Outlaws

Everyone wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads-They Might Be Giants

Alright already! I just read that someone has spent the last umpteen years of their life creating, perfecting, patenting, and now marketing, fake testicles. Not just for men but also for dogs! So that the dogs don't suffer crises of their doggy masculinity, the inventor said in an interview.
Incidentally, if you've lost a testicle (say, in a knife fight with your mother), now you can get a few ounces of plastic manliness to weigh down your sack in the swimming pool. Guys who have lost their balls can have two more slipped right back in, no questions asked about why in hell you were tea bagging a land mine. You can even get fake balls for your truck or motorcycle.

That's just what we need: trailer hitch testicles tea bagging every speed bump and pedestrian we run over. Getting to watch them swing viciously like a flesh-colored pendulum as we go speeding down the highway cutting off soccer moms and schoolgirls. What sort of message does that send when your car is hung better than you are? I'm waiting for a latex dong made especially as a hood ornament for oversized trucks - a nice rubber battering ram with which to part throngs of feminist protestors around the Capital. Rig it up on a spring so it'll flap sideways and leave mushroom-shaped bruises right at cheek height. That would make CNN, I'll bet!

Is this ball fascination the natural offshoot of our obsession with silicon genitalia? We have suitable replacement parts for sale over the counter in every town at that one shop no one ever talks about, and for a few grand you can get just about anything inflated or sculpted or enhanced or cut off and replaced with a model guaranteed for the rest of your life. Is this where vanity has taken us? Could you order a third, or even a fourth, and then entertain guests at a party? Could you order a few spares just in case you get kicked in the real ones by a ninja, or the place kicker for the Denver Broncos? I can imagine swapping the real thing for Memorex and laughing demonically the next time a girl kicks me in the junk…to no effect. I'll just keep laughing as she flails and pounds and starts crying, going for the Achilles tendon that is vulnerable no more.

The possibilities are endless. Tell the vet to give Fido four balls, graft an extra one of those motorcycle sacs on while he's at it, and see what happens out behind the doghouse. Get a handful of prosthetic testicles to launch from a slingshot. Crash your annoying coworker's party and slip one in with the meatballs. Color one pink next Easter and tell people it's a giant jellybean.

Does that say anything about us as a culture, as a country, or as an era-the generation that invented fake balls and then dangled them from animals and vehicles alike? In a national survey of Gen-Xers, their number one value was "caring for their pets". Have we taken pet worship to the level of cosmetic surgery for the dogs' sake, or ours? We have surgery to give women bigger breasts for pure aesthetics, and surgery to give dogs their balls back for the same reason. Have we objectified women and neutered dogs equally, or elevated both to the same plain? Could it be that neither is the case, and this is simply an instance of the market filling a perceived need for the sake of turning a buck? What the hell kind of a market needs fake testicles for motorcycle, trucks, and dogs alike? Our grandfathers fought a World War. Our fathers fought a culture war. We invented fake balls to put on trucks and dogs. Will this be our legacy?