Darling Nicki,

It’s been 7 hours and 15 days since the mainstream media took their love away.  This personal salutation, “Darling Nicki” as well as the first line “It’s been 7 seven hours and 15 days…” are an homage to Prince.  If there was ever a song that Nicki Minaj was drawn for, it’s “Darling Nikki”.  I know you get the reference:  “They keep on dialing Nicki like the Prince song.”

While media minders applaud you pushing the cultural envelope, Darling Nicki, you are not allowed to diverge from their sanctioned talking points. Trigged by that infamous tweet of yours, they turned their unflattering megaphone on you and gave you a bitter taste of what it is to be Donald Trump or Kayne West for a news cycle or two.

For those coming late to the party,  Nicki Minaj tweeted the following on September 13th:  

Darling Nicki, don’t you know you are not allowed to diverge from the media’s sanctioned talking points? You got a broad, wokeful denunciation across platforms. My TV was on MSNBC and your assault on the Republic of Settled Science was announced by Joy Reid. She was not kind: My Darling Nicki, having 22-million twitter followers makes you a systemic risk. No wonder Reid’s mob declared you “too big to think for yourself.”

Yes, they went after Kanye before you, but his sin was overtly political. Your sin was not. Kayne put himself in the cross-hairs by trying to make it legit for African Americans to have their own minds with regards to politics.  My Darling Nicki, your circumstance was very different.  What they did to you marks the politicization of thought. You are not the first, but you are certainly the most attractive and the one with biggest social media following. So let’s call this tactic of control, “Whack-a-Minaj.”

Your sin was that you shared an observation the gets to core of what is driving vaccine hesitancy among young healthy men and women—that the vaccine might cause reproductive harm.  Virility is not a minor point.  It’s a major point behind much of the vaccine hesitancy.

Might there be a truth behind your front-line observation that motivated your sharing?  It turns out that there is.

Instead of thinking this through, which is the media’s purported responsibility, then making persuasive, fact-based arguments that express real concerns, the press simply attacked without restraint or proportionality. Normally, a free people and a free press are governed by and through persuasion. But the media are drawn to torches like moths to a flame.

Might there be a truth behind your front-line observation that motivated your sharing?  It turns out that there is.

A friend of mine just sent me a September 22 piece by Sharon Guynup from National Geographic‘s science section. It’s a piece headlined, “COVID-19 may impair men’s sexual performance.” My buddy suggested that it would good for me and Planned Man to get behind and push this article. I read it and he is right: it’s a kick in the balls. This piece should be a tipping-point.

The sub-head certainly grabs a guy by the short hairs:

“Men may be six times more likely to develop brief or long-term erectile disfunction after contracting the virus. The vaccine can prevent this.”

So the article, which is not an opinion piece, makes the case that getting the vaccine can offer some protection against persistent sexual dysfunction which is showing up as a consequence of long-COVID.

Darling Nicki, you are mentioned in the piece but as the victim of a drive-by snark:

“The science stands in sharp contrast to the anti-vaccine information spreading online—including the now infamous tweet by rapper Nicki Minaj—claiming that Covid 19 vaccines cause swollen testicles and impotence.  To date, no studies support that claim.”

No shit! The fact that there are no studies to support that the claim Covid vaccines may result in swollen balls and impotence doesn’t disprove what you reported in your tweet either, Nicki.  The emerging body of data, which is what the article is intended to bring public, suggests that a serious long-term consequence of getting COVID is sexual dysfunction—and one of the persistent symptoms is swollen testicles!

Here is what preceded this statement about you, my Darling Nicki:

music

Darling Nikki (2015 Paisley Park Remaster) [Explicit]

Buy it on:

Buy it

“Men may be six times more likely to develop brief or long-term erectile dysfunction after contracting the virus, according to research published in March. Other studies have documented a litany of post-infection health issues that impact sex, either independently or in concert: inability to have or maintain an erection, damage to the testes, testicular pain or swelling, inability to achieve orgasm, low testosterone levels, and mental health issues.” (Emphasis mine.)

While I don’t think if you shared this with Joy Reid you would get an apology, it’s hard to read this piece carefully and not think you are deserving of one.

Yes, I get that the correlation is not causation blah, blah, blah that must necessarily follow all anecdotal evidence.   But Darling Nicki, your logic is just as good as Fauci’s one-mask-is-good-but-two-masks-are-better claim. And isn’t the argument that while the vaccine has side effects that mirror the symptoms of Covid 19, there is one important caveat: what a patient gets from the vaccine pales in comparison to what they would get if they contracted the Covid 19 naturally. In the absence of direct studies, we are left only to our capacity for inference.  Point Minaj.

But Darling Nicki you can make a difference.

After reading this Nat Geo article you can tell your cousin, and your cousin’s friend that what he experienced, while real—a man knows when his nuts are swollen and can’t get an erection—he can take solace that he may have been worse off not getting the vaccine and contracting Covid 19 as a result. The Nat Geo article more than suggests that it could have been worse, and that your cousin ought to reconsider taking the vaccine in light of this evidence. That puts him in the company of all men holding back out of concerns for their virility.

Sweating out the disease naturally as opposed to getting controlled exposure via the vaccine comes with some scars that ought to factor into every man’s assessment.

Here is the top-line conclusion of a post-COVID survey by urologist Ranjith Ramasamy and his colleagues at University of Miami Hospital.  It draws from a bigger sample size than Darling Nicki’s survey of one:

“About 18 percent of men reported sexual disfunction; some 13 percent experienced pain in their testicles; 8 percent noted other sex organ issues; and about 4 percent had a decrease in the size of their penis or testicles. “

Eighteen percent! The last sentence of the article is the money shot:

‘The plausible relationship between COVID-19 and erectile dysfunction is one more reason for the unvaccinated to get their shots,” Jannini wrote. “If you want to have sex, better to get the vaccine. “

I don’t know about you, but this new information would be enough for me to get the vaccine. If I were a younger man, doubly so.

Included below are some other top-line findings that ought get a young man over his what-doesn’t-kill-me-makes-me-stronger obduracy with regard to Covid vaccine.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m with George Carlin on the regimen of a healthy immune system.  (It’s a classic made for our moment.) I feel compelled to share one that still is freaking me out and would probably even convince Carlin to get the vaccine:  It  turns out that a man’s testicles are are an “immunologically privileged” site.  “In these places,” writes Guynup, “viruses including Ebola, mumps, and Zika can remain in the tissues, evading the immune system even after the invader has be cleared from other parts of the body.” Yikes!

Men of the world, heed this article and get vaccinated!  Your balls—and their continued use—hang in the balance. Remaining alive but without taste, smell or the desire for sex is not living. 

The strongest and most headstrong and among us can be turned into geldings unless we get vaccinated. Our Country, Our Women, need you — and your balls.  

Best,  Guy

Media Inquiries can be made at [email protected]

Also, if you have some thing substantive to say send me a reasoned thought at [email protected].  Happy to respond and if really good publish.

On Blood and Boners:

“..[M]uch younger men also have reported sexual health issues.  When it comes to figuring out the short-term and chronic aftereffects of this new virus, “we’re still in the tracking and trends phase,” says Ryan Berglund, a urologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.”  

It lives on in men’s junk long after you get a clean bill of heath:

“The virus was indeed present in their penis tissue, which was shocking. Ramsey says, given the time frame: It had been up to eight months since the men were first infected.  The doctors also found damage to the lining in the organ’s tiny blood vessels.”

No Women, No Pride:

“No oxygen, no sex”.  Emanuel A. Janine,  Professor of medical sexology, University of Rome.

A man’s testes is his castle:

It turns out that a man’s balls are “immunologically privileged” site.    In these places, viruses including Ebola, mumps, and Zika can remain in the tissues, evading the immune system even after the invader has be cleared from other parts of the body.”

“One study speculated that testicles might therefore serve as a reservoir of the virus that causes Covid-19.  This may explain why 11 percent of men hospitalized with COVID-19 suffered testicular pain.”

The COVID vaccine’s effect on fertility:

A June study found no link between mRNA and reduced sperm count.

The combination of Prince and Nicki would be a 50 Shades of Grey masterpiece.  As mentioned above Minaj makes the connection to Prince,  “They keep on dialing Nicki like the Prince song” in track Chun-Li  

The latter “7 hours and 15 days..”  lyric from the track Nothing Compares 2 U, while it catapulted Sinead O’Conor to stardom, was written by Prince and given an equally beautiful male rendition by Chris Cornell of Pearl Jam. 

 At the time of the publication of this piece, it has been in fact, too many hours and too many days since Joy Reid and her ilk took the love away from Darling Nicki.