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Goatse.cx

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img:Hello.JPG

Goatse.cx (variably pronounced /ˈgoʊtsi/, /ˈgoʊtsɛ/, /goʊts/, /ˈgoʊtsɛks/, /ˈgoʊtse/, /ˈgoʊtsi dɑt si ɛks/, or /goʊts dɔɑt si ɛks/, 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, taken offline as of February 22, 2005. As of February 27 of that year, the domain goat.cx, like goatse.cx, were 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!"

A mirror that closely resembles the original exists at http://goatse.ragingfist.net/ but it lacks less known content. The Internet Archive has the original site preserved as it was before it was shut down. [1].

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".

The title is also believed to be an acronym for "Guy Opening Ass To Show Everyone". [citation needed]

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.

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 Kirk Johnson contains the precursor images to hello.jpg and some following. At this point, it is considered highly likely that Kirk Johnson is the "Goatse Man." Johnson 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 Johnson'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 Kirk Johnson.

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.

Parodies, tributes, and trivia

File:Times goatse.JPG
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.
File:Westnet-logo.gif
The new logo for Westnet, which bears a resemblance to goatse.

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.

  • The "Goatse Clan" are a group of people who play the game Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and their logo holds definite similarities to hello.jpg.
  • Snopes.com has an article, "The Hands of God", about a photographic hoax of a cloud formation that looks suspiciously like the Goatse.cx photo. It also has an image of the September 30, 2004 TIME cover which also looks inadvertently like the Goatse.cx photo, with the suggestive tag line of "Even after 9/11, it's outrageously easy to sneak in."
  • The 2005 and now the 2006 edition of the Tour de France homepage [2] appears inspired by goatse [3]
  • The game Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil by Nerve Software and id Software features blocks forming a rough image of hello.jpg in level 3 of the Hellanoid game.
  • Unreal Tournament 2004 featured an assault level for which the final objective was to move the Hellbender through an object that bore similarity to the Goatse.cx anus.
  • On July 6, 2006 Matt Haughey made a parody [4] of the new Mastercard logo.
  • The following parodies all originate from the same IP address, hosted in the Houston, Texas metro-region:
    • Oralse.cx - The "Pussy" hello.jpg is that of a kitten, and the "Wiener" giver.jpg is that of a dachshund. Oralse.cx also has a "Contrib" section of more shots of the cat and the dog, as well as modified versions of the aforementioned pictures. It also had a "Feedback" section with its own letters.
    • http://analse.cx/ - This site has bunny.gif, which is a picture of several cartoon rabbits, each with a pancake on its head, who open their anuses in imitation of hello.jpg. The title of the page is "GoatsePancakeBunnyDance". A song called "bunny.mid" plays on the site, a version of "The Girl from Ipanema". The string "Now this is something I just don't get. - Matthew 11:42" (Matthew 11 only has 30 verses) is seen in the source code. It is most likely that the author accidentally transcribed Matthew 11:24[5], which references Sodom. The use of a rabbit with a pancake on its head is a reference to Oolong, and the repetition of the movement is a reference to The Hamster Dance.
  • In the tradition of oralse.cx and throatse.cx, "anti-shock" (sites that imitate shock/curiosity websites but do not feature objectionable content), has become an Internet trolling phenomenon where people advertise non-shock sites as containing pornographic or shocking matter. Commonly, the actual website linked-to is an image of a family pet, a recipe for sugar cookies, or the Olsen twins' website.
  • Trollse.cx - a parody of the front page of goatse.cx, replacing the original picture with a picture of open source figure Eric S. Raymond, wearing a Unix shirt photoshopped to say LUnix. The giver section has a cartoon of two men, a still frame from Jeff K's animation satirizing Linux users and game designer Cliffy B. One of them is clothed and sitting down in a chair. His oversized penis is bulging through the crotch of his red pants. In the background are pictures of Something Awful characters Cliff Yablonski and JeffK. The "contrib" only has an ascii picture of Raymond. This website is hosted in the Washington, DC metro-region. The site links to Slashdot and Slashnet. The site also links to cowse.cx, which is advertised as "coming soon." Cowse.cx currently simply displays the word "moo".
  • http://sam.zoy.org/goatse/ - A gallery of Goatse parody pictures.
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20010305142500/http://www.conhugeco.org/goatse.cx - Neo Goatse.cx, which has two sections - The Effect, which shows a picture of a man with a prolapsed rectum, and The Cause, which shows a pair of gap.zip pictures, the first depicting the Goatse man sitting on a large butt plug, the second with a pair of dildos inserted into his anus.
  • http://www.xcesta.org (no longer exists) - features a reversed version of hello.jpg (looking out from the man's anus instead of into it) for the "Receiver" section. The site's name comes from a reversal of the Goatse.cx domain - reversed, Goatse.cx would be Xcesta.og, though the site uses ".org" because there is no such TLD as ".og". The inside of the 'anus' in the picture is actually an undoctored photo of the inside of a cave, something this parody's author claims reflects on the mind's ability to conclude based on assumptions. The text is reversed and the "contrib" section is a poor-quality ASCII version of hello.jpg. "Revig eht" shows a man squeezing his micropenis.
  • http://www.evilscheme.org/defcon/ - A gallery of censored goatse images being shown to people.
File:Quake2gloomtempleofgoatse.JPG
"Temple of Goatse", a map for the Quake II mod Gloom, features a version of goatse.
File:UT2004goatse.jpg
Goatse.cx "featured" for the final objective in an Unreal Tournament 2004 assault level.
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