The viral spread of Two Girls, One Cup
Evolutionary disgust helps humans get over viral scat porn
Leah Werier, Staff
Usually when I am forwarded e-mails containing video content I instantly delete them, however, the other day, feeling a queasy sensation of curiosity, I decided to watch one entitled Grandma’s Reaction to ‘Two Girls, One Cup’ hosted by YouTube.com and filmed via webcam, the video starts with an elderly woman sitting in front of a computer monitor alongside what is said to be her granddaughter.
The granddaughter clicks on some sort of video, a burst of elevator music begins, and then the real fun starts. The grandma clasps her hands over her terror-stricken face and begins to gag. She then proceeds to swear at her granddaughter, who has burst into hysterical laughter so hard she cries. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to see exactly what it was they were reacting to.
Two Girls, One Cup, or Cup Chicks, was created by Marco Fiorito, a Brazilian scatological pornography director. If you are not part of the millions of Internet users who have already seen this video, spare your eyes. This short “pornography” video is aptly titled because it features two girls, and one of them literally shits into a cup. The second girl eats the feces from the cup and then spits and vomits the contents into the other girl’s mouth. They continue to regurgitate this mess into each other’s mouths for longer than I could watch. Whether actually pornographic or just plain horrific, this clip is arguably the most disgusting and discussed video of the past year.
Somehow this video has become a cultural phenomenon, spawning thousands of response videos. These response videos capture the experiences of first-time viewers watching the “cup chicks” doing their thing. There are are over 11,500 different response videos posted on YouTube, as well as spoofs on the original clip from bloggers, celebrities and childhood icons like Kermit the Frog. John Mayer did a parody on his blog, showing himself and a male counterpart enjoying some frozen yogurt, which replaced the feces in the original — they also skipped out on any vomiting. The thousands of reaction and parody videos, placed on YouTube, are incredibly popular; one of them has been viewed more than 9,049,350 times.
The popularity of the “cup chicks” video is astronomical. VH1’s television program Best Week Ever has picked up on it, too. On this show, hosts regularly discuss the previous week in terms of popular culture, gossip and entertainment. In a recent episode, Two Girls, One Cup was reported to lead to extreme moral decline, and the show’s hosts felt that, because of the video, “moral bankruptcy” had the best week ever. In their opinion, the video’s popularity is a sign of society’s declining morals, but there is more to be discussed about being disgusted.
“Disgust” is a human emotion that is normally activated in response to a situation that is deemed unclean or potentially infectious. Actions considered as being morally unclean can trigger the same response. In 2004, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study demonstrating that “disgust,” considered as a product of human evolutionary history, acts to protect humans from potential disease. The study surveyed more than 40,000 people using web-based photo stimuli. Images that suggested a higher potential disease threat were rated in every instance as significantly more disgusting.
One such image comparison involved comparing a photograph of a white towel that had a blue stain on it with another photograph of the same towel, but the liquid on the second one resembled blood and other bodily secretions. The latter image depicted a potential health threat and was chosen as being the more disgusting of the two. In an image comparison between a louse and a wasp, the louse was rated as significantly more disgusting.
The study argues that disgust may have evolved to prevent humans from eating potentially diseased or dangerous materials. Patterns of response among the study participants were similar regardless of place of birth. The facial expression that a person makes when disgusted is said to be universally recognizable. When watching one of the thousands of Two Girls, One Cup response videos, it is clear that all the viewers are expressing complete and utter disgust.
So why would tens of thousands of viewers draw together to watch a disgusting video? Disgust has developed from a reflex to avoid potentially diseased or dangerous materials into something much more complex: human emotion. As an emotion, it is both abstract and complicated. Like guilt, disgust is a uniquely human characteristic that acts as a mechanism for socialization. Once something is disgusting, it is considered socially reprehensible, and then it should stop occurring.
Andras Angyal, a psychologist who pioneered research in the area of disgust, argued that our ability to be disgusted reminds us that our emotional lives remain deeply influenced by “primitive, archaic meanings.” Our capacity for disgust signals our continuing denial of our animal instincts. This tug-of-war between animal instincts and socialization results first in fascination with base behaviours — the likes of which can be seen in Two Girls, One Cup — and secondly in our disgust and communal rejection of them. So maybe the number of viewers is not proof of moral decline but rather of moral growth.
Although most people that see the video react with disgust, the man behind the Two Girls, One Cup video seems to experience the exact opposite. Fiorito and his wife began a fetish film business in 1996 featuring videos that were appealing to those with foot fetishes. As their film business inexplicably continued to grow, they expanded their horizons, creating videos involving feces and vomit prior to making Two Girls, One Cup. In a legal declaration made after his films came under censure in the United States, Fiorito admits that not all of his actors were always comfortable with the idea of eating feces. “I have already made fetish movies with scat-feces using chocolate instead of feces. Many actors make scat films but they don’t agree to eat feces.”
It is unknown what percentage of the world practices the activity, as they are rarely polled. According to the Online Medical Dictionary, “coprophilia” is a psychiatric term that refers to “a morbid attraction to, and interest in (with a sexual element), faecal matter.” The word itself comes from the Greek words “kópros,” which means “excrement” and “filia,” which means fondness. The term “coprophagia” refers to the eating component of this fetish, demonstrated lustfully in Two Girls, One Cup.
The Marquis de Sade, famous for his sexual perversion, was a practitioner of coprophagia. Sade wrote primarily on the topics of sexual exploration and political freedom, advocating eating fecal excrement at some point along the way. He said, “No habit is more easily acquired than mard [excrement] savoring; eat one, delicious, eat another, no two taste exactly alike, but all are subtle and the effect is somewhat that of an olive.”
Anyone in the field of health care can comment on the obvious dangers of eating human excrement, namely that it can transmit diseases like hepatitis. Another danger associated with consuming human excrement is E. coli, which is a harmful type of bacteria that lives in the intestines and is expelled in the feces. When fecal-oral contamination occurs, E. coli can be transmitted and can cause extremely severe food poisoning, as well as urinary tract infections. The two stars in this viral video must have missed out on any sort of lesson in safe sex.
The video Two Girls, One Cup brings a new meaning to the term “viral video.” Its rapid spread through the Internet mimics the way that sickness and disease spreads through populations. The fact that millions have watched the video and declared it to be a sign of moral decline might just paradoxically be a sign of moral growth. When a virus passes through an otherwise healthy human body, the body reacts first by being sick and then by learning how to neutralize the offender and build up defences against its return. Like getting an annual flu shot to help prevent more serious outbreaks, it might be a good idea to have an occasional dose of the disgusting to stay healthy.
