What is goatse?

April 1, 2006 11:02 PM

What is goatse?

I've been tricked into looking at tubgirl, and after gouging my eyes out with hot spoons, I swore never to investigate goatse. Can someone who had experienced the horror therein please give me a verbal description of the site? I understand it has something to do with wide-open assholes, but I'm lacking specifics. Please to clarify.

Without a link to goatse.

posted by BitterOldPunk to computers & internet (28 comments total)

You can (safely) take a look at the wikipedia entry:

Goatse.cx (variably pronounced "goat see," "goat seh," "goats," "goatsex," "goat say", or "goat see dot cx", and often truncated to goatse) is one of the most infamous Internet shock sites and well-known Internet memes. Its front page contained a sexually explicit and extremely graphic picture, hello.jpg, featuring a man wearing a gold ring on his left hand (and nothing else) manually stretching his anus and rectum to a diameter roughly equal to the width of his hand. Below his anus, the man's dangling penis and testicles were visible. The site was commonly linked to by Internet trolls in order to shock unsuspecting users with the image.

As of January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx is no longer online. However, many mirrors of the site are still available and the image itself has been posted at many other websites.
posted by Dasein at 11:05 PM on April 1, 2006

Wikipedia's article is pretty informative about this.
posted by wanderingmind at 11:06 PM on April 1, 2006

Thanks -- I was afraid to even wiki it.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 11:13 PM on April 1, 2006

Kirk Johnson is a regular poster to the newsgroup alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.anal, among others, and a rather simple analysis confirms this; it is unlikely that there is another practitioner of anal stretching with the same mole on the upper-left edge of his anus. Furthermore, both the gap.zip (see below) pictures and Kirk Johnson's pictures show the same type of large yellow buttplug being used.

Andy Warhol was wrong: we'll all be famous FOREVER.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 11:17 PM on April 1, 2006

For the record, tubgirl is a photoshop, goatse is not. In fact, goatse is part of a series of images involving a man playing with an ass plug roughly the diameter of a two-liter soda bottle (if I remember the supposed interview with the person in the pictures).

The picture itself is an extreme closeup of the aftermath of this activity.

Goatse is a lot less painful to look at than tubgirl, at least to my eyes. I remember actually feeling slightly ill looking at tubgirl, but Goatse just gave me a laughing "AW GAWD NO WHY ARE THERE SUCH THINGS IN OUR UNIVERSE?!" It was horrible, but funny horrible, not "I'm going to be sick" horrible. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you should go ahead. We all know this thread is going to end in you recording your first impressions here anyway.
posted by Ryvar at 11:20 PM on April 1, 2006

Here is an iPod cover with the general idea. It's more or less shock-free but the comments might not be safe for work.
posted by fionab at 11:24 PM on April 1, 2006

I felt better about tubgirl when I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out it's just orange juice. Goatse is pretty gross, though.

So to compare what you know with what you don't know: on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being most disgusting, I'd rate both sites about a 7. Tubgirl would have ben a 9, but again, it's juice.
posted by hazyjane at 11:25 PM on April 1, 2006

Ah. I stand corrected. Goatse a 7 and Tubgirl (on first impression) a 9? Yeah, that's about right.
posted by Ryvar at 11:28 PM on April 1, 2006

Here's a flickr collection of pics of people's first reaction to seeing goatse . Even Ron Jeremy is repulsed. That's saying something. Nobody's said what it stands for, yet, BTW.
posted by wsg at 11:50 PM on April 1, 2006

"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." -- Nietzsche.

Our own joeclark unwittingly contributed to the goatse tribute-empire with his book cover for Designing Accessible Websites. And he's not the only one.

My girlfriend did a drawing of goatse for her graduation exhibition.

I'm so proud of her.
posted by holloway at 11:52 PM on April 1, 2006

Thank you for asking the question BitterOldPunk, you're not alone in wanting to have an idea of what it's about without actually going there. So to speak.
posted by ceri richard at 11:53 PM on April 1, 2006

I can't remember where I read it (hick.org?) but the story is that .cx domains were free to register*, and Hick wanted gotmilk.cx. It was already taken (or something) so he further deviated by going to goatsex → goatse.cx.

* perhaps these Christmas Island domains were only free for Open Source projects.
posted by holloway at 12:00 AM on April 2, 2006

I think life is a little less fun now after seeing it.
posted by Mrs.Doyle at 12:39 AM on April 2, 2006

I think these gingerbread cookies are the least offensive goatse you're likely to find.

And I just decided that goatse is the plural of goatse.
posted by team lowkey at 3:16 AM on April 2, 2006

Our forefathers, er, our foreparents, er, our forepersons were convinced that a permissive attitude toward pornography would inevitably lead to degredations of the worst kind. I wonder if they may have been on to something.
posted by megatherium at 4:50 AM on April 2, 2006

team lowkey... I think it should be goatsii
posted by Acey at 6:42 AM on April 2, 2006

Our forefathers, er, our foreparents, er, our forepersons were convinced that a permissive attitude toward pornography would inevitably lead to degredations of the worst kind. I wonder if they may have been on to something.

Although I sorta agree, a quick read of the wikipedia entry for the Marquis De Sade might change your mind, although one could argue that perhaps some practices are more widespread now than they were. Yes, I'm thinking specifically of Peep fetishists.
posted by craniac at 7:10 AM on April 2, 2006

GOATSE = Guy Opens Ass To Show Everyone, fyi.
posted by 31d1 at 8:34 AM on April 2, 2006

backronym, fyi.
posted by mdn at 9:34 AM on April 2, 2006

lol, pwnt :/
posted by 31d1 at 11:17 AM on April 2, 2006

We all know this thread is going to end in you recording your first impressions here anyway.

Nope. I refuse. Isn't going to happen. Long ago I learned not to look at roadkill, because it would just spoil my day. I'm applying the same logic to goatse.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 2:21 PM on April 2, 2006

I found the 8 phases of goatse to be pretty accurate.
posted by horsewithnoname at 3:03 PM on April 2, 2006

I was really impressed the first time I read the Wikipedia article on shock sites. (It may have been edited and changed now.) The images were described well enough to satisfy my curiosity without provoking me to visit those sites.

I don't feel like I'm missing out on some internet legends or in-jokes. Having seen Tubgirl, I can live without ever seeing another shock image.

I don't care if it's orange juice.

I don't want to see anything like that again. There's not enough brain bleach.
posted by Savannah at 4:18 PM on April 2, 2006

OK, I'll bite... Can someone give the same description of tubgirl, so I won't need the brain bleach?
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 4:34 PM on April 2, 2006

This List of Shock Sites on Wikipedia is text-only - no awful images - and describes a number of shock sites, including tubgirl.
posted by ikkyu2 at 5:18 PM on April 2, 2006

Beware, goatse can be something of a curse. One time, I wore a goatse t-shirt in a photo that was printed in the New York Times. Now I have to go places and have people say "Hey, aren't you the goatse guy?!"

I usually try to reply with my wife in mind: "No. I am the goatse t-shirt guy. Big difference."
posted by anildash at 1:32 AM on April 3, 2006

OK, I'll bite... Can someone give the same description of tubgirl, so I won't need the brain bleach?

Girl doing a semi-headstand in a bathroom tub, spouting what appears to be liquid fecal matter out of her anus with sufficient force to arc up in the air and come splashing down on her face. The picture is taken while the splash and arc are ongoing.

Compared to that, a gaping anus is quite tame.
posted by Ryvar at 1:59 AM on April 3, 2006

According to a friend who knew the owner of the original site on IRC (this friend actually used to get on irc from a @goatse.cx address) the people involved with the site did pronounce it "goat sex" and no, it's not an acronym for anything.
posted by mikeh at 11:17 AM on April 3, 2006