tl;dr

On Sunday, a basketball player was hit in the testes. This is not a new phenomenon. Athletes, be they professionals or amateurs, have been getting hit in the nuts since the dawn of time, and America has been publicly laughing about it at least since Bob Saget first hosted Ow! My Balls! America's Funniest Home Videos. At some point, though, saying someone got hit in the balls didn't sound that funny any more. Was the market over-saturated? Possibly. Were balls not funny anymore? Unlikely. Was the idea of getting hit in the testes, a feeling any man knows and just the thought of which triggers a tightening of the taint region, scarier than it was funny? Hmmm... What do you do when you want to laugh at someone without questioning how you would feel in a similar circumstance? Enter Gawker Media.

The  reason to write about dicks is not having balls to write something else.

Suddenly, according to Dickspin, people were no longer getting hit in the nuts, they were being "hit in the dick." Why did this change suddenly come about? Could it be that Dickspin feared we wouldn't want to think about the immense pain and reproductive stakes involved in a man being hit with a fastball to the testes? Many athletes do not wear cups; they're uncomfortable, cumbersome, and may impact performance. So when Dickspin says someone got hit in the dick, that person may actually have been hit in the balls, which should be triggering that taint tightening with a tiny bit of empathy.

Or did they change it because all they really wanna talk about are dicks? Not a week goes by without a number of articles about dicks. It's our fault, of course. As readers, if we didn't gobble up the #dickclickbait maybe they would stop underpaying underqualified writers to "write" an "article" about some guy's dick with a photo and nine words of text. Why not just call the site Dickileaks? Is it unfair of me to say the writers are underqualified? Maybe, but if your contribution to sports journalism is showing Brett Favre's penis, Rex Ryan's wife's feet, and posting videos of bears doing things bears do, then I don't think we should hold our breath waiting for the next Gary Smith. Oh! Hey, here's an article saying there isn't going to be another Gary Smith, and trying to be Gary Smith is not trying to be yourself, cool so now you're free to just continue chronicling great dick moments in real-time.

One of the great things Dickspin does is point out great moments in sportswriting's past, and while I love reading those articles, it only reinforces how worthless almost everything else on the site is. If the guy who sold us Krokodil would occasionally read us interesting excerpts from 20th-century German philosophy, does that mean we should keep buying Krokodil from him? Side note: DO NOT GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH FOR KROKODIL! NSFL.

Dickspin showing Brett Favre's penis was our generation's Pentagon Papers, and made men feel great about themselves.

As a fan of sports, I sometimes feel the need to defend sports to others who don't care about them. They'll say, "Okay, I get why people play sports, and physical activity is great, so from an exercise standpoint, sure, that's cool. But why would you watch sports? Why do you care who wins?" The answer isn't a simple one, and involves decades of my personal history with sports, what success and failure means in a context wherein the answer should be so obvious, and layers of my particular (but surely not uncommon) neuroses about growing old, regret, agnosticism, superstition, justice, virtue, living vicariously, schadenfreude and my relationships with everyone I love and hate. There's no one answer to why sports are great, or why we want our team to win. Sometimes sports play a cathartic role for a struggling country, sometimes they're just something to look at other than porn. There is no roadmap for why we care, but our shepherds, for better or worse, are sportswriters.

Sports are modern fables being told to us all simultaneously. If you want to believe someone is "telling" us these fables then it is a Troll God, the athletes themselves, or people behind the curtain we'd rather not think about. We think we have direct access to witnessing these events, but that is no longer true. If sports were religion, they were once experienced as "waiting worship" in a Quaker mass, where everyone goes to a church together but silently interacts personally with God, without some church authority acting as an intermediary. People would all go to a sporting event without context or analytics, and watch people compete. They would write their own narratives in their head, for why the guy with curly hair fought valiantly, but the guy with wavy hair was just too good, and they would maybe even take away a lesson about courage versus preparation. Does this sound like how we experience sports today?

"If we can't sell a magazine teasing Lindsey Vonn's vagina, I'll give up and take that job at Deadspin!"

Watching sports today is like going to churches that are advertised on infomercials at 4am. Some almighty preacher will tell us exactly what we're supposed to be getting, and why it's good for us, and why we just need to tell our friends to come back so he can save them all. The sportswriters are the televangelists, and the athletes (or corrupt officials, commissioners, unnamed crime syndicate, etc...) are the Troll God. The most important thing is getting your money, the second most important thing is thinking you're saved to tell your friends. So, if it's just about money, what's going to stop it from becoming its most baseless form? Sportswriters. They're the last hope against the #hottakes ESPN culture, because their pieces are supposed to take longer to write and consume. They should be asking the "why" and "how" questions, and not just the "who, what, where, and when." We have highlights for that. Give me something unique. Instead, they cater to the one thing they can do that ESPN can't, writing about and showing dicks.

"...and the Troll God said, 'You leave Jameis alone! And so they will! Praise the Troll God!"

The concept of "the court of public opinion" is silly when a vast majority of Americans think lobbyists have too much power but there's nothing we can vote on to curb the power of lobbyists. "Catering to the demands of the public" is a common excuse for laziness, cowardice, and greed. So, if you say, "Well, this article about dicks just got more clicks than this article about bears, so that means people must want us to write more about dicks and less about bears," you're excluding just trying to write something great. You're choosing laziness, cowardice, and greed. It's hard to write an article about Johnny Manziel's checkered family past, or checking sources and blowing open the Manti Te'o story (both written by Timothy Burke, so he's cool), and when you do, wouldn't it have been more effective to have had ten leaks of athlete's dicks instead?

If you're using the standard of "giving people what they want," and measuring "people" as anyone who would click on your site, regardless of whether or not they care about sports, the endgame is always going to be porn and snuff films. Put up a video tomorrow of someone being electrocuted, call it, "Guy Dies from Electroshock to the Dick! NSFW" and see how many hits you get. Does that mean you should just keep posting videos of people dying and working "dick" into the article title? Are you really doing your dream job?

Someday I'll write the greatest story ever written, and I'll call it "Bear Dicks: A Comparison."

Therein lies the most frustrating part of Dickspin, and all the Gawker sites in general. This is a dream job, (other than the pay, which I get the impression is not great) except it's being done without passion. You want to write about sports? You want to provide context to the morality tale so that those who wander into the church of the Troll God can appreciate it more? Great, I'm fine with all of that. But if it's true, then why are you only writing 15 words a day and just posting a link? Is this your full-time job? If it is, what the fuck are you doing with your time? If it's not, then do you understand that the reason this isn't your full-time job is because you're merely hosting episode 9 million of America's Funniest Home Videos? If you're doing something anyone can do and many would love to do, it's no wonder you aren't getting paid for it. That's why the job market for getting stoned and sucking as disc golf is so competitive. If this really is what you want to do, then try to get better at it. Don't just try to get more hits, because eventually someone is always gonna come along who can write a "#DoubleDickDude is Starring in the Next Soderbergh Movie!!!!!!!!" post before you can. Just because you are in an office doesn't mean you aren't bathroom paparazzi, and just because we read it, doesn't mean we should.

The problem is that we don't want to read long articles, because we are reading them at work, and therefore have to be ready to actually "work" again at a moment's notice. If we are reading a long article, it's frustrating to stop when our boss comes by, then pick back up where we left off. We want the headline to be the article, and that's exactly what Gawker Media is doing. To be fair, this has been a trend way before Gawker Media, but we used to judge each other for "reading" US Weekly, now it's just called Gawker, and we read it on a computer, so it must be for smart people. As dumbed down as the headlines are, they aren't what really drive traffic on the internet anymore. The real traffic is in comments, and likes, and retweets, and link posts. This generates traffic by pulling more people to your site, but it also keeps pulling the same people back, to see what someone said about their comments, or how many likes their link got on Facebook.

We've taken the internet, the ultimate worldwide encyclopedia and turned it into the mirror from Snow White. We could ask it anything in the world, and the only thing we want to ask it is if we're the most awesome person on the planet. Spoiler alert: No you aren't. I'm not either. The most awesome person on the planet is so far from a computer right now that wikipedia says they died 20 years ago. But we still keep asking the internet the same question: Am I the most awesome person on the planet? We're so desperate for positive reinforcement that we post stupid shit and keep checking back for likes, and get upset about dislikes. There's a reason why there's no option for "Not Interested" on social media, because everyone would immediately know that nobody's interested, and then they'd stop posting, and then they'd stop being bombarded with ads. We just want to be told we're doing the right thing. Tell us that our kids are adorable. Tell us that without eating gluten we're unstoppable. Tell us she's a slut. Tell us my dick is bigger than his. Tell us the government cares about us but is being stonewalled by trolls. Tell us that women actually want the type of man who sits at a computer and reads about what type of man women want.

"Your comment about free speech having limitations has been given 127 thumbs up!"

The internet is becoming more and more specialized because we would feel like idiots if we believed everything HuffPo or CNN told us, so we believe what Jezebel tells us about women's issues, and what Kotaku tells us about video games, and what Gawker tells us about people in their 20s, and what TMZ tells us about which celebs are bad mommies. In the same sense that there is no monolothic "Big Brother" because instead there are the NSA, CIA, FBI, IRS, Interpol, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intel, there is also no one Ministry of Information. The endgame is the same, but we are being told what to do by so many "different" sources that we think we're doing our own research. It's the assembly line of propoganda, and Dickspin is the transition from sports interest to navel gazing. So at least we can trust Dickspin to cover one thing well, those moments when dicks and sports intersect. Except, even that, they can't be trusted with because they're too infatuated with winning the #DickPickSpaceRace to put any context behind their dick articles.

III. If that fails, I'll give them what they actually want.

You know how I know Dickspin writers aren't good at their job? They put up a post Sunday entitled, "Blake Griffin Takes a Shot to the Dick Courtesy of Serge Ibaka," without pointing out that Griffin may actually be hitting Ibaka in the dick first (I would say balls, but thanks to Dickspin's #DickPickSpaceRace competition, I am led to believe it is difficult to hit Serge Ibaka anywhere without hitting him in the dick), and that Griffin hit Andre Iguodala in the balls on a three-pointer in the previous series (I can't find this online because Dickspin didn't cover it, but I swear to the Troll God, it happened), and then threatened to do so later in the series while trying to alter another Iguodala three. Griffin also blatantly nut-slapped Chandler Parsons a year ago, then blamed it on a sore wrist.

How did this happen? Are Chandler Parson's balls more therapeutic than icy-hot? How did Blake Griffin become the ball-slapping boogeyman? Where's that story? Maybe Chris Paul, the same person who seemed to teach Blake Griffin to flop, and who knows how to make a mean batch of Nut Punch himself, taught Blake this practice. This is the story Dickspin was created to write, but they're so busy worrying about posting 15 word "articles" before anyone else does that they're missing the dick forest for the dick trees. But, hey, maybe their amazing commenters will set the record straight with a series of obvious puns.