Perhaps I'm Not Crazy Enough...
Why I Think It's Always the Ball Gap
Post after post on r/chastitytraining. Same set of symptoms. Burning sensation under the scrotum, pinching, chafing. And so many people doing drive-bys to say Aquaphor, straps, coconut oil. But over the past two years, I’ve started to see a change. More and more saying it’s the ball gap. In fact quite a few posts have been dedicated to simply saying, yep, it was my ball gap1.
Maybe there are a handful of people who have this issue and it’s not the ball gap. I know one person reported it with the ring alone. My working hypothesis is that almost every case ultimately comes back to the same underlying problem: pudendal neuralgia.
From the Cleveland Clinic:
Pudendal neuralgia (or pudendal nerve entrapment) is when you experience chronic pelvic pain from damage or irritation to your pudendal nerve. If you have pudendal neuralgia, this nerve is injured or compressed and causes stabbing, burning or shooting pain. The pain can be felt in your buttocks, perineum and genital region, and is more severe when sitting.
Here we have a nice diagram I found from another article on the topic but for some reason, it was missing the chastity cage so I slapped one on — I’ll share my improved diagram with them.
All of these nerves are part of the larger pudendal nerve.
Look at where these nerves run? Right through the ring and right through the ball gap. I still don't understand why the ball gap seems to cause this rather than the ring itself, but after watching this pattern repeat over and over, it's difficult to ignore. So most of my recommendations go like this:
Me: You need a larger ball gap.
Them: But then my balls slip out.
Me: Then you need a smaller ring.
Hopefully most people are comfortable in reasonable off-the-shelf ball gaps like 15 mm. But some need larger. Some much larger. I have seen someone only find comfort when he got up to 30 mm. Sadly, 20+ mm gaps are almost never available with reasonable ring sizes outside of custom as apparently most of the population is quite happy in sub-15 mm gaps.
I do wonder if, for the few where this advice didn’t work, they just needed those 25+ mm gaps, gaps that are very difficult to obtain without some serious ring curvature. Hence the subtitle of this article — perhaps I’m not crazy enough. It wasn’t until I saw someone who needed to go all the way up to 30 mm did I realize how big a gap some needed. And at that point, we’re really talking about people who can’t suffer ball-trap devices at all. Sorry for the archaic word choice — I like my Tolkien.
An interlude: Ball Escape
The way most people size their rings, anything over a 20 mm gap and you’re very likely to have frequent ball escape. The solution to this is to wear a much smaller ring — and to maintain the gap, one with much larger curvature. The idea here is that with your flaccid penis in the ring, there’s no room for the testicles to escape. Now, there are some (or many) who would be uncomfortable with that kind of fit. And I sympathize but if it turns out you need a 20+ mm gap, you either need a snug ring or you need straps.
Nocturnal Erections
Why is it only nocturnal erections? Well, for some of us, including yours truly, it’s also nocturnal erections. But the explanation is pretty simple:
Nocturnal erections are often stronger than arousal-based erections.
Nocturnal erections don’t come with the pain desensitization of arousal-based erections. It seems evolution doesn’t want that shag carpet from 1976 to interrupt anything.
Pinching and Chafing
Those are symptoms that are experienced while flaccid so they are much easier to attribute to the ball gap. Why? Well, if you head over to r/shaftOnlyChastity, you won’t find anyone talking about their scrotum pinching or chafing. And if you head over to r/cockrings, you won’t find anyone complaining about those issues either. It’s only us who take a shaft-only device and lock it onto a cock ring who seem to have these problems. Aren’t we a bunch of idiots.
But what if it’s caused by…
Quickly I want to address some of the most common explanations I see outside of the ball gap: friction and skin being pulled. And I think these explanations are where the coconut oil solutions come from.
Friction
Sliding friction generates heat. Static contact doesn't. If the ring is simply pressing against tissue, where is the motion that's supposed to be producing the burning sensation?
For an example, think of a car going down a mountain road riding the brakes. Anyone who lives near mountains knows that those brakes are going to get HOT. That’s what’s called sliding friction. Now there are two good ways besides down-shifting to let your brakes cool. One is to stop using them. Wheeee. The other is to come to a stop and just let them cool off. But the foot’s still on the brakes but they cool nonetheless.
Skin being pulled
Let’s do an experiment. Pull on your scrotum. It’s not exactly comfortable but does it feel like it feels when you’re suffering from a nocturnal erection? Some may object saying it’s different when it’s the ring pulling on it versus getting pinched between fingers. Well, that difference is friction… but again not the kind of friction that generates heat.
If you’re trying to find comfort and that 20 mm gap isn’t working, I’m very sorry. But even if 20 mm hasn’t helped, instead of saying sorry, I don’t know what to do, I would say you may need a 25 or 30 mm gap.
Related articles
Note that my thinking and understanding of this issue has evolved over time. The older articles lack some of the ideas of some of the more recent ones.
Practical advice for bending the ring
Thanks and Credits
I always want to thank Mature Metal. They are the ones that told me that it’s the ball gap that’s the cause of scrotum burn. And after making 20,000 custom cages, I’d say they are a pretty authoritative source.
I also want to thank u/tdfun for his creative designs to help people actually test other ball gaps. And he was also the person, to the best of my knowledge, who discovered that most plastic rings could be bent using hot water. And this was well before I even started thinking about the ball gap.
I think my only contribution here, and likely not a novel one, is the idea that we can rely on the ring and the flaccid shaft to keep the balls in place and not the gap.
There are some posts that said no, it didn’t fix it. But as I’ll explain, I think they never went far enough.
Could you check the reference to your colleague u/tdfun because I can’t find him on Reddit