Men's private parts need special coverage, but female parts go unmentioned

It was the word testicles that first caught my prurient eye -- in the middle of a sidebar accompanying a Sun-Times investigation into City Hall employees receiving disability pay, even when they were fit to work.

The story included a list of various body parts covered under the Illinois Workers' Compensation Commission. If a bulldozer drives over your foot and you lose a big toe, you can get 35 weeks off work. Your hand gets lopped off, you warrant 190 weeks.

But testicles are deemed to be especially precious. If a man loses one testicle as a consequence of an accident on the job, he can take 50 weeks off work -- almost a whole year to recover from this terrible impairment.

If he loses both testicles, he is allowed to lounge about the house with 150 weeks worth of pay. I guess that's because the loss of two testicles would effectively neuter the poor guy and the trauma of suddenly turning into a castrato would understandably be too much for any red-blooded, meat-eating Chicago male laborer. Suddenly you're talking in a high-pitched voice and your mom doesn't recognize you when you phone her.

Compare the testicle loss with the loss of a kidney, spleen or lung -- only 10 weeks off from work allowed. The Workers' Compensation Commission has its priorities straight.

There is not a word, of course, about uteruses, ovaries or breasts. What if a woman needs a hysterectomy because her uterus has been damaged due to a work-related accident? Female parts apparently are covered on Page 17 of the Workers' Compensation handbook in a vague reference to parts of the body "not listed in the chart." Are the male and female lawmakers on the state's House Labor Committee just too squeamish to mention a breast or ovary directly? Is there still a patina of Victorianism hanging over the Legislature in Springfield?

What's so special about testicles, anyway, that they get their very own category?

"I've heard this complaint before," says Susan Piha, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Workers' Compensation Commission. "You have to remember this law goes back to the early 1900s.

"You'd have to get the Legislature to make changes to the law," if you wanted to include the female parts, she noted.

I phoned two female senators on the Legislative Labor Committee, which oversees Workers' Comp, Carol Ronen and Kimberly Lightford.

I never heard back from them. Guess they were too busy campaigning. And I figured I already knew what the men on the Commission would say.

But I want to extend this question to all state lawmakers: What is your position on including testicles in the handbook? Are you pro or con? And can you give reasons why female appendages and parts aren't provided equal opportunity when it comes to injuries?

As I walked around the office asking male colleagues for their opinions vis-a-vis dangling testicles, their faces wrinkled with pain. Their demeanor seemed to wither. "Your stuff doesn't hang out like ours does," claimed one. "There is the psychological trauma," said another.

But one reporter who co-wrote the story on so-called disabled city workers thought long and hard about the question. He offered the best explanation: "Women's body parts are priceless," he said. With a little giggle.