"Men tell me over and over again, `it's just a game. Why are you writing a paper on it? There's nothing to it,'" Kuo said. "But I think they're actually afraid to face what a study like this could say about them."
"Masculinity is a fragile thing," Kuo said.
Masculinity can be fragile in other ways, warned urologist Hung Chun-tse (洪俊澤) of Shu-Tien Clinic.
"I've always warned young men that it's a dangerous game with potential for permanent damage," Hung said. "Aluba is rightly banned by the authorities, and they should work to better enforce that ban."
"The penis itself is very, very vulnerable. If the corpus cavernosum in the penis breaks, that could cause massive internal bleeding. The urethra itself could be broken," he said.
He said the testicles are even more fragile and damage could result in testicular atrophy and infertility.
Neither Kuo nor Alex agrees with the ban on aluba by school and army officials, however.
"They can ban the game, but they can't change the group dynamics that made it so popular in the first place," Kuo said. "Besides, the ban has proved completely ineffective."
"It's really no worse than getting dragged to the toilets and beaten," Alex said.
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