Inside the 25th Annual Ashland, Nebraska Testicle Festival

Getting to the bottom of what it means to be a man. [ view in [browser](. add esquire@newsletter.esquire.com to your address book ] [Esquire]( [Sunday Reads] FOLLOW US [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Pinterest]( [Instagram]( [You Tube]( [Google Plus]( [‘God Created Everything. Testicles Too.’]( Let’s get it out of the way: No, testicles do not taste like chicken. Nor, when battered thickly with flour and tossed into searing oil, do they taste like chicken-fried steak. They don’t taste like meat or like morels, though I was impressed with the suggestion, given to me by a Nebraskan gourmand who claimed he comes to the event known as the Testicle Festival—held annually over Father’s Day weekend at Round the Bend Steakhouse, in Ashland—because he thinks of cow balls as an affordable alternative to rare mushrooms. Instead, cow testicles taste, simply, like offal—toothsome and musky, the occasional gristle between your teeth, like an afterthought. My tasting experience is limited to bull nuts, testicles shorn from male cows in spring so their testosterone levels remain relatively low, leaving the animals relatively placid and their meat tender enough to sell at market. (No, you can’t call them Rocky Mountain oysters, one testicle enthusiast explained to me—that term is reserved exclusively for pig nuts.) But years ago, the Testicle Festival showcased a menagerie of animal testicles: beef, pork, lamb, and, more unexpectedly, turkey. Lately, to keep prices low enough that everyone who works in and around Ashland might attend—bikers, farmers, mechanics, attorneys, accountants—only cow testicles are used, about twenty-two hundred pounds of them, shipped in from all over the country and processed an hour’s drive away in Diller, Nebraska. They are deep-fried, then wedged ten or twelve to a red-check paper tray, with a piece of rye bread, a pickle chip, and a squirt of a ketchup-based dip called cock sauce. When I arrived the evening before the twenty-fifth festival began, the sun cast orange and pink light over rippling cornfields, as far as the eye could see. The bar was set on top of a gently sloping hill, and at the foot of it, an enormous sign beckoned to drivers along the highway: "Welcome to right smack dab in the middle of everywhere." I walked into the ten-thousand-square-foot event space known as The Ball Room (pun intended), and an enormous man in a sleeveless T-shirt, arms covered in tribal tattoos, introduced himself as TJ, the owner of Round the Bend, before scooping me up into a bear hug that squeezed the breath from me. "I like to tell people, ‘Thanks for coming out and putting my balls in your mouth,’" he said, laughing. I should mention that there’s something else that drew me out to Nebraska. Lately, when it comes to men, I find myself in a confusing and dispiriting headspace, compulsively pondering questions like, is my date a feminist, or is he a shitbag with decent fluency in the cultural discourse? Is my colleague successful because he is objectively talented, or because our manager is misogynist? How should I feel when a formidably large male stranger is friendly? Five years ago, I might have acquiesced, radiating in the unchecked affection and warmth of a stranger, defaulting to trust rather than suspicion. I would have laughed, genuinely, at jokes about balls and cocks—why not? But observing the ongoing spate of high-profile sexual-assault cases as they play out on the national stage has left me more than a little paranoid about my interactions with men, to the extent that I find myself struggling with an unsettling contradiction: I am certain now, intellectually and emotionally, that men are structurally advantaged to a toxic extent in this country—but can I really dismiss 50 percent of the population based on a designation they had no say in being born into? [READ MORE]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE] [Esquire]( [I Called Out Toxic Star Wars Fandom. Then They Proved My Point.]( Last week, Esquire’s Matt Miller published an article titled "The Year Star Wars Fans Finally Ruined Star Wars." In it, he discussed the loud section of Star Wars fans who have spent the year attacking the film, its director, and its actors with misogynist and racist online harassment. 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