drop. I’ve tried this technique on guys wearing cups and even with protection, it is not a fun feeling.
If you’re mid-range and have enough room for a kick, the goal becomes to use your shin. The shin is actually called the tibia, which ounce for ounce is one of the strongest bones in your body. So, here’s what you do, my little bloodthirsty beaus:
You aim, you scream “DO NOT COME CLOSER I SAID NO!” (legal purposes, because now you’re officially exercising your right to self-defence). Maintain a 360 degree awareness, just in case he has friends, and then, when he’s close enough, connect your shin full on soccer kick with the delicate squish of his testicles.
What you want is as much upwards force as possible in combination with as much momentum as you can manage. When he collapses, which he will, then stomp on his groin again, and then run.
The latter has less of a trick to it. It’s primarily about momentum and force.
Remember, if you’re close enough to put your hands on him, use your knee. If he’s coming at you, use your shin.
If you can smell the nachos he had for dinner, rip his fucking balls off.
It’s easy to do, they’re tiny little squishiness wrapped in a delicate flap of skin about as thin as a toenail.
Remember: if he’s coming at you, he’s ALREADY out to hurt you. Might as well give the fucker a reason to be pissed.
Someone once told me that the way to train a proper knee in the groin (with appropriate aggression if you want to hurt him enough to let you go is to train and act as if you’re not aiming your knee at the groin, but aiming for somewhere much higher so that your mind knows to really ram your knee upward.
A male friend of a friend of the family once generously and kindly advised me that if anyone with nuts ever got up on me without me wanting him to do so, to “grab his balls as hard as you can, squeeze, and yank away from his body until they feel like marmalade. Then run.”
I have never forgotten this advice.
My self-defense trainer used to say: “Eyes are like grapes. Ears are like pull tabs. And if you’re going to grab some, girls – grab, pull, twist, and bring those balls home to Mama.”
“What would street fights between guys look like—or professional fights for that matter—if one could
go below the belt? For one, there’d be a lot more collapsing. Two, a
lot more writhing in pain. Three, a lot less getting up. All in all, it
would add up to less time looking powerful and more time looking
pitiful. And it would send a clear message that men’s bodies are vulnerable.“
…
“So, men generally agree to pretend that the balls just aren’t there. The
effect is that we tend to forget just how vulnerable men are to the
right attack and continue to think of women as naturally more fragile.”
“In 2015 I wrote an essay
in which I speculated about why we don’t see men kicking each other in
the balls more often. We leave no stones unturned here at SocImages,
folks.I argued that men don’t kick each other in the balls because it would
reveal to everyone an inherent and undeniable biological weakness in every man, not just the man getting kicked. In other words, it’s a secret pact to protect the myth of masculine superiority. I expected a reaction, but I was genuinely surprised at what
transpired. In public — in the comments — men debated strategy, arguing
that men don’t kick each other in the balls because it’s actually a
difficult blow to land or would escalate the fight. But in private — in
my email inbox — men sent me hushed messages of you-are-so-right-though.“
I work at a job that requires me to lug around hand trucks with stacks of stuff on it held in place with a bungie cord. Like this:
One time, I messed up wrapping the cord and it whipped around and nailed me right in the ballsack. Three things happened:
1. I fell down to one knee as the most nauseating pain I have ever experienced knocked me off my feet.
2. I let out a strangled scream that wasn’t louder only because I’d had the breath knocked out of me by the pain.
3. I couldn’t walk right or stand up straight for a solid fifteen minutes. I couldn’t see straight because my eyes were tearing up so bad. I couldn’t piss right for a week.
And that was from a single accidental blow to the testicles, not repeated strikes intended to harm.
If you need to hurt a man, go for the nuts.
Captain William Fairbairn taught unarmed combat to UK and US Special Forces in WW2; he was apparently famous for concluding every lecture and demonstration with “and then kick/knee/punch/hit him in the testicles”.
Fairbairn wrote numerous books including
“Self Defence for Women and Girls”; you can guess what that might involve…
This was supposedly his finisher to dealing with any enemy, even if that enemy had been knifed, garotted, manually strangled, brained with a chair or for all I know taken to bits by hand-grenade, heavy machine-gun, aerial bombing or long-range naval artillery. It was his version of “nuke the site from orbit: it’s the only way to be sure.”
“And strike him in the cods” – what the codpiece contains – is also a standard instruction in numerous period fight manuals.
It’s an effective defence, and the more effectively it’s made, the more
effective its result.
Strike as if driving the point of impact through the roof, or grab as if taking it home as a trophy.
Even outside the Real World, remember it for writing purposes: despite the protracted Hero/Villain fights beloved by Hollywood,
anyone hit by an expert tends to stay hit (plenty of examples on YouTube).
It’s not protracted or visually dramatic but it’s effective and in fiction, if properly written, doesn’t read as abbreviated or lazy but as something by someone who Knows A Thing Or Two.
When two combatants who Know A Thing Or Two go head to head with no rules but You or Me, the fight is like a Nac Mac Feegle – fast, brutal and short. A solid smack in the Ooh-mah-Tenders will do it too.
The Paradox Machine 