We Want You To Put Your Hands Down Your Pants

Attention. It is fleeting and near impossible to hold in a culture that scrolls through memes while passing a bowel motion, so the TL; DR of this piece is:

Please put your hands down your pants.

(In a private place)

If you read to the end I’ll give you three hard facts, not hot takes, as a reward.

Testicular cancer is the most common cancer in young men. It can progress more rapidly than many other cancers, but one of modern medicine’s major wins is that if caught early, it is around 95% curable. Those are stats that are rare enough to make Oncologists smile. Again, if caught early it is most often cured with a pretty minor day-stay surgery. We can even send you home with a prosthetic nut if scrotal symmetry is essential to you. And you won’t miss the bad one, the other will virtually always pick up the slack and just make enough testosterone for two. Fertility for most men is not affected, but if the cancer has progressed further and you need some chemo the government will pay to have your sperm banked for later.

So far, so unusually positive for a cancer narrative. The problem is that most Urological Surgeons I know have a story about a young man turning up with a tumour the size of a grapefruit. Usually young (the high-risk age range is 15-44), disproportionately Māori which is an additional kick in the…well…because Māori have a significantly higher risk of developing testicular cancer. It’s curable, the treatment almost never has long-term adverse effects, it’s most likely to happen to men with a lot of life ahead of them so why do we still have men walking around with a bomb in their undies left untreated?

We’re told that men are simple creatures, but I am not sure about that. I think there are layers of complexity to men that combine fear, shame, anxiety, and a self-destructive adherence to societal norms and this is the fruit of that twisted, dysfunctional vine. Women are very good at sharing their health concerns with each other. It is normal and acceptable for them to talk about their mammograms, and no one snickers about breast cancer despite is being all about “Boobs”. If we take testicular cancer as a parallel, in nearly half a century of life I have never once heard a man in a social setting mention that they had felt a lump in their scrotum that they weren’t sure about. And a scrotum is a bag of lumps. Any discussion using formal terms like “testes” or “scrotum” elicits reflexive smirks. So, we’re leaning into that.

April is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month, and we are taking the fear out of the situation by seeing the funny side with Lump Lottery. Testicles can be hilarious but also potentially deadly, so if we can get the banter going amongst young men it will be job done. We intend to make self-examination a funny and therefore socially acceptable topic for the target audience. We hope men will joke about the difficulty examining ones their size. We hope for them to decline the offer of an examination from a friend until they’ve been bought dinner first. We will demonstrate how easy it is to do as part of getting dressed after a shower and give men the excuse of “don’t shame me for caring about my health” if they are walked in on in a private moment. And we will give them the chance to win a JAC ute because it might just get their attention!

To those who feel that we should not make light of a serious diagnosis in a way that could offend people, I take your point. However, it’s come to a point where we need to act differently. Some people don’t have the imagination to understand that traditional health education does not work on this vulnerable group, or the sense of humour required to laugh at balls. You’re wrong, they are funny.

Three bonus hard facts:

• “Superfood” is a marketing term, not a nutrition term.
• There is no way to “target belly fat”, and doctors do not hate this one trick.
• There are no hot MILFS in your area wanting to date you.

April is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. To encourage men to put their hands down their pants Lump Lottery campaign is a simple ask. Go lumplottery.co.nz  and watch a short “how-to” video with Dr Jim Duthie. Check yourself. Answer yes or no to finding a lump. Go in the draw to win a brand-new JAC ute.