About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Goatse.cx

Encyclopedia : G : GO : GOA : Goatse.cx

Goatse.cx (variably pronounced "goat see", "goat seh", "goats", "goatsex", "goat say", "goat see dot cx", or "goats dot cx", and often truncated to simply goatse) is an infamous Internet shock site and well-known Internet meme. Its front page contained a sexually explicit and extremely graphic picture, hello.jpg, featuring a man wearing a gold ring on his left hand with no visible clothing (although his entire body is not visible) 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. The most common mirror was goat.cx; however, goat.cx was, like its predecessor, no longer online as of February 22, 2005. As of February 27 of that year, the domain goat.cx, like goatse.cx, had been suspended by the Christmas Island Internet Administration, but the domain as of April 2005 appeared to be back online, showing only the message "eat my goatse'd penis!" In May 2005, there was an image on the site showing a pumpkin with some hands around it as if it was stretching its anus. Christmas Island Technology Corp has registered goats.cx as of May 24, 2005 with obviously nonexistent name servers, presumably in an attempt to prevent another mirror of the original goatse.cx. In July 2005, goats.cx displayed the text "SIRS! WE HAVE A PROBLEM! ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO GOATSE.CX!"

The mirror that most closely resembles the original is at http://goatse.ragingfist.net/ and is entirely complete. The Internet Archive has the original site preserved as it was before it was shut down. [link]

Contents

Etymology

The intended meaning of the site's name is not known for certain. It is commonly interpreted as a word play on the phrase "goat sex", although no goats are involved anywhere on the site. If it meant "goat sex", then goatse.cx is one of the first domain hacks, although not a perfect one due to the extra "c".

It has been claimed that prior to hello.jpg, Goatse.cx contained a picture of a woman being anally penetrated by a goat. This is incorrect. The alt attribute on the image, "Stinger", actually comes from the EFnet #quake channel. The image itself was discovered on a webpage called members.xoom.com/stinger. Goatse.cx was created by a #quake member expressly for the purpose of displaying the image.

The Internet Archive only lists versions of the Goatse.cx site as far back as March, 1999, at which point hello.jpg was already being used.

Others believe that goatse is actually an acronym for "Guy Opens Ass To Show Everyone", with the usage of the ".cx" TLD being purely coincidental. This is likely a backronym.

Also, a member of another EFNet channel who, tired of the channel being mistaken for a warez channel, began sending hello.jpg to those who requested pirated software, renaming it appropriately to what was requested. Around this same time, members of that channel were also taking advantage of the free domain registration offered by the newly online Christmas Islands NIC (.cx), many of whom played on the phonetic resemblance of "se.cx" to "sex".

It was then that one of this channel's operators put hello.jpg on one of such domains, to facilitate easier and more effective shocks by replying to such requests with something like "see http://goatse.cx for all your cracks/warez needs."

Identity of the \"Goatse man\"

A series of pictures by a man identified as Oliver Bussel contains the precursor images to hello.jpg and some following. At this point, it is considered highly likely that Oliver Bussel is the "Goatse Man." Bussel 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 Bussels's pictures show the same type of large yellow buttplug being used.

He has been given many nicknames by various Internet communities, including "The Goatse Guy", "Goatse Man", "G-Man", "Assman", "Bob Goatse", "The Ass Pirate," "Mr G.", "The Goatman", "The Receiver", "Stinger" (hello.jpg was originally passed around on IRC as _stinger.jpg, with the intent of prodding an op), "Gman", "Goatsemon", "The Ass that started it All", "Goatse", "Gaping Ass Man", "Señor Goatse", "MVG", "Mr. Goatse", "The Goatsenator" and many others.

Some have speculated that "he" is actually an intersexual who is pulling open his vagina. However, the rest of the images in the series are unambiguously male. An interview with a man who shows similar elasticity can be found at: http://www.bmezine.com/news/people/A20210/plp56/index.html (Note that this site contains similar photos on the front page.)

Judging by the anatomical similarities between the man seen in the original goatse.cx images as well as those on detroithardcore.com and the man seen in the image on bottleguy.com (same mole near the anus, similar scrotal sack and penis, same slim build), it seems likely that "bottleguy" is also Oliver Bussel.

Geographic location

The site used the .cx country code, which is the top-level domain of Christmas Island, whose operators will not disclose registrants' personal information. The actual server of Goatse.cx was not located on Christmas Island, but in the United States and is owned by Hick.org, which is a website about computer programming and bathroom humor. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originate from the same IP address; the server is located in the Kansas City, Missouri metro-region. Goat.cx, a mirror of Goatse.cx, is located in the Dallas, Texas metro-region.

In recent times the website has been rehosted as www.goatse.ca. The .ca suffix implies that the website is now hosted in Canada, although it is unknown at this time if www.goatse.ca is "official" and was hosted by the original owners of www.goatse.cx; however, it remains a popular mirror of the site.

According to [Google Trends] the region most interested in 'goatse' is Finland.

Parodies, tributes, and trivia

The front cover of the September 20 2004 issue of Time magazine (above) is seen by some to look suspiciously like a deliberate allusion to hello.jpg, according to Snopes.
Enlarge
The front cover of the September 20 2004 issue of Time magazine (above) is seen by some to look suspiciously like a deliberate allusion to hello.jpg, according to Snopes.

Because many frequent Internet users have been tricked into viewing the site at one time or another, it has become something of an Internet-wide in-joke. As such, hello.jpg and the other images on the site are common subjects of parodies and tributes.

"Temple of Goatse", a map for the Quake II mod Gloom, features a version of goatse.
Enlarge
"Temple of Goatse", a map for the Quake II mod Gloom, features a version of goatse.

Goatse.cx "featured" for the final objective in an Unreal Tournament 2004 assault level.
Enlarge
Goatse.cx "featured" for the final objective in an Unreal Tournament 2004 assault level.

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: