Nuts! Just plain NUTS!!

TUCKER CARLSON: TAN YOUR BALLS IF YOU WANT TO BE A REAL MAN

How to address the “end of men?” Carlson wants men to be “open-minded” about shining a bright red laser on their groins. 

BY ERIC LUTZ

You may be a man, but are you a real man? The kind of guy who wrestles his jacked friends and throws giant tires? The sort of guy who milks cows and chugs glasses of raw eggs, just because? No? Well, do you want to be? Because if so, famously rugged tough guy Tucker Carlson has the solution for you: “testicle tanning.”

Testicle tanning? you might ask. Surely, you don’t mean to say becoming a macho man like Fox News’ Carlson will require me to stand nude on a rock, subjecting my genitals to some sort of mysterious red-light machine?

You bet your nuts it does. Carlson has recently begun promoting a new documentary episode for his “Tucker Carlson Originals” series, in which he asks his audience to be “open-minded” about a novel proposal to address the “End of Men” — a real, not-made-up problem the Fox host has identified.

A promo for the special shows a bunch of shirtless men doing guy stuff (shooting guns, cooking meat, swinging big axes) to the opening section of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. It’s plenty odd on its own. But it takes an even more surreal turn about 10 seconds in, when the camera pans up from a dark pool of water to a naked man standing on a rock formation of some sort with a machine shining a bright red laser on his groin. A voiceover suggests that this would help produce “men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive,” and who could “reestablish order.”

In some ways, this is easy enough to parse: Carlson has been going on for years about the supposed war on masculinity in America, something fellow conservatives like Senator Josh Hawley have also made a pet cause. “Men are in crisis,” the Missouri Republican told Carlson in an appearance last year, adding that Democrats “hate this country” and “don’t believe in manhood.” More difficult to understand, though, is this business about the testicle tanning, which simply cannot be a good or healthy thing to do.

How does that all fit in? 

Here’s Tucker’s interview guest, “fitness professional” Andrew McGovern, to explain: “If you want to optimize and take it to another level, expose yourself to red light therapy,” he said. “It’s testicle tanning, but it’s also full-body red-light therapy, which has a massive amount of benefits. And there’s so much data out there that isn’t being picked up or covered.” (Note: There's not a ton of data out there.)

“So obviously half the viewers are now like, ‘What, testicle tanning? That’s crazy,’” Carlson told McGovern. “But my view is, okay, testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it. That’s crazy. So why is it crazy to seek solutions?”

“It’s not crazy to seek solutions,” McGovern responded, adding to Carlson that he had recently been “exposed” to the term “bromeopathy.”

It is, of course, crazy — something even Kid Rock, of all people, appears to recognize. Appearing on Carlson’s program later that episode Friday, the Donald Trump-loving Rocker spoke for Americans of all political stripes when he told the Fox Host: “Dude, stop! Testicle tanning? Come on. I haven’t heard anything like that in a long time.”

“Open your mind, Bobby,” Carlson replied. “Don’t you think at this point when so many of the therapies, the paths they’ve told us to take, have turned out to be dead ends that really hurt people, why wouldn’t open-minded people seek new solutions?”

“I don’t know what the hell is going on in this world,” Rock said. “I’m not even sure if I understood that question. But some days you just want to stop this planet and let me off.”