A feminist, misogynist, and Rabbi walk into a bar. The misogynist imagines his sack on the feminists’ chin, the feminist orders a “girly drink” without irony, and the Rabbi wonders if this heated situation is even circumcised. This joke may not be the way to begin, but it already did.

In our grim Post-Structuralist inquiry and critique of the phallus, we’ve neglected poor balls—the warm wheels that slowly churn time along, those reservoirs of our human genome, those two slightly asymmetrical nuggets of forever adolescent hope. Unwitting men suffer from “blue balls.” Cowards have “¡no cojones!” Men are invariably defined by their sack.

In 1932, a 50-year-old Picasso painted his 24-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter in “Le Rêve” (“The Dream”), and what a dream it was—per the graceful allusions employed by our pervy modern master. What is the fragmented left side of Marie’s face also operates (pictorially and symbolically) as the artist’s erect penis, her kissing his balls in the imminent moments before the glory of emission, perhaps on her face. (I am not the pervert here, merely your solemn art historian.)

Not that this readership is obtuse, I simply wanted to render some balls to make it more evident. It is rather genius how Marie’s eyelid conveniently distinguishes Picasso’s head from its shaft, in the blink of an eye. One may take this is a step farther and suggest that her blond hair is the spray of urine via the “golden shower,” but of course, one is not a pervert.

And as modern art turns to post-modern culture, and as everything cultural gets incestuously churned into the black hole of television, from which a show like Family Guy cometh, we begin see similar testicular tendencies, and see them we will continue to—that is, up until Peter Griffin places his warm nuggets over our eyes in some optometrical tea bagging.

Creator Seth McFarlane will tell you it’s merely a coincidence that Peter’s chin offers a striking resemblance to his own balls, one imagines only a fat torso away. With Freudian playfulness, son Chris Griffin’s chin/balls are rendered in the same fashion, albeit smaller. Perhaps this subconscious “face boner” is a commentary on the complicit numbness and passivity of television watching, for McFarlane borrows Picasso’s conceit in exploiting our lack of perception. The meaning here is instilled by not seeing. McFarlane draws a fucking cock right over our patriarch’s face—his dick, of course—facializing us with each episode, and picking up millions in advertisements along the way.

It’s called “Family Guy” after all, an invocation of a genealogy to which the wonderful things of balls lends itself.

-Jimmy Chen