So me, my wife, and our unborn fetus were watching Smokey and the Bandit the other night, and when they got to the scene where Burt Reynolds and Sally Field drive into the woods to consummate their relationship,

So me, my wife, and our unborn fetus were watching Smokey and the Bandit the other night, and when they got to the scene where Burt Reynolds and Sally Field drive into the woods to consummate their relationship, I said, “She’s going to zip open his bell bottoms and tongue his balls…his hairy fucking 70s balls…his stinking, matted, cactuslike 70s balls.”

We both laughed, but at the same time, we both agreed it was highly likely that Burt Reynolds, at least at the time Smokey was filmed, had a scrotum as furry as a buffalo’s head.

Naturally, our earnest discussion blossomed into full-blown speculation about which entertainer had the hairiest sac in showbiz. We both agreed that Burt Reynolds would be high on the list. That wasn’t even a matter of debate. And then we moved on…

My painstaking inquiry first delved into the country-music world, which I suspect fairly teems with men who have hairy balls. I mean, we’re talking about bales of ball hair there. It occurred to me that Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson probably have extremely dense scrotal hair growth. I could see Merle having a thick grey bush down there smeared with dried feces from errant wiping. Willie would be the same way. He might even have some of Merle’s poop on his balls.

For some reason—and it’s not personal sexual experience, you assholes—my instincts tell me that our nation’s Italian-American community boasts a disproportionately high quotient of men with testes that resemble small porcupines. Something greasily intangible tells me that Tony Sirico, the actor who played “Paulie Walnuts” on The Sopranos, is the kind of guy who thinks shaving your balls—or even washing them—automatically and irrevocably makes you a fag. I hereby nominate Tony Sirico’s scrotum. And if Vegas placed odds on such things, I’d eagerly wager last week’s paycheck that rock drummer Carmine Appice (Ted Nugent, Vanilla Fudge) is sporting quite the scrotal shrub. Make that anyone named Carmine. But I think that particular mook has a Ball Bush formidable enough that, if someone were so inclined, they could grab a handful and lift him off the ground with it.

I would also think that frizzy-haired men of Middle Eastern extraction—and in a safe, convenient gesture of racial unity, I’ll include both Arabs and Jews—would be totin’ some hairy coconuts around in their drawers. My token Jewish specimen is chubbily bug-eyed Vegas comic Marty Allen, if only to dredge up his long-forgotten name in reference to hirsute scrotums. My Arab representative is Tony Shalhoub, star of Monk. Down to the last hair, I suspect his Ball Bush measures exactly the volume of hair atop his head…and precisely the same shape…only rotated 180 degrees and radiating out from his testes.

One really can’t go wrong suspecting anyone who isn’t African but has an Afro. Therefore, Mungo Jerry (one-hit-wonder singer of “In the Summertime”), Robert Hegyes (who played “Juan Epstein” on Welcome Back, Kotter), and lead singer Marc Storace from metal band Krokus are all prime candidates. I would think that deep-rooted South American jungles of hair blanket all their balls like form-fitting foam microphone covers.

Because I don’t ever want anyone to think I’m a racist, I should include a set of hairy black balls on this list for the sake of fairness. During his younger days as a Brooklyn drug dealer, slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. was reputedly able to stash an entire kilogram of cocaine safely within his lush testicular pelt. OK, I just made that up. I know absolutely nothing about the balls of Biggie Smalls.

AND YET, AS A FREE SOCIETY, I don’t think we’ve thought about testicles nearly enough. If the penis is Tony Orlando, then the testes are Dawn—two background singers overshadowed by a hammy front man.

Phallocentrism’s flaw is that it mistakes the penis as the true male genital—the giver of life—when the dick is merely a shuttle bus delivering the squirmy worms hatched inside the testicles. And for all the blibbity-blab one hears about women being the primary givers of life, a womb is a glorified halfway house inside which nestles a tadpole birthed in a man’s nutsac.

Life starts inside deez nutz. Don’t ever forget it.

And yet the scrotum, due in equal parts to its ugly name and its droopy, pachydermal configuration, doesn’t get nearly the same credit as the penis. While women may worship (or ridicule) a man’s ding-a-ling, you’ll never hear them drooling over “That SEXY set of testicles!” A man’s family jewels, despite their primacy in procreation, aren’t considered to be sex objects.

It’s time to change all that. Let us reclaim the scrotum, gentlemen. Let us bask in its mystical, sexually magickal allure. Let us shave, oil, and adorn our sacs in the manner of the ancients. Let us beseech our partners to lick them and weigh them in their palms as part of foreplay.

The scrotum has remained hidden because it has remained hairy. Women started shaving “down there” long before we did, gents. They ran away from 70s bush long before we even realized that 70s balls were a public-health problem. It’s time to play catch-up with the ladies. Grab a razor and knock down the walls that shroud our balls!

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