Usually I post the “hey, look, world, we’re getting more and more vegan all the time!” posts over on Staying Vegan, and keep things like posts about goat testicles here on VP, because never the twain shall meet and all that.
THE TWAIN HAVE MET.
I’ve just found out about Charlatan: America’s Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam
ANYWAY. The goat testicles. Can I tell you about them?
It seems that back in 1917, you could get a medical license AND inject goat testicles into people to cure impotence. That’s the career path that John R. Brinkley took, or at least part of it, which eventually led to a 36 room clinic that apparently was devoted to injecting goat testicles. He called his clinic the Brinkley Institute of Health, which probably won the focus group over from other ideas like “Brinkley Goat Nads Distribution Facility,” though in either case, if it were around today it’d be the perfect building to threaten your kids with a visit to if they don’t eat their green beans. No I don’t know why you’d threaten your kids with goat testicle injections, but if I was 8 years old I’d eat a lot of green beans under such conditions. Now, probably moreso, so in fact I reckon it’s the kind of place kids can threaten their parents with a visit to, but that’s just because you screwed up the “how babies are made” talk.
Today, we have little blue pills. Sure, they may contain animal ingredients, and are probably tested on animals (and not in a fun way that makes for easy jokes,) but a step away from using actual goat testicles and towards powders and formulas that can be cooked up in a lab is a step towards veganism.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk briefly about vegans getting it on like crazy, which Science has attributed to two main reasons: a reduced fat diet with antioxidants and other things I barely understand can lead to better blood flow, including blood flow DOWN THERE, and also there are way more vegan women than there are men, so for straight male vegans, anyway, there’s clear evidence that goat testicles or the modern equivalent are much less necessary. Or so I’m told.
But back to the book: as I mentioned earlier, it would please me immensely to tell people that I am a goat testicle profiteer, because I have strange views on outreach, so please consider buying this book through this link. We’re not talking F.U. money here – if 10 of you buy it, I think I get four bucks, but I’ll turn that into a slice of vegan pizza, thus furthering the swords into plowshares metaphor, only it’ll be goat testicles into vegan pizza.
* No, science has not replaced goat testicles on the goats themselves, at least not directly – there are replacement balls available but to my knowledge they’re more used for companion animals like dogs and cats. VP apologizes for the somewhat misleading headline.
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Oh, and here’s the story behind the story: I wrote this post in a public library (which I just realized actually has this book on a shelf not far from where I’m sitting, but it’s not available for checkout,) and at some point it turned into a game of “how many times can I push ‘goat testicles’ over the wifi in a place of research?”
To put it in FourSquare terms, I’m pretty sure I’m the mayor of goat testicles, at least for today.
I’ve heard of this book before but had never thought of it as a possible activist tool. But clearly, all those dumb-asses who think they need the milk of the bull’s pizzle to make them manly could use a reminder that people who sell such things generally end up in the history dictionary under “huckster”. Which is an awesome word, btw.