Morning, welcome to yesterday’s Sunday Times Column. Here it is today. Isn’t technology marvellous?
xoxo
EVER HAVE A CRUSH? – By Paige Nick
A guy at work showed me a clip on his cell phone that’s the latest thing to go mobile viral. People are passing it around like the common cold.
In it, two young women (I originally wrote two young ladies, then on second thoughts deleted that and replaced it with young women for reasons that will become apparent in the second part of this sentence) give a guy oral sex, while killing goldfish by stomping on them.
I’m told they’re from Edgemead, Cape Town (the girls, I have no idea where the poor goldfish are from) and were still in high school at the time of filming.
I counted two ex-goldfish before I looked away. It was an odd and disturbing thing to watch. Newspapers report that the police and SPCA are investigating and all parties will be held to task.
The video is entitled ‘Squishing Nemo’, and it’s a goldfish fetish video, which made me explore the word ‘fetish’ on Google. A fetish is defined as ‘a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing or part of the body.’ I didn’t know this before, but it’s the object that makes something a fetish, not the act. You can’t have a fetish for spanking for example, but if being spanked by a hairbrush is what gets you off, then you have a hairbrush fetish, and red marks on your bum.
By their very nature, Fetishes are totally nuts. I wonder what percentage of ping-pong ball and latex sales worldwide are reliant on this industry? I totally get that things happen in some people’s lives, usually early on while their brains are still forming, that causes them to fetishize certain objects, but you have to wonder what would have to have happened to you in order to find murdering goldfish a turn on?
I then typed ‘goldfish porn’ into Google to see if it’s even a thing. The search engine mercifully only kicked up pictures of goldfish doing it in ponds, which is hardly porn. You could play that on the National Geographic Channel at eight am on a Tuesday. You could probably even get away with it on Disney, if you put it to the right soundtrack.
The particular kink this distasteful video plays into is called ‘Crush Porn’. In the beginning that involved a woman in stilettoes stepping on a man’s crown jewels. But I guess it’s augmented somewhat and now also includes the viewer getting off on watching a woman performing a sexual act while squishing a bug (or in this case a goldfish) with her heel.
Fetishists must have been really screwed before the Internet. These days, no matter how weird your kink, you’re always just a couple of clicks away from somebody else who can also only get off if you cut an avocado the wrong way on their chest, or lick an iced pole while wearing velvet undies and a cucumber as a hat. (They really do seem that random to me.)
Interestingly (well to me at least) a team of researchers, who reviewed all the files in a teaching hospital over a 20-year period, identified 48 fetish cases. 58.3% of which included clothing, 22.9% involved rubber and rubber items, 14.6% involved random body parts, 10.4% leather items, and 6.3% were over soft materials and fabrics. They didn’t give the percentage on goldfish, but I really hope it was below 1%.
I’m told the girls were only seventeen at the time of filming this clip. Don’t kids play spin the bottle anymore? And whatever happened to postman’s knock? When I was their age, a crush meant something entirely different. You stared at a certain boy a lot, constantly doodled his initials or practiced your signature, with your first name and his surname, in your text book and on your pencil case and on your hand, then scribbled over them incase anyone saw. You also spent an unreasonable amount of time imagining what it would be like if he even knew you existed. Walking past him was an apocalyptic event. But no animals were ever harmed in the process.
I’ve heard somewhere that goldfish have really short memories. For their sake I hope that’s true.