FemSkin

Congratulations, Rob. You’re now the creepiest guy on Boing Boing.

Seems like you ought to be able to get a free milk shake or something out of that.

No, we’re all going to be Ernest Borgnine.

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Have you guys not heard of this thing called “transgender”?
Or this other thing called “drag”?

I’m surprised at the tone of the comments here, I thought the BoingBoing crowd was hip to teh queer.

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Er, uh, better is not any less creepy.

http://www.hyperflesh.com/

Earthman! Give me your seed!

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It’s like one of those Clive Barker stories where the guy ends up being a sex slave to some hideous monster.

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The person has a perfectly serviceable human face, they don’t have to make themselves look like an Auton to present their gender.

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Yeah, transgender and drag are generally not trying to look like Leatherface visiting a Sephora counter.

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You win the internet

I didn’t realize I was in the presence of an authority on the matter. Do you have any other advice for how queer people should go about presenting themselves? Other than “just look normal, not all weird”, I mean.

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I only clicked ‘like’ because BoingBoing doesn’t have a ‘scared me shitless’ button.

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There.

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If only Jame Gumb had discovered femskin. Then Thomas Harris wouldn’t have had to write that horribly transphobic novel.

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I’ll add two more late items to this.

First, what may be a pertinent picture…

And a short story I wrote years ago…

Yeah… here’s where I have to admit to never having read the book and not having seen the film since it came out.

For me it isn’t about dressing up or expressing oneself as the opposite sex. It’s about masks like this being like a creepy second skin that doesn’t move.

Yeah… it looks like a dead thing. They look like walking corpses. Dolls scare me too. So this is basically two creepy things rolled into one IMO. I also hate clowns probably for the same reason: rubbery immobile face-but-not-face.

In a truly crap mood now working past midnight, so I should probably not talk to human beings further.

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Tolerance is nice and all, but regardless of however tolerant and accepting you feel you are, there’s a limit in there somewhere of what you’ll accept or not. Most people are really creeped out by the human/not human uncanny valley nature of these suits. Call it a cultural archetype or whatever, but there are stories all over the world of things wearing human skin.

If I want to wear a dead person’s tanned skin, and have their permission to do so after their death, nobody’s being hurt by the activity, but it’s still creepy as all hell.

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To a certain extent it’s beyond your control what you’re “creeped out” by. Expanding your cultural horizons can help, but you’re right that some things may just feel creepy. That’s ok.

But when you’re creeped out by something, it’s not necessary to deride and ridicule it. We don’t need to make a public case for why such things are abberant, or should not exist.

It’s unfamiliar, sure. Maybe you don’t really get the appeal. It’s definitely not something you would be interested in trying. Fine. Let’s just leave it at that, and we can all get on with being happily mutated without pissing on each other.

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This creeps me right the fuck out. That said, it is kind of weird that we’re all more creeped out by it than by, say, a serial-rapist news item. At least this is harmless.

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I find it extremely creepy, borderline disturbing stuff.

Human sexuality (? fetishism? fashion? Whatever you’d call this, anyway.) is fascinating, bizarre, creative and completely surprising. I think that it’s just great that there’s stuff like this out there and that they’re enjoying themselves. Fly your freak flag high,you full-body-anatomically-correct-latex-suit-clad folks!

Just please don’t put in the same room as someone wearing one of these, because I’d feel a pressing need to be elsewhere really quickly and that would come across as being really impolite.

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People who don’t like this must not have enjoyed Mrs. Doubtfire either…

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