Goatse, Agape!
Internet Shock Sites Designed to Give Plaquedemia the Bum Rush
Rob Parker

"This is disgusting, it's pornography," exclaimed a sluglike woman in a fur coat, vanilla ice-cream smeared across her double chin like a money shot.

Countered a balding professor-type in his mid-forties, his left hand stuffed crassly down the front of his pants: "No. No. No."

"This is beautiful."

"This is art."

Pig Destroyer = "Jennifer."

———

2002.

A misleading link directs me to Goatse.cx. [1]

His sphincter covers the screen, stretched agape.

Inside me, something broke. Some limit had been [stretched]. Something went dead. Something is still crying (Sontag 20). The Internet isn't serious business. Here, as the old cartographers had it, be dragons.

Goatse comes by its reputation as the elder statesman of shock sites honestly. It is a cipher. It instructs, inspires and spawns new trolls to memorialize and curate its history. [2]

William Gaddis knew technology was the turd in the punchbowl of capital-A Art. He touched on this implicitly in his novel JR and explicitly in Agape Agape. [3] His paranoia regarding our technological ruination rests upon the assumption that technology will redraw (or warp) the lines of aesthetic and social acceptability. [4]

Like teenage boys graduating from early forms of masturbation (pillow humping, etc.), we economize with Fleshlights® and homemade sex dolls. [5] We've replaced the act of opening a book with clicking. But like Gargamelle (my Fleshlight®), our tools are social things. Internet carnies who trick people into accessing shock sites resist the technologically deterministic utopia prophesized by hypertext theorists by making us stare down the "degrading/regenerating lower bodily stratum" (Bakhtin 78). We now actively engage our tools.

It's Videodrome2k: every click a Schrödinger's box of contagion (computer viruses or spyware), information or grotesque body horror/bawdy humor.

The ideal Internet is classless, but the real one isn't. Divisions between cyberclasses aren't traditional, but centered on ephemeral intellectual capital. [6] Goatse rewrites cybersocial order by parodying information gatherering acts, thus driving users into two groups: those who are humanized by Goatse and "get it" and the passive lusers who haven't, or don't, and can't figure out why your link to articles about Michael Jackson's death "redirect" to 2girls1cup.

And Bakhtin's ghost smiles upon this digital carnivalesque, the destroyers, ah, stretchers of boundaries, these paragons of 21st century Art and strokes where he wishes he could grow a beard as nice as Dostoevsky's.

"... and if you do not believe it, I wish your bum-gut fall out and make an escapade" (Rabelais 68).

Notes

[1] The original image isn't hosted at Goatse.cx anymore. See Works Cited.

[2] "Trolling" webforums dedicated to offending clueless "lusers."

[3] Agape is a Greek word meaning roughly “all-consuming love.” Early Christians expropriated the term to refer to ritualized “love feasts” such as the Feast of the Ass. Goatse is quite literally Agape Agape or “all-consuming love, held wide-open.” Because on the Internet, ass feasts on you. Bakhtin also examined these feasts (as depicted in the works of Rabelais) as examples of literary carnivalesque, where social order is rewritten through transgression and parody.

[4] “The collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer” (Gaddis 2).

[5] i.e. passive tools that help us do the work.

[6] Grandparents || standard lusers || hackers, obese children.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Gaddis, William. Agape Agape. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Pig Destroyer. Jennifer. Prowler in the Yard. CD. Mastered by Scott Hull. Visceral Sound. Bethesda, MD. Relapse, 2001.

Rabelais, François. The first [second] book of the works of Mr. Francis Rabelais, Doctor in Physick, containing five books of the lives, heroick deeds, and sayings of Gargantua, and his sonne Pantagruel. Together with the Pantagrueline prognostication, the oracle of the divine Bachus, and response of the bottle. Hereunto are annexed the navigations unto the sounding isle, and the isle of the Apedests: as likewise the philosophical cream with a Limosm epistle. Trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux. New York: Harper, 2000.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977.

Shock Sites Consulted/Cited/Cringed At

http://www.1man1jar.com
http://2guys1horse.com
http://www.tubgirl.com
http://cupvid.com
http://www.goatse.cx
http://www.hai2u.com
http://www.lemonparty.org
http://www.meatspin.com
http://smoke.rotten.com/bird
http://www.stagparty.us

Rob Parker has more questions than he knows what to do with (or can ask in polite company). For example: What is the significance of Goatse's wedding ring? Why is tubgirl's vagina censored? Why is it not okay to talk about barebacking (or, for that matter, Mr. Hands and 2guys1horse) in a graduate-level class as an example of jouissance, but Pynchon can write lengthy hypersexualized passages and nobody roughs up his house plants? Parker (perhaps wrongfully) holds an M.A. in English and Film Studies from Wilfrid Laurier University.