[sebbie]

Part XXXVII

Then there are the cups, traditionally worn over parts of the body where contact in the groin area is a real possibility, say a baseball player dealing with a pitch that went way awry, with the danger of doing serious damage to the male sexual organs. Since the strap held the guy’s nads close to the body, it was only logical to think about using the pouch to hold a cup made of an impact-resistant plastic to protect the area.

The cups that were made for the traditional straps, to put is bluntly, were not very big. They were designed to contain a guy’s flaccid penis, with little room to spare. The smaller size also meant that the presence of a cup would not be easily observable once a clothing item, say baseball or football pants were placed over the cup.

All well and good, except of course, every guy knows that his penis does not always stray the same size. There is a “normal” variation that occurs over the course of a day. Further, generally penises are fond of being in a confined space. And a modestly-sized hard cup is, well, a confined space, perhaps not the “perfect” confined space, but still not a “normal” situation either. The mere thought of being in a confined space sometimes causes interesting “reactions” on the part of a penis. Let alone actually being in one.

Penises are expert in a seeming 6th sense about the situation they are in, space-wise and knowing exactly how to use the available space. Put a penis inside a cup of sufficient size to hold it flaccid, and unless the guy attached to the penis is completely brain–dead the penis will expand just enough to fill the available space, seemingly sensing exactly where the walls of the cup are reminding the guy on a constant basis where the cup walls are. These sensations can be fun, but they can also be infuriating especially if a guy is trying to focus his brain on playing the sport, not the interesting and happy sensations emanating from the groin area. Is this really a situation where you want to be horny.

Some guys may think that getting off while wearing a cup would be an easy task and the game would be much better played post-ejaculation with perhaps no one being the wiser. But getting off while wearing even a snug-fitting cup is not easy. True, the penis is sending back all the interesting signals about what is going on in the immediate vicinity, but it likes to just hang there enjoying itself. A guy can press on the cup or tap it repeatedly while still wearing it, and this may have the net effect of sending the penis off into a slightly higher arousal level but normally still not enough for a full-scale ejaculation to.

Another option is to pull the cup away from the body for only a few seconds. Momentarily relieved from the confinement of the cup, the penis expands a bit more. Then the cup snaps back to the body, the now slightly bigger penis entering a more interesting state still. This is great fun to do but you probably don’t want to be engaging in a team sport if you try this.

So, the strap and cup manufacturers probably figured out that the snug-fitting straps and cups they were selling had these “problems” for guys, and set about to fix the problems.

The so-called Banana® cup was one of the first attempt to design a larger, not as confining but still protective cup, with enough space inside so that a guy’s penis could flop around inside the cup without feeling that it was “confined”. (Banana is a registered trade name) The cup was shaped more or less like a hollowed out banana.

A basic problem with the banana cup was that it was a big piece of “hardware” that had to somehow fit between a guy’s legs. It was not like the smaller traditional cups that were easy to disguise. These have proven popular with college and professional football players, and photos you see of them often reveal either that the player is very amply endowed or must be wearing one of these.

These cups are typically so big that they really don’t work for all but a few sports, football being the major example. So, there have also been attempts to design smaller versions of these cups that are not as big a piece of hardware. But as the size comes down, so does the amount of available space. An adult can wear a cup made for a young teen, but that may very well be about as confining as an old-style cup.

To be continued…