Tight jeans bust balls

UK celebrity physician Dr. Hilary Jones is reporting that the current men's fashion of tight, skinny jeans is leading to an increase in twisted testicles, weak bladders, low sperm count, fungal infections, and urinary tract infections. Interestingly, Jones's efforts to raise awareness about said dangers are sponsored by TENA, makers of adult diapers and other incontinence and bladder weakness products. From The Telegraph:

"My advice would be to make sure you leave plenty of room around the groin area and that your pants and trousers feel comfortable so you're not being restricted in any way," (Jones said)…
"Please don't put style before health."

"Fashion for tight jeans is increasing testicular problems among men"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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http://2012diaries.blogspot.com/ tristan eldritch

Never seemed to affect Jagger.
Gutierrez

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slobhI2HXhA
V

…as long as it keeps hipsters from breeding, I’m cool with it.
Nunya Bidness

I’m not sure if we should classify limiting the reproduction of hipsters a “problem”…
Andy

Cool, I don’t want kids anyway.
sarahnocal

I’ll never understand why women are supposed to wear skirts instead of men; it seems that their vulnerable dangly bits need a lot more protection than ours.
And shouldn’t they be the ones riding sidesaddle?
- xzzy
  
  The dangly bits don’t emerge from the crotch. Any dude who sits on his own gear is doing something seriously wrong.
  - RadioSilence
    
    I once jumped onto the saddle of my bike badly :’(
  - http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/RA4AVVHBDO7ZTD3ANU6CLVQZPI pierre
    
    You apparently dont have huge balls like I do, because I accidentally sit on the boys all the time – especially when I am getting in my car. My balls are so big sometimes when using toilets they reach all the way to the water. Noting like having to wash your balls in a public bathroom.
    - benher
      
      Nobody wants to hear this, but I have a similar thing when I sit down on the toilet… my wang hangs straight down and then “drapes” against the bowl side (shudder) unless I go out of my way to sit as far back on the seat as possible.
      
      If I do this on a public toilet by accident it sends hypocondriac shivers up my spine and my only choice is to nuke my glans from orbit.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Yeah. The place where I live now has a ‘cadet’, which is the rather short, round, old-fashioned toilet bowl. Very unpleasant contact situations happening there.
  - AnthonyC
    
    This is not universally true. The problems @pierre describes below happen to be as well
- malindrome
  
  Apparently pants came about to prevent leg chaffing for soldiers who were riding all day. Women weren’t expected/allowed to ride that much, so skirts were still workable for them.
starfish and coffee

Fashions come and go.. no need to get your knickers in a twist
- http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki
  
  Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
PhosPhorious

This is why I don;t wear pants. Ever.
Onyxhawke

Ick.

Not surprising, but Ick.
Andy

Oh, one more thing for the ‘tight-pants’ haters. Not sure how many of you were alive in the 60s and 70s, but this is HARDLY a new thing. In the 90s this baggy-pants thing came around, and a lot of people just think it’s ‘normal’ now and this is how people have always dressed, which is not true. Also, Americans have gotten fatter, which generally requires a baggier pant. Look at some old photos from the 60s and 70s, most people worse a tighter fit of pant, and many people wore pants just as tight as your hated cool-kids. nothing to see here…
- EH
  
  I think this story is just a periodic grant con. It occurred in the Disco Era as well.
- http://twitter.com/lunamoth42 Luna
  
  I came down here into the comments to say something like this. In the early 80′s tight jeans were it. And as I recall, we didn’t always have the added benefit of lycra/cotton blends at the time for stretch. You just had to squeeze yourself into them. Carefully.
- toyg
  
  True, but also true that we know of these side-effects exactly because we’ve already gone through such fads, which produced damaging effects so clear that they’re statistically relevant.
- Cowicide
  
  The 80′s was a tight ass time too.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79VYktOdAPs
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    The 70s, too. And those were probably my loosest pair. 28″ waist, 40″ inseam.
GuyInMilwaukee

awwww.. nuts.
Maybe kilts will be the next hipster trend.
simonbarsinister

I switched from tighty-whiteys to boxers myself.
- millie fink
  
  Hope that doesn’t mean you’ll end up sitting on yourself, as it were, 40 or so years from now.
DevinC

Between this headline and “Digg dug own grave”, BoingBoing wins the internet today.
sigdrifa

“Please don’t put style before health.”
I think that could be said for other fashionables as well…
jimh

Perfect timing for my product launch, an antifungal creme that doubles as a mustache wax!
millie fink

Reminds me of the billboard I saw yesterday for Ballroom Jeans.

http://www.duluthtrading.com/store/mens/duluth-ingenuity/mens-ballroom-jeans/mens-ballroom-jeans.aspx
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  That’s like stretch panel pants for pregnant women.
gastronaut

Hipster jeans cause low sperm counts? Inconceivable!

Also, the term “dad jeans” now means more than I thought it meant.
Pliny_the_Elder

An old housemate of mine passed out on the couch wearing really tight jeans, got testicular torsion, ignored the pain for 2 days, and ended up losing a testicle.
- Ms. Anne Thrope
  
  Yeap. Happens. Dated a guy whose nickname was One Hung Low. Also tight jeans thanks to a hot kiss with a high school sweetie … who left him “hanging”…a long ride home unfulfilled, very tight jeans, and, well, the nickname. Didn’t lose one, just dropped permanently.
vonbobo

Attention Ladies,
Where did your derriere go?

Love,
Normal Comfortable Jeans

By the way… what a fantastic marketing gimmic. If I had a career in manufacturing anything, I would figure out a way to add “skinny” to the name.
Now- go burn your dumb skinny jeans please! :)
http://www.facebook.com/linrichardson Lin Richardson

A friend of mine twited one of his and had to go to hospital. No everyone calles him “Twister” and posts stuff like “Twist & Shout” on his facebook wall.
http://twitter.com/atouchofyou Stephanie

I wonder if this was an epidemic when men wore leggings and the incredibly tight pants in, say, the Victorian era and and during the Renaissance. (Although I think during the Renaissance, the pants were only tight on the legs and more loose in the groin.)
- http://twitter.com/lunamoth42 Luna
  
  They tended to be knitted fabric though, didn’t they? Vs. woven as jeans are. At least linen is more breathable than “the devil’s denim” (as my hubby calls jeans).
Mazoola

A few years back, as I edged up on the big Five Oh, I became concerned I was also edging up to prostate trouble. It didn’t feel like a repeat of the bout with prostatitis I’d suffered ten years before, but every so often I’d have a week or so with a constant dull ache down around the root chakra. It was if I had swapped out my office chair with the seat from an English racing bike — or was trying to hatch a snooker ball.

Being uninsured, my first reaction was to ignore it and see if it went away; if did, but, distressingly, returned. Drinking more water, saw palmetto capsules (this was before the supplement was pretty much incontrovertibly proven worthless), and working part-time at a standing desk had no effect. Finally, I made an appointment with my GP and started digging change from the sofa cushions so I could pay her.

A couple weeks before my appointment, though, I pulled a box of clothing from storage. Packed away on top I found the pair of black Gap jeans I thought I had on. Confused, I dropped trou — my usual response — and discovered I was actually wearing a pair of women’s Gap jeans, size 7, evidently abandoned by a departing ex.

Since I’ve gone back to wearing only big boy pants, not a twinge.
http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

“… the current men’s fashion of tight, skinny jeans…”

Is that what they call all these dudes shuffling around with their pants hanging off their asses?

I guess “saggy jeans” must mean wearing them down on one’s ankles, or draped over a piece of furniture.

Maybe it’s just my neck of the woods…
Cowicide

Please don’t put style before health.

NEVER!
http://twitter.com/jmaynard8888 Joe Maynard

The moral of the story is always this: just wear clothes that actually fit you, not so tight that they crush your reproductive glands and not so baggy that you stand a serious risk of being caught and pulled into a woodchipper.
penguinchris

I wear tight jeans sometimes. It’s very hard for me to find pants that fit well and look good (anything even slightly baggy looks awful on me, but so does anything skin-tight of course). Skinny jeans from certain brands fit me great (the term “skinny” isn’t well-defined… some brands put it on skin-tight jeans but not all).

My best-fitting pair is actually a women’s pair of Levi’s. Women’s pants aren’t cut with much room in the crotch area, of course. Fortunately they have some spandex or something woven in with the denim, but they are flush across the crotch. However they are much more comfortable and less restricting than some of the men’s cut jeans I have, somehow. The reason I don’t wear them more often is because the pockets are almost unusably short (which I gather is normal for women’s pants). Might sew in larger pockets some time.

I have gotten a “busted balls” feeling from wearing underwear that was too tight, and I never get that from my tight jeans. Some people take it too far and wear jeans that are actually too small for them, which is the real problem, and that doesn’t even look good either. Skinny-cut jeans by themselves are fine if they fit.
swlabr

Advice from Morris Day (and the Time):
“Fellas, get rid of those blue jeans and those new-wave pants, and get yourself some baggies. It’s all about freedom… always stay at the hotel with the biggest ball-room. Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends wear blue jeans, but I’m just not seen with them. What time is it?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFqnw8_xMXI
pahool

Ain’t nothin’ like a fresh pair of baggies!
petsounds

There’s a big difference between rock n roll jeans and shopping in the womens’ section for stretch pants (see: 70s Jagger versus 80s Jagger). I think most guys who talk shit about guys who wear slim jeans are afraid of their sexuality and unsure of their masculinity and their conformity to a certain standard. Ironically, much of this is driven by the perceptions of masculinity by women.
schrutzki

Standard procedure in 1972:

1 Buy really tight jeans
2 Go home, fill tub with hot water
3 Squeeze into jeans
4 Squeeze into tub
5 Shrink to fit for 10 minutes
6 Let jeans dry on body.
7 Adjust dressing/undressing time by ten minutes

And yes, parents and papers (not neccessarily in that order) absolutely warned of permanent damage to the procreational functionality. Well, thinking about it, it might indeed explain Germany’s demographical problem.