Cage Fit: A Different Idea

Or why we need curved rings

I want to lay out my case that the ball gap is little more than a necessary evil, that it serves no purpose in ball-trap devices other than as a necessity of basic geometry: you have a cage, you have a ring, you have balls– voilà, ball gap.

But I want to make this case by exploring an issue that a few people have but otherwise isn’t terribly common: a dull pain in the testicles, the stomach, or the kidneys. And since I’m writing about it, you can probably guess the issue: the ball gap. But, in this case, instead of being too small, it’s too large.

While the reason of why a ball gap that’s too small causes scrotum burn is not entirely clear (I strongly suspect it’s a pinching of the pudendal nerve), I think it’s far simpler to understand what’s happening with too large a gap.

Those are balls. I’m better at cages.

In this somewhat faithful model of a Mature Metal Jail Bird (I love CAD) with a less than faithful model of Lefty and Righty (I hate CAD), you might already have a clue what’s going on. As you grow and the cage is naturally pushed down, your balls are pulled into the gap. They get squeezed between the cage and the ring. And as you can imagine, it can be a bit painful. And it’s a pain everyone should be familiar with due to various ball-related incidents they’ve had throughout their lives. So, what do we do about it. Well, there are two choices. But let’s go with the more intuitive first: narrow the ball gap.

With a narrower gap, the balls aren’t getting squeezed like they were with the larger gap– it’s more like they’re running into a wall. And this works great (in so far as your balls running into a wall is great). But only for most of us. Some of us (including yours truly) would find this unbearable for another reason: the gap is now too small.

Trapped between a rock and a hard place

So, what does such an unfortunate person do (see, this isn’t just theoretical)? Hunt around buying ring after ring (or bending them) until they find that narrow range of gaps that go right down the middle? No, like the trope in all so many movies, we’re going to do the unintuitive.

That’s right, we are going to get an even larger gap.

With the even larger gap, Lefty and Righty don’t even feel the gap. It doesn’t exist for them because they don’t actually see the cage, just the ring.

But wait, isn’t it the gap that is responsible for keeping everything in place? And here we come to it: you don’t need the ball gap to trap the balls.

Let me use a pull quote for emphasis (pull quotes are cool).

Or at least for many of us. (I hate having to slap that damn qualifier on my thesis but I know of one particular cage artisan who will come out of the woodwork and say, “well what about the guy born with five nuts”. I don’t like him very much.)

Hey, if you can tolerate a ball gap that’s small enough that it does actually trap your balls, great. But what should be trapping your balls isn’t the ball gap alone but your flaccid shaft.

Yeah, kinda unnerving with the almost-skin tone.

Take a minute to stop being freaked out by my “render”– there’s a reason I design cages and not dildos. If you downvote me, the next one will have a tetherspout sticking out of it.

But do you see what’s happening here? With a snug ring, well, there’s just no way for the balls to get through that ring as long as the penis insists on taking up so much of that space.

Now, I realize that not everyone can or should wear a ring this small so that their flaccid shaft alone removes the possibility of ball escape. And I don’t understand everything that determines the lower limit on ring size, but besides spitballing (hehe) the size of the testicles, those proportions– the ring, the cage, the girth– are all mine. And if you look at some marketing images of cages, you’ll see this same basic proportion between the ring’s and the cage’s diameters.

Credit: Mature Metal, KINK3D, Steelwerks Extreme and Badass Workroom

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means I’m probably not crazy. But it also means that some number of us, there’s no real reason to worry about the ball gap.

But if the ball gap gives you no issues (I hate you), why go with a snug ring? Good question. And the answer is this: straps.

Straps have become so normalized a lot newer users, before they even try a ring on, they are asking about what straps they should get. And maybe some people just like the way they look. Sure. I like security screws. But most users are using them to hold their cages up. To me, it just doesn’t seem like much of a cage if you’re relying on a piece of elastic to keep from sliding down. However, if you think a ring small enough that it alone secures your balls, well, you can throw the straps in the trash.

But there’s a problem here. Let’s zoom in a bit (sorry). You see all that space between the ring and the cage?

I was hoping it would be less unnerving without the glans. Nope

Not only is this less than attractive, I believe it’s more likely to lead to edemas in that large axial (shaft-wise) gap. Now, nothing horrible. In my experience they go away after a day. But there’s an answer: curved rings. Perhaps I’m just advocating for myself but I think we need rings with a far more dramatic curvature than we see today. We need rings that look like this.

I bet you’re really tired of seeing that… thing. But a much better looking cage?

And there are few to no artisans offering rings with the amount of curvature I have depicted (10 mm on a 48 mm ring). Fortunately, I buy almost all my cages custom and I get those curved rings. But most of us don’t have that option. To be clear, this curvature is dramatic and much more I think may cause its own issues but my preferred ring features such curvature.

My preferred curvature

I would love to see cagewrights (just trying the word out) offer more dramatically curved rings than you currently see on the market. And for custom cagesmiths (hmm, probably a more accurate word but doesn’t have the same ring to it) to let people know it’s an option. But this comes with education. While a lot of people have read my writings on the ball gap and how ring geometry plays into it, I’m sure it’s just a fraction of the people wearing far too large a ring because they just don’t have a choice. And I’d love to see the marketplace offer a solution.