T'ain't a good idea

December 7, 2019 2:44 PM

Our ancestors had a secret to happiness we are just now rediscovering. Between hunting and gathering, drawing little horseys on cave walls, and discovering exciting new ways to die, they would roll onto their backs, grip their dirty hands around their dirty ankles, and expose their nether regions to the life-giving eye of the sun. (Reid McCarter, AV Club)

Josh Brolin's butthole is sunburned and he's not happy about it

Sawbones: Taint Tanning and Heliotherapy (Sawbones previously)

posted by Johnny Wallflower (64 comments total)

You'd think the idiomatic expression about the "place where the sun don't shine" would be sufficient caution against this practice.
posted by sourcequench at 2:52 PM on December 7, 2019 [71 favorites]

i live in w michigan and i have two questions

1 what's the sun?

2 how do you not freeze your ass off?
posted by pyramid termite at 2:53 PM on December 7, 2019 [32 favorites]

The whole “wellness” thing has long been predicated on paying to have metaphorical sunshine blown up one’s proverbial ass.

In hindsight, this new literalist bent seems inevitable.
posted by armeowda at 3:06 PM on December 7, 2019 [49 favorites]

It's funny, because the sun shines out of mine.
posted by pipeski at 3:07 PM on December 7, 2019 [57 favorites]

i live in w michigan and i have two questions

I was about to ask the same questions from Canada.
posted by clawsoon at 3:09 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

First you have to bleach your bunghole, then you have to tan it?
posted by Marky at 3:11 PM on December 7, 2019 [24 favorites]

*Thinks of sunburn*
*Thinks of sunburn on delicate areas*
*Thinks of skin peeling off*
*Whole body shudder*

Of course in England if the sun, rarely, decides to show itself, hordes throw off their garments and start basking on the grass for as long as lunch break allows. But where I grew up hosts ask their guests if they wouldn't like to come away from that hot window and sit somewhere more shady? And people keep their curtains closed to as to keep the house cooler.
posted by glasseyes at 3:17 PM on December 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

An interesting new terrain to cultivate for skin cancer...
posted by jim in austin at 3:17 PM on December 7, 2019 [5 favorites]

This just in: Dermatologists Are Warning People Not to Try Perineum Sunning
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:18 PM on December 7, 2019 [7 favorites]

“30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole is the equivalent of a full day of sunlight with your clothes on,” we’re told.

Being a former redhead I get burned in about fifteen minutes. Assuming that the summer has around 10 hours of good tanning time in a day, that means I can only do this for ... less than a second. So I not only have to assume an inherently undignified position, I have to rig up some kind of automatic shutter to avoid great pain?

I choose to assume there are not actually any people that believe stuff like this and that this is just a "you are superior to someone" article ... kind of like I assume about most advice columns.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 3:18 PM on December 7, 2019 [9 favorites]

From the comments to that article: Finally, there is harmony between the sun and the moon. (Officer Milk Carton)
posted by glasseyes at 3:23 PM on December 7, 2019 [22 favorites]

Sunshine is really good for diaper rash. I hope to not need to care about this for a while yet.
posted by theora55 at 3:30 PM on December 7, 2019 [9 favorites]

Now I've involuntarily visualized Thanos' butthole. Thanks.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 3:40 PM on December 7, 2019 [9 favorites]

Pretty sure they're just blowing smoke up my ass.
posted by srboisvert at 3:45 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

Is there any evidence that anyone bar the Instagram influencer profiled in the original thing had been doing this before her post went viral? Like, anyone?

I like a good "daft homeopaths are doing terrible things to themselves" story as much as anyone else, but I don't think there's necessarily an actual trend happening here.
posted by sciatrix at 3:47 PM on December 7, 2019 [16 favorites]

30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole is the equivalent of a full day of sunlight with your clothes on

anchorman_idontbelieveyou.gif
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 3:51 PM on December 7, 2019 [4 favorites]

Never change, Johnny
posted by sjswitzer at 3:52 PM on December 7, 2019 [6 favorites]

Warmth on your butt does feel good and I wouldn't be surprised if some human somewhere sometime did this and enjoyed it.
posted by bleep at 4:01 PM on December 7, 2019 [4 favorites]

In hindsight, this new literalist bent seems inevitable.

I see what you did there.
posted by briank at 4:18 PM on December 7, 2019 [11 favorites]

Butthole sun, won't you come
And wash away the rain
Butthole sun, won't you come
Won't you come
posted by ZaphodB at 4:21 PM on December 7, 2019 [61 favorites]

I remember reading in some woo book a long time ago that the perineum is an important point in acupressure, so much so that if someone drowned in front of you you could revive them by pressing on the area. And all I could think is that sounds like a great way to get hauled off to jail as horrified onlookers watch you rush to the scene as if to help, only to begin non-chalantly finger-banging the drowned person.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 4:25 PM on December 7, 2019 [58 favorites]

Not the circle of life I was expecting.
posted by mhoye at 4:25 PM on December 7, 2019 [16 favorites]

Tempting as it may be to attribute this to an unfortunate subliminal effect of a lifetime of seeing "Sunkist" labels on navel oranges, I feel compelled to note a family resemblance between this practice and the results of a now retracted and infamous Science article from a few years back claiming that the human body clock could be very efficiently reset by applying light to the backs of the knees.
posted by jamjam at 4:27 PM on December 7, 2019 [4 favorites]

Gotta give props to that Sawbones podcast. That's some good content right there.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:39 PM on December 7, 2019 [3 favorites]

Works great. Erm, I hear.
posted by No Robots at 4:41 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I feel like this is mixing up cause and effect. If I'm in a place where I have the space, time and privacy to let the sun shine on my taint for any period of time, then chances are things are going well for me. If I were to try and do that today my neighbors would complain, but if I have a couple of acres and freedom to relax and do this when the sun is otherwise out my life is probably pretty low stress which is generally good for my well being, sunburned perineum or no.
posted by mikesch at 5:02 PM on December 7, 2019 [35 favorites]

1. It's not like it's the risk of sunburn that's going to keep people from adopting this en masse.
2. Bullshit on this "ancient Taoist practice" garbage - that's just orientalist crap right there unless you have a primary source for me.
3. Sunshine is antibiotic, so there's that.
posted by Miko at 5:11 PM on December 7, 2019 [16 favorites]

Being a former redhead I get burned in about fifteen minutes. Assuming that the summer has around 10 hours of good tanning time in a day, that means I can only do this for ... less than a second

Co-signed. Also, if your complexion is anything like mine, aloe vera burns worse than the scorch itself, so you have to slather on Noxzema instead. The thought of that mentholated tingle alone is enough to make me believe all the pop hypotheses about redheads feeling more pain all the time.

As with massages, pedicures, and all the other “healthy” treatments that supposedly “feel good” and not “like you’re being mauled by constipated bears in Hell,” I’ll have to give this one a pass.
posted by armeowda at 5:36 PM on December 7, 2019 [6 favorites]

mauled by constipated bears in Hell

Sockpuppet name up for grabs.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:29 PM on December 7, 2019 [14 favorites]

Is there any evidence that anyone bar the Instagram influencer profiled in the original thing had been doing this before her post went viral? Like, anyone?

I don't think so?

It reminds me of the "Billie Eilish doesn't know about Van Halen" thing that was going around (and has hit the mainstream media), where consensus is that it's okay for a girl her age to not recognise Van Halen and everyone should lay off her... except no-one actually was laying into her in the first place. Like, the consensus was 100%.

Which in turn reminds me of Fred Clark's concept of the Anti-Kitten Burning Coalition, where he noticed, when he still had a newspaper job, that when there was an animal cruelty story in the paper, they'd get a ton of letters a) furious that this had happened, understandably, but b) that assumed this was a controversial position that had to be defended. It was a moral performance - burning a kitten is a low bar, morally, so condemning it demonstrates that you're better than someone, with very little risk on your part that you might have to actually fight.

With Billie Eilish, the imagined opponent is the out of touch Boomer who expects the cultural touchstones of their youth to be eternally relevant, a person who, I remind you, turned out to not exist. And with this, it's kind of a mix of wellness influencers peddling woo, where a lack of boundaries is conflated with intimacy which is conflated with authenticity. It's an expression of our anxieties about the modern world, in a form that's low-risk to stand against.

Clark brings up the Anti-Kitten Burning Coalition in the context of Evangelicals: he sees the same pattern with Evangelicals, with the Satanic Panic and with the pro-life movement, inventing imaginary monsters to allow them to be moral crusaders without actually having to be morally upstanding themselves.

You do you, but I think it's preferable to put my energy to worrying about terrible things that are real.
posted by Merus at 6:32 PM on December 7, 2019 [32 favorites]

These ppl are skipping a few steps. You could try washing your butt with water first once you're done at the toilet before getting to this stage.
posted by cendawanita at 6:42 PM on December 7, 2019 [3 favorites]

/gives Greg Nog the stinkeye
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:02 PM on December 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

And all I could think is that sounds like a great way to get hauled off to jail as horrified onlookers watch you rush to the scene as if to help, only to begin non-chalantly finger-banging the drowned person.

SED, you just made me choke on my toothpaste. Next time when I laugh at this comment and choke on something substantial and die, who is going to nonchalantly fingerbang me to revive me? Who?
posted by medusa at 7:13 PM on December 7, 2019 [12 favorites]

+1000 to Greg Nog. It's AT LEAST twice as bright as the moon.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:22 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

For the record, I have to say that as I was reading this article, I wondered whether if I came back here to talk about how hilarious it is, my post would be pulled for slamming another religion. Happily, that is no longer a concern.
posted by KleenexMakesaVeryGoodHat at 7:30 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

I remember reading that an apparently famous person I was not familiar with named Shailene Woodley had said, "Another thing I like to do is give my vagina a little vitamin D." I also read where she had said things like "My religion is the Earth, man. I believe in trees" or "I first heard about the benefits of eating clay from a taxi driver" or "I’ve always sort of wondered what it’d be like kissing my brother."

I kept making a mental note to check out her comedy, because I honestly and sincerely assumed she was an alternative comedian, someone who'd slot in between Sarah Silverman and Maria Bamford. I cannot tell you how flummoxed I was to learn she is a person who really says and means these things. The idea of lying around waiting for your genitals or butthole to tan just reads like a setup for a joke for me.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:38 PM on December 7, 2019 [11 favorites]

I had a model get a nasty burn on her vuvla/pubis. She didn't normally burn readily and we were only out for about 10 minutes but that was more than enough for March sun on a clear day reflecting off of snow to sunburn skin that doesn't regularly see sun. So ya, be careful perineum tanners.

PS: the sun is about a million times brighter than the full moon, the moon has the same effective visual area as the sun and the moon is pretty much a perfect 18% gray. Which means even in the 35mm film days you could take pictures by full moonlight and they would look just like sun lit images. It just took a million times as long (plus some windage for reciprocity failure).
posted by Mitheral at 8:12 PM on December 7, 2019 [3 favorites]

I remember reading that an apparently famous person I was not familiar with named Shailene Woodley had said, "Another thing I like to do is give my vagina a little vitamin D."

Don't be surprised. Every generation needs its Shirley MacLaine. And it's not just their New Age woo factor; SW nails those modern-day Fran Kubelik roles.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:24 PM on December 7, 2019 [2 favorites]

“The social media influencer lays on its back, its rectum baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 8:25 PM on December 7, 2019 [51 favorites]

Over the years I’ve known more than a few people get really bad sunburns in uncomfortable places because although they were ok being naked outdoors, they weren’t ok rubbing sunblock on their private areas in public.

That people are doing the same thing but on purpose is pretty funny.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:30 PM on December 7, 2019 [3 favorites]

As the prophet Leonard Cohen said, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
posted by armeowda at 8:32 PM on December 7, 2019 [36 favorites]

“The social media influencer lays on its back, its rectum baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”

I read that in the voice of a replicant derived from the combined DNA of David Attenborough and Ze Frank.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:48 PM on December 7, 2019 [4 favorites]

"Perineum trauma." One more thing I'm not going to lose sleep over tonight.
posted by kozad at 9:31 PM on December 7, 2019 [1 favorite]

And I thought the jade egg thing was dumb. Well, at least this idiocy isn’t gender-specific.
posted by kinnakeet at 1:20 AM on December 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

It is absolutely true that network effects lead the internet-at-large to stage backlashes against nonexistent phenomena (or barely existent phenomena).

All it takes is one thinly sourced claim of one person doing something. It can be a real occurrence, or it can be fabricated for the lulz.

That becomes a BuzzFeed / HuffPo article titled "People Are [Doing X]", which invites readers to become outraged that society has become so stupid and/or morally bankrupt – and to share that outrage on social media.

At that point, people start regarding the backlash as evidence that the phenomenon is real in the first place. (If it weren't, why would so many people be talking about it?)

I wouldn't be surprised if, in some cases, the backlash inspires contrarians to actually do the thing – thus making a previously imaginary phenomenon real. (How many self-described Satanists have been inspired by evangelical panic?)

Human brains aren't equipped to deal with a rumor mill on the scale of the internet.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 4:28 AM on December 8, 2019 [20 favorites]

Taint Misbehavin'
Taint That a Shame
posted by kirkaracha at 5:35 AM on December 8, 2019 [4 favorites]

Many moons ago, I asked a philosophy professor that taught Indian and Chinese philosophy at RPI a silly question about the All and the One. He replied that I would be better off if I looked at the world through my asshole. Everyone in the class laughed including me. Having the sun in my ass-eye would make that somewhat more difficult. Butt nothing lasts forever.
posted by DJZouke at 6:17 AM on December 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

I remember reading in some woo book a long time ago that the perineum is an important point in acupressure, so much so that if someone drowned in front of you you could revive them by pressing on the area.

Something rather similar (image 2, scroll down) was used along the Thames in the 18th century. A matter of startling people back to life, i suppose,
posted by Fuchsoid at 6:51 AM on December 8, 2019 [4 favorites]

“Josh Brolin's butthole is sunburned” only exists as a phrase so we can wonder about the poem Frank O'Hara would write about it.

Also, this “Embodied Mermaid” influencer: do fish even have a perineum to sun?
posted by scruss at 6:51 AM on December 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Now I've involuntarily visualized Thanos' butthole. Thanks

Maybe he was just checking for Ant-Man infestations
posted by nubs at 7:12 AM on December 8, 2019 [7 favorites]

It seems weird seeing the Sawbones episode linked when Sydnee went to some lengths to say that this isn't really a thing. It required making the episode almost completely about something that turns out to be largely unrelated in order to get an episode out of it. That episode, however: Quite good and a better explainer than I'd seen before about why it is that people are so desperate to believe that sun exposure is healthy.
posted by Sequence at 7:12 AM on December 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

Josh Brown's butthole is sunburned and he's not happy about it

Truly, the "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" for the 10s.
posted by ZaphodB at 7:36 AM on December 8, 2019 [5 favorites]

i live in w michigan and i have two questions

1 what's the sun?

2 how do you not freeze your ass off?

That'll make your brown-eye blue for sure!

(also from West Michigan)
posted by JohnFromGR at 9:45 AM on December 8, 2019 [6 favorites]

kirkaracha: Taint Misbehavin'

Dammit, much better title than mine.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:30 AM on December 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

I used to have a copy of Swanson on Swanson- the autobiography of Gloria Swanson. Somewhere in it she vividly describes laying on a chaise lounge in a friend's very private yard, to heal her bits after childbirth I think (her doctor recommended surgery, she didn't want to). Meanwhile her maid is applying sterile water, with an eye dropper, every few minutes to the affected areas. She was a fervent believer in macrobiotic diets and the evils of sugar. So, yeah, it's a thing.
posted by twentyfeetof tacos at 10:47 AM on December 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Georges Bataille got there first.
posted by Joan Rivers of Babylon at 2:16 PM on December 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

Perine-yuck!
posted by freecellwizard at 3:40 PM on December 8, 2019 [2 favorites]

Imagining Josh Brolin’s Instagram post in the voices of his various characters has kept me entertained all weekend. If there isn’t a joke about it in the next Deadpool movie, I’m going to throw my popcorn at the screen.
posted by Etrigan at 3:44 PM on December 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

You still have popcorn left by the end of the movie!?
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:57 PM on December 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

I was about to ask the same questions from Canada.

file photo of average Canadian's hindquarters
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:26 PM on December 8, 2019 [3 favorites]

Serene Empress Dork: I remember reading in some woo book a long time ago that the perineum is an important point in acupressure, so much so that if someone drowned in front of you you could revive them by pressing on the area. And all I could think is that sounds like a great way to get hauled off to jail as horrified onlookers watch you rush to the scene as if to help, only to begin non-chalantly finger-banging the drowned person.

srboisvert: Pretty sure they're just blowing smoke up my ass.

These two concepts are, oddly, strongly connected.
posted by Blasdelb at 6:32 AM on December 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

There are so many great posts up there, but for some reason, this is the one I clicked. I'm embarrassed by myself. I'd even seen the story already.
BTW, I grew up with many naked hippies and ultra liberal people around me, and while everyone was tanned in every inch of their body, I don't remember any areas being specially burned. I mean, they didn't actually focus on tanning their anus, but they did do yoga outdoors in ways that would give their bottom some sun. So apart from the silliness of the whole thing, I'd also suggest that we don't worry that anyone will get cancer from this specific stupid practice.
posted by mumimor at 6:50 AM on December 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

Sun gonna shine in my back door someday, per Big Bill Broonzy.
posted by e1c at 12:45 PM on December 9, 2019 [1 favorite]

I reckon that if someone's lying apparently drowned on the beach, and someone comes and pokes them in the ass, it's really plausible that the drowned person might suddenly jump up and exclaim, and otherwise appear to be suddenly revived.

"Acupressure", however, isn't the first explanation coming to mind.
posted by quacks like a duck at 12:55 PM on December 12, 2019