Goatse

About

Goatse (site domain: Goatse.cx) is a shock site featuring an image of a naked man stretching his anus with both of his hands. One of the most widespread shock media on the web, the site has been notoriously used for bait-and-switch pranks or website vandalisms to provoke reactions of disgust. Although the original domain was taken down in 2004, the image continues to circulate online through mirrored sites.

Origin

The site was first launched in 1999 under the domain name Goatse.cx. According to the Wikipedia entry, the earliest known instance of the shock image was uploaded circa 1997 as “gap3.jpg” in a set of 40 additional images compressed into a single zip file named “Gap.zip.” According to Gawker’s investigative report published in April 2012, the photo set initially spread across gay porn communities on Usenet and was later picked up by The Stiles Project.

The official website was comprised of four sections: the main index page titled “Receiver” (filename: hello.jpg) which contained the most famous image that we now know as the Goatse; the counterpart image “Giver” which revealed another photo of a man reclining on a boat with a penis reaching up to his chest; A feedback page with e-mail contact information; and the “Contrib” page, which hosted a collection of tributes and parodies of the original image submitted by the site visitors.

The Man’s Identity

Gawker’s investigative report on the subject in April 2012 identified the man in the image as a “Kirk Johnson,” a self-described bisexual man in his late 40s with a fancy for oversized black dildos. The article also detailed the man’s prolific collection of shocking self-portraits hosted on various porn sites:

His profile on the adult image-sharing site Imagefap, which holds the most complete collection of his work, boasts 15,156 photos, all of which have been compiled over the last five and a half years. His videos of xTube have been collectively viewed more than 22 million times.

Spread

Throughout the early 2000s, similar shock vandalisms and bait-and-switch pranks involving the image continued to flourish in chatrooms and message boards.

On November 24th, 2000, the Goatse “Giver” and “Receiver” images were posted to the official Oprah Winfrey Message Boards in the Soul Stories board. Trystan T. Cotten and Kimberly Springer, the authors of Stories of Oprah: the Oprah-fication of American culture, later revealed that this “seemingly considerable male intrusion drove many of the women elsewhere, and the board was retired shortly afterwards.”

The earliest known Urban Dictionary definition for “Goatse” was submitted by user Bob Goatse on September 30th, 2002, describing the term as a colloquial verb:

1) To cause someone to inadvertantly navigate to the website of the same name
Example: I thought it was link for Amazon, but after I clicked the link at work I realized I have been goatse’d.

The tech news forum Slashdot was also forced to alter its thread display method after its users started a recreational game out of soliciting clueless readers into visiting Goatse.cx. In May 2007, an article on the shock site was posted onto Encylopedia Dramatica, which attributed the photograph to a “Kirk Johnson”:

One very persistent internets user spent months and months trawling all the gay erotica and anal stretching newsgroups and eventually located the star of this picture, by matching the pattern of moles on his ass. It is with many lulz that ED advises the world that the Goatse guy’s real name is Kirk Johnson, and he posts pictures and videos of himself regularly on the newsgroup alt.binaries.erotica.male.anal.

Hot-linking Deterrent

In June 2005, Los Angeles Times launched its Wikitorial website as a forum where readers could respond directly to the paper’s editorial section. The project involved consultations from the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in the making and it was highly praised by the staff columnists. Despite the anticipation, the wiki was closed two days later on June 19th, 2005, due to some readers posting “explicit images known as Goatses,” according to the Guardian.

The Goatse.cx image has been also used by website administrators to discourage other websites and blogs from hot-linking to image files hoste on their servers. In a typical set up, the adminstrator would replace the hot-linked image with the Goatse image, which was then made visible to all readers visiting the offending party’s web page. One of the more notable incidents occurred in 2007, when Wired hot-linked to another site in article about the “sexiest geeks of 2007” that resulted in the swapping of the image with the Goatse image.

Parodies

Due to its prevalence on the web and unmistakably shocking effect, the original Goatse image has spawned a series of humorous parodies and tributes. One of the most notable parodies surfaced after the Hurricane Charley in August 2004, when a photograph allegedly showing “the hands of God” in the stormy cloud formations began circulating via chain email. It was later proved to be a fake photograph with the clouds manipulated to resemble the human hands in the Goatse image.

In June 2007, BBC reader Sean Stayte submitted a sketch proposal of the 2012 Summer Olympics logo, which depicted two hands stretching the numeral “0” wide in “2012.” The design was subsequently featured on the BBC News 24 and its website as one of the best viewer-submitted alternative versions to the official logo, shortly before being taken down when the editor learned of its true meaning.

In April 2011, a photo of an Audi billboard campaign made the rounds across internet humor blogs for its resemblance to the Goatse image.

Notable Examples

Conan O’Brien’s Commentary

Comedian and late night talk show host of NBC’s Tonight Show Conan O’Brien, has often commented that his favorite audience reaction is one where horror turns to humor, and it is this particular reaction that Goastse inspires -- at first a sense of horror, but once time has passed and we gain the ability to cope (or rather if we gain the ability) we begin to find the humor in it.

Search Interest

External References