Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/03/is-trypophobia-a-social-contag.html
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I think it must be… I never remember feeling squicked out by images of holes until I ran across a buzzfeed article a few years ago… but now, I feel a little squicked out by such images…
Also… nice shoop!
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I’m standing in a hole right now.
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But are you standing in multiple holes.
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Suriname Toad
Suriname Toad
Back-achin’, egg-br—NOPE!!
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What you take me for, a rank amateur?
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You know when I think back to my childhood pre-internet I have clear memories of how I’d spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ house looking through these medical books they had. There were tons of photos and descriptions of various skin diseases and while it disgusted me and frightened me I just couldn’t avoid digging them out to read. Because of that I have to imagine it’s kind of a similar impulse just given a vector by the internet and socialized. That being said I never much extended the fascination or fear to inanimate objects with holes or anything. Just a morbid fascination with poxes, ulcers, abscesses, cancers and other disturbing medical conditions. I did find wasps nests frightening but then again I really hated being stung so that’s more concrete.
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I suspect there’s a sound biological basis for trumpophobia.
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Maybe it’s an alt right conspiracy designed to make us hate yonic imagery in an attempt to undermine feminism
Post beautiful holes to take back the meme
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Great_Blue_Hole.jpg
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I don’t buy the evolutionary thing. If anything I have trypophilia; I like images of small clustered holes. Nobody ever talks about trypophilia.
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I figure that pic would work effectively to cure people of the compulsion to view the images.
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Lady Goose has definitely had this aversion since long before it was cool, so there is definitely OG trypophobia, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t spread like a bumpy rash across the internet. I mean, I imagine a lot more people had tarantula nightmares after Arachnophobia came out and went memetic through schoolyard jokes and latenight sets.
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I have the opposite experience I reacted to those sort of things well before the widespread use of the internet. But these days I find it less disturbing. Except the Surinam toads.
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Over-boiled penne or rigatoni pasta tend to align vertically and cluster and give a similarly pleasing and/or horripilating sensation.
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I wonder if it’s a kind of visual version of the ASMR/misophonia dichotomy (although I experience both, but not with the same sound triggers)? Some people find ASMR triggers to be pleasurable, but others find them irritating. Most people, of course, are mystified by all the fuss.
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A rich Bolognese sauce ups the pleasure-ante.
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Trypophobia is not a real thing.
Being squicked out by photoshops of people infested with hundreds of parasites in their skin is a real thing.
I think actually this whole thing evolved out of the weird youtube subgenre of people getting jiggers or botflies removed from their skin. I won’t link this because HOLY SHIT IF YOU THINK PICTURES OF LOTUS SEEDS ARE CREEPY.
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Didn’t know there was a word for it, but I’ve been really bothered by some textures since I was a kid. The first I remember it being a thing for me was a really horrific fever dream which I could never adequately explain. “Beige, but spongy and awful” completely fails to capture it, but it’s shudder-inducing even now over 30 years later.
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I learned about this horrible squicky feeling from the cover of Windows Annoyances by David Karp. I could never bring myself to actually read the book because the image on the cover makes me feel ill.
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