April is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month, and we’re grabbing it right by the balls. Every day for the entire month, we will be publishing a new story aimed at getting men to better consider — and cherish — their family jewels in hopes of helping prevent a diagnosis that, if caught early enough, shouldn’t prove fatal. Read everything here.
As with the penis, there’s a broad understanding that “big” means “good” when it comes to balls. We associate big balls with bravery and fertility, and cultural artifacts like AC/DC’s “Big Balls” cement the moxie of having them as universal and genderless. Still, big balls are challenging to define. Dicks can be measured in length and girth, but testicles are measured in, what, volume? Do I need to break out my gram scale? A Pyrex measuring cup? Calipers? Do we consider balls a solid state of matter, or some sort of amorphous liquid?
Oddly enough, these details don’t plague us when we talk about breasts, which are similarly squishy, round and semi-capable of forming to the container that holds them. Still, we have a much better understanding of what qualifies as “big” breasts than we do balls — one only needs to look at the cup-size measurement system for evidence.
That said, it’s an imperfect science. D-cup breasts can look entirely different depending upon the person they’re attached to. In fact, bra size is determined by counting out the difference in inches between the breast circumference and rib cage circumference. A four-inch difference equates to a D-cup regardless, but it can appear much bigger or smaller depending on the body. Still, you know big boobs when you see them.
While we lack this type of cup measurement system for balls (athletic cups are apparently measured by waist size or height/weight), this same principle often applies in quantifying “big” balls. According to the numerous ball aficionados I spoke to (i.e., random people on Twitter), it’s the size of the dick that determines whether we think the balls are big — not the actual size of the balls themselves.
“If they take the attention away from the dick, they’re big,” says prominent Twitter user @Rava. Similarly, @azninthesun states that “balls are big when they visually dwarf a flaccid peen or they’re causing scrote sag.” This concept of “scrote sag,” or how low the scrotum hangs, further complicates the matter — balls can be long, but not necessarily big. This, @azninthesun says, is a sort of “chicken-and-the-egg” predicament: Bigger, more voluminous testicles may be more likely to cause saggier balls because of their weight, but perhaps someone with naturally saggier balls would benefit from the visual trick of the length, as though there’s more volume within that saggy sack than there actually is. Nevertheless, she defines “big” balls with an even simpler rule: One ball can fit comfortably in the palm of your hand, but not both.
Again, this is entirely subjective, and dependent on the size of one’s hand. But for most people, it doesn’t actually matter. Big balls may be a novelty — and some may idolize them — but for others like @azninthesun, the effect is neutral. “No one ever takes a trash dick because of great balls,” she says.
There are exceptions, of course. Miss Miserlou, a European adult content creator, tells me that she prefers balls that “hang nicely and look heavy, but aren’t abnormally huge.” In her experience doing dick ratings that often lean toward humiliation, she tends to see penises that are either large with equally big balls, small dicks with small balls or big dicks with small balls. Small dicks with big balls are a rarity, despite it seeming like the most logical combination if ball bigness is relative to dick size.
I was only able to find one person who’d come across a case of large balls that seemed truly, measurably “big.” They belonged to a man who had a hernia in his testicles — soft tissue from his abdomen had moved out of place and into his balls — making them appear larger. “They were literally nearly as big as his dick, and his dick was at least six inches,” the anonymous woman who saw them explains. “Like, the size of a baseball.” But despite their enormity, she felt rather neutral about them. “They were big enough that they’d get in the way at times, especially while trying to cop a feel of his boner while he was wearing pants, but it seemed like something he felt self-conscious about, so I tried to not make him feel bad about it,” she says.
With this baseball comparison in mind, I ask Miss Miserlou what she thinks is an appropriate comparative object for big, but still reasonably sized balls. “Apricots or plums,” she answers. “Filling up your hand, but still fitting in it.”
If you want to be boring about it, Healthline defines the “average” ball as two inches long, and states that any ball longer than that could be considered bigger than normal. As discussed, length really isn’t all that great of a measurement in this context, but that’s what the medical world often uses. There are some medical factors to keep in mind, too. While we don’t know why some people develop bigger balls than others during puberty, there’s cause for concern if you’re an adult, and you suddenly have bigger balls than you did before. In addition to hernias, swollen balls can be a sign of an infection or cyst, injury, torsion or testicular cancer. As always, if you’re seeing any changes like this to your balls, please see a doctor.
As for a sense of what defines healthy big balls, a visual is perhaps required. On the subreddit r/BigBallProblems, people who believe themselves to have big balls share nudes. The problem, however, is that there are no minimum requirements for posting. There are long balls, shapely balls, balls with flaccid dicks, balls with hard dicks. Most of them do indeed look “big,” but there’s no data to ascertain exactly why that’s the case. More than anything, r/BigBallProblems is a self-selecting group rather than an elite community of certified big-ball havers.
Given all these mixed messages, I’m about ready to throw in the towel. Big balls are whatever you want them to be. Like big naturals, big balls are perhaps a state of mind above all else. And no, ball size ultimately doesn’t matter that much unless they’re an extreme outlier, much like dick size. So, instead of using hand size, fruits or sporting equipment as measurement devices, I’d like to offer some wisdom given to me by OnlyFans model Violet Valentine: “Ball size is only important to the extent that I can comfortably fit them in my mouth,” she says.
Maybe we can’t all fit baseballs or whole plums into our mouth — but isn’t it still fun to try?
Magdalene Taylor
Magdalene Taylor is a staff writer at MEL. She covers internet culture, sex and the online adult industry. She lives in Brooklyn but is from God's Country, Western Massachusetts.
