Cecil Adams on Gerbil Stuffing
"The Straight Dope" is a newspaper column where readers write
in with their questions. Any question at all is fair game. The columnist,
Cecil Adams, swears that he never fakes any of the reader's letters, he
says he doesn't need to with all the weird people out there. His columns
have been collected and published in a book called The Straight Dope, available
at bookstores near you.
The column reprinted below concerns the mechanics of inserting gerbils
into body cavities, and is the most disgusting thing I've seen on the net
in a long, long, time..
THE STRAIGHT DOPE
A reader writes in:
While discussing a gay acquaintance recently, my friend Mary, a nurse, lauded
him by adding, "and he's no damn gerbil stuffer, either." When
I protested that she should not perpetuate cruel sterotypes of our homosexual
brethern, she informed me that she personally had witnessed a fellow admitted
by her hospital to remove a deceased gerbil
lodged in his rectum. That gentelman is now doomed to be tied to a colostomy
bag through eternity. What I'd like to know is, what are the mechanics and
philosophy of gerbil stuffing? How
are the gerbils insserted and retrieved? Don't they bite and scratch? Why
not hamsters or snakes? Is this a common practive? My curious friends and
I await your reply with bated breath.
-- Shanon O'Hara, W. Thomas
Cecil Adams replys:
Let's face it, toots, an awful lot of stuff has been found where that gerbil
was found. The medical journals list an astonishing array: a bottle of Mrs
Butterworth's syrup, an ax handle,
a nine-inch zucchini, countless dildoes
and vibrators including one 14-inch model complete with two D-cell batteries,
a plastic spatula, a 9 & 1/2-inch water bottle, a deodorant bottle,
a Coke bottle, a large bottle cap, numerous other bottles, a 3&1/2-inch
Japanese glass float ball, a 11-inch carrot, an antenna
rod, a 150-watt light bulb, a 100-watt-frosted bulb, a cucumber, a screwdriver,
four rubber balls, 72&1/2 jeweler's saws (all from one patient, but
not all at the same time, although 29 were discovered on one occasion),
a paperweight, an apple, an onion, a plastic toothbrush package, two bananas,
a frozen pig's tail (it got stuck when
it thawed), a ten inch length of broomstick, an 18-inch umbrella handle
and central rod, a plantain encased in a condom, two Vaseline jars, a whiskey
bottle with a cord attatched, a teacup, an oil can, a six-by-five-inch tool
box weighing 22 ounces, a six inch stone weighing two pounds (in the later
two cases the patients died due to intestinal obstruction), a baby powder
can, at test tube, a ball-point pen, a peanut butter jar, candles, baseballs,
a sand filled bicycle inner tube, sewing needles, a flashlight, a half-filled
tobacco pouch, a turnip, a pair of eyeglasses, a hard-boiled egg, a carborundum
grindstone (with handle), a suitcase key, a syringe, a file, tumblers and
glasses, a polyethylene waste trap from the U-Bend of a sink, and so on.
In 1955 one man who was "feeling depressed" reportedly inserted
a six-inch paper tube into his rectum, dropped in a lighted firecracker,
and blew a hole in his anteriour rectal wall. This changed his mood multo
rapido.
As for live or recently deceased fauna, rumors of gerbil (and mouse or hanster)
stuffing have been circulating since about 1982, and I know of at least one
case, in 1984, when a Denver weekly printed a confirmed report of a gerbilectomy
in a local emergency room. Unfortunately, such cases have been slow in making
their way into the formal literature of medicine. I have checked with numerous
sources, including gays, doctors, and your nurse friend, and though everybody
has heard about gerbil stuffing, there is no consensus on how it is accomplished
or how often it occurs. The principle is simple: a tube is inserted in the
rectum, and a recently manicured gerbil is induced to run up the tube and
burrow in. There's some difference of opinion about what happens next. Some
say the gerbil somehow winds up in a bag or scak (perhaps a condom?); others
say no sack is used -- the gerbil simply squirms around, eventually dies
of suffocation, and is later eliminated during defecation. The kick is supposedly
in the sensation of fur. I am skeptical about this whole damn business.
I should note that there are nerve endings only in the lower extremities
of the rectum, and thus there is nothing to be gained by shoveling extended
families of gerbils into your lower quadrant. A word to the wise.
Complications often occur. Often the rectum and/or anus become lacerated,
torn, or infected. (The Manhattan publication "New York Talk"
reported about a year ago that New York doctors first caught on to stuffing
when they started encountering patients with infections previously found
only in rodents.) More generally, chronic insertion of objects (or fists,
for that mattter) can result in a flaccid anus, a major turn-off in my book.
Cecil sternly advises caution. And stick to mammals your own size.