Do Men’s Balls Get Bigger In the Summer?

It’s a difficult time to be a man. They’re falling behind women academically, making less money than their dads and grandfathers, and are so desperate for kinship and community that they’ve started posting sticks on Instagram and asking each other to rank them. It’s tough out there, and now that the weather is heating up, it’s about to get tougher.

A man told me something a few years ago that haunts me to this day: every summer, his balls get bigger. Not to the extent that he has to purchase new underwear or anything, but enough to make a noticeable difference when he wears trunks or loose boxers. Every June or so, like clockwork, his “summer long balls” come in. It’s one of the harbingers of summer, sort of like a collie shedding its top coat or Sabrina Carpenter releasing a new single.

This guy says he doesn’t have strong feelings about his Summer Long Balls. “It’s not something I either like or dislike,” he said. “It is simply a reality.” But I don’t think he’s being entirely truthful. I’ve gone to the beach with him, and on at least one occasion, he had to find a Target en route and duck into the bathroom to self-adjust because his balls had gotten twisted in his trunks.

I had to know if this condition was specific to this one man, or if it was something that all men struggled with but  just didn’t talk about publicly. When I asked around my social circle, about half the men I polled didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. Others, however, acutely felt the pain of summer long balls. “It sucks,” one person told me. “I wish I could wear sluttier shorts in the summer. But I can’t do so comfortably.”

Another told me he experiences a variation on summer long balls in which sweat causes the skin from his scrotum to stick to his leg, creating what he dubs a “bat wing” effect. “You have to make sure no one sees you grab your crotch to rearrange if you’re in public,” he says. I even heard about a guy whose testicles were so distended they hit the toilet water when he sat down in a public restroom.

Some pointed out the similarity to “summer penis,” the term coined by MEL Magazine’s Tracy Moore in 2018 to describe the way some men’s genitals appear to swell during the summer. This phenomenon, Moore writes, is caused by vasodilation, or the dilation of blood vessels to allow for increased flow to erectile tissue.

But this is not the case for summer long balls, according to New Jersey urologist Anika Ackerman, which instead result from body self-regulating in warmer climates, so the testicles are at optimal temperature for sperm production. “When it’s a cold environment, the testicles move towards the body, and the scrotum tenses up,” Ackerman explained. (Think: George Costanza’s shrinkage incident.) “The opposite is true in a warm environment. The scrotum relaxes and the testicles move away from the body.” It’s not so much that men’s testicles become bigger in the heat; it’s that they travel further away from the body.

Still, the question remained: why do some men clearly experience summer long balls, while others don’t? And approximately what percentage of the male population is at risk, so to speak? I called Yaniv Larish, a urologist and surgeon at Fifth Avenue Urology, to see if he had any theories. He suspects that a good proportion of summer long ball cases are actually men with varicoceles, or enlarged veins within the scrotum. (Which is basically like varicose veins, but for your ballsack.) “When you have a varicocele, the blood is not moving around efficiently, so instead of circulating around the testicle and pulling the heat away, it’s pooling up and actually insulating the testicle at an elevated temperature,” he says.

About 15 percent of the male population has a varicocele in either one or both testicles. They’re often undiagnosed, because “men are way less educated about their bodies than women are,” Lavish says Varicoceles are usually harmless, but in some cases they can be linked to decreased fertility, in which case they are treated with minor surgery. “What you’re describing as summer long balls is, I suspect, really the varicocele becoming more pronounced as a result of the elevated temperature,” Larish says.

If a man in your life is struggling with summer long balls, there are a few things he can do to alleviate his discomfort. Wearing tight underwear, for instance, can offer scrotal support; it’s also helpful to spend as much time in the air-conditioned indoors as possible, as hotter environments aren’t great for testicular health overall. Ackerman also told me about a product called “Nutsicles” — essentially, an ice pack for the testicles — that could possibly help, though it is intended primarily for men who have had vastectomies and not Summer Long Ball sufferers.

While there is no hard-and-fast cure for Summer Long Balls, the good news is that it’s temporary. Once the temperature goes down, so, too, will the circumference of a man’s balls. Men can also take solace in the fact that summer long balls can provide, if nothing else, a new opportunity for creative expression. “Actually, I think they’re kind of awesome,” a friend told me. “When they’re hanging way the heck down you can really grab a handful of them and twist them around, or pull them up to do a bullfrog.” Who says men don’t have hobbies?