VIDEOS ON SPEW TUBE
HOW INTERNET JUST GOT A LOT MORE DISGUSTING
FORGET greed, these days gross is good.
Instead of the likes of Wall Street’s villain Gordon Gekko raking in millions by squeezing clients, we have heroes like YouTube’s Dr Sandra Lee making money squeezing pus.
Posing as Dr Pimple Popper, she’s hit with millions of clicks every day as she rids patients of the grossest growths ever captured on video.
I’m not judging her – it’s actually brave and necessary work – but I am judging us. (Yes, I’m one of those who watches – with eyes all but squeezed tight.) Why are we so into gross-outs?
Almost every day, the information superhighway provides us with ever more car crash viewing – from the woman shaving her legs in a public pool in north Queensland to the woman shaving her legs in a drinking fountain in a public park.
Have we always been so disgusting? Or is the lure of internet infamy enticing these offenders out from the shadows?
The world just seems more comfortable with private bodily functions going public – it’s a literal interpretation of better out than in.
As someone who has known a pimple or too in her time, the attraction of watching Dr Lee and her patients is that it makes me feel like a supermodel by comparison.
I may carry a bit more weight since having children, but at least it’s not in the shape of a 5kg ball of pus on my forehead.
Understanding humanity’s disgusting habits, growths and illnesses might be a dirty job, but it seems to be the gross glue that keeps us together.
When superstar Pink had to cancel some concerts due to a bout of gastro, I felt like calling her up and saying: “Girl, I feel you.”
Stars, they get diarrhoea just like us.
Of course, the reason I couldn’t call her was because I was in the midst of my own gastro meltdown. Also, I don’t have her number.
Last week my husband was away for one night. He never goes away. Ever. Stepping up to the role of responsible adult, I managed to make dinner and was herding the kids into bed when my son mentioned he felt a little funny.
With one eye on the clock ticking towards both their bedtime and my wine time, I brushed off his complaint.
Two minutes later he grumbled again and that’s when I noticed his face. White skin, lips pale and trembling, I asked if he thought he needed a bucket. To which he replied: BLURGH!!
It was like someone had installed a leaf-blower in his oesophagus and was just blowing vomit all over the house.
As luck would have it, he was sitting on the couch at the time so that the entire threeseater, the floor, the wall and lower portions of pretty much all the furniture in the room were covered.
I literally did not know he had it in him.
Wading though this nightmare version of a Nickelodeon sliming, I wondered how on earth I was ever going to clean it all. I called my husband not for help but because I needed someone to know what hell had just descended upon my house. In sheer desperation and depression, I hung my head on the kitchen counter, possibly crying and muttering: “Why, God, why?”
And when I looked up, there was an answer to my prayer.
The dog was, uh, cleaning it up. Like the circle of life, what comes up, then goes down.
My only regret is that I didn’t film it. That gastro virus would have gone viral for sure.
Because in the depths of our depravity, the world would surely relate to the humour in our humble humanity. And that, like Dr Pimple Popper’s profession, is noble work indeed.
Yes, it’s gross. But also, good.
Read Ann Wason Moore every Tuesday and Saturday in the