In Which I Discover Another Very Weird Corner of the Internets…

Back after a long hiatus in which I have been a) attempting to write a novel and b) generally pissing away my life…and what, you ask, brings me back?

Grossness, in a word. Don’t ask me how I found out about this or, ok, ask me how I found it, but don’t ask why I know more about it than I would with just a cursory glance.

I’ve long been fascinated with the very strange communities you find in out-of-the-way corners of the web – the Furries, for example.  About a month ago, I discovered a new one, when the YouTube threw up (literally) a link to the following, extremely gross video:

If you don’t want to watch it, believe me, I’ll understand.  Me, I couldn’t help myself. And then I found there are literally THOUSANDS of videos like this on YouTube.

So I watched some more of them. There are several things I found just absolutely fascinating about these: first, someone decided to take video and put it up on YouTube. But even more interesting is the fact that in most of them (that I’ve seen, anyway), there’s a big crowd of onlookers when the home surgery takes place.  Participants regularly make comments like “this is the best day of my life!” as they push and prod on their friends and loved ones to remove the pestilence from their bodies.  In the video above, there’s a group of KIDS watching all the fun and providing commentary from the peanut gallery.  It’s like these folks are calling up their friends and neighbors to come over and watch them cut open Bob’s cyst.  In some of them, the amateur doctors reference other “famous” YouTube cyst removal videos, referring to “Marco” (the patient in the video above) or with jokes about “make a bigger hole” referring to an unfortunate named Lou, who throughout his surgery exhorts his wife to, you guessed it, “make a bigger hole” so she can “clean out ALL that crap.”

Then there are the comments.  We all know that YouTube comments represent the worst the web has to offer…except, surprisingly, in the case of these home surgery videos.  Comments for these are usually hysterical.  Two that show up on a lot of the videos are “I came” and “how did I end up here?” and “I wish I was the one doing the squeezing.”  Even funnier are the ones where the commenters are upset by poor video quality, or a video not matching or living up to the promise of its title.  Imprecations about the hygiene and skills of the amateur doctors abound.  Marco came in for quite a bit of abuse for being a “nasty redneck” and a lot of folks wanted to kill Lou for his repeated admonishment to “make a bigger hole.”

And it’s not just amateurs getting in on the act: there’s an Indian doctor, Yadav Vikram, who has apparently become somewhat of a celebrity in this very strange subculture.  Viky does a lot of blackhead squeezing accompanied by commentary like “and now you can see like little worms coming out of the pores” (imagine in Indian-accented English for full effect).  Other videos were taken by friends or family members in a clinic or hospital, as real doctors do the honors.  In most of the ones I’ve seen, the intention to “put it up on YouTube” is openly expressed by either the practitioner or one of the onlookers, and they’ll often reference having already watched a lot of the videos already posted.

I started wondering, WTF?  Am I the only one who hasn’t been watching these things already?  And then came the crushing shame and embarrassment of admitting that yes, I am one of the sick fucks who are watching these things NOW.

Some of these things, I shit you not, feature a 70’s porno soundtrack.

Let that sink in for a moment.

…

So why write about it?  For a start, to expose my shame.  Shame’s one thing; hidden shame is a much worse one.  In my defense, watching these things is far from the worst or sickest thing I could have done, though granted I’m not setting the bar real high.

Why did I watch any of these in the first place?  First there’s the freakshow aspect.  You can see how Marco sucked me in to begin with – just the still frame for the video shows a man with a TIT on his BACK.  I’m powerless to resist something like that, which is why I watched – and made it all the way through – the TV presentation of The Man with the 132-lb Scrotum.  How are you NOT going to check into that?  And then, I have to admit that there’s something I find oddly satisfying about seeing a big ugly excrescence meet its end and purging a body of an imperfection – though it makes me feel a little dirty to admit it.

I’m certainly not recommending you watch any of these videos, even (or perhaps especially) the one posted above – but you might enjoy clicking through them to the comments.

Who knew that zit, cyst, and boil-popping enthusiasts were the funniest and most literate YouTube commenters?