Anyway.
I was trying to break up my compulsive TV viewing schedule. Having a TV in your bedroom is a bad, bad thing. Seriously. Don't do it.
The schedule goes like this: Seinfeld at 11 pm, followed by an episode of Frasier and then Just Shoot Me, because I really hate Jay Leno and Dave Letterman's station is burnt out on my TV. Then it's Conan at 1 am, Carson Daily (to cleanse the palate and accentuate just how talented and charismatic Conan is and Carson...isn't), a Jay Leno rerun---again, to cleanse the palate of Carson's toolness and to provide a nice foil for the next and final Conan O'Brien of the evening at 3 am. I would like to add that I don't actually sit there and stare at the tube for 9 hours. Mostly it's just background noise while i do other things, which I swear are always very constructive and industrious.
So somehow I started flipping back and forth between my regular viewing and Fear Factor reruns. I always turn the food challenges off because while I don't see the difference between putting a cow's thigh muscle in your mouth and chewing it up and putting a bull's balls in your mouth and doing the same, I really really don't want to watch anyone do either of these things. It's really why I tend to not have friends or leave the house. It's still a dead animal, no matter how you slice it. So to speak.
Anyweh.
So there's three guys and three gals left, and they walk up to this corral and Joe Rogaine is standing there with a teeny tiny baby goat in his arms, and he's bottle feeding it because his milk has dried up. They all make cute noises over the baby, and I'm thinking to myself that there's no way. Are they seriously going to eat goat fetuses?
Nope. This is where it turns into the best food challenge in the history of food challenges. Which I admit is very short and not really anything to write home about. But still.
So Joe tells the folks that they will have to milk a goat until they have 8 ounces of milk in a glass and then chug it. The first person to do that wins.
Only problem....THEY CAN'T USE THEIR HANDS!
I have to be honest with all three of you: I jumped out of my chair and did a little jig. And then I fondled me pot o' gold.
The contestants had to actually suck the milk out of the goat's teat and then spit it in a glass. I honestly want to find whoever thought of this challenge and kiss them full on the mouth.
It was so interesting to watch this boundary being pushed. They all showed up mentally prepared to eat maggots out of a rotting pig skull, only to find themselves confronting some serious bestiality issues.
The irony for me is the strange places where people draw lines. Maybe it's just a side effect of a chronically unexamined life, but how do some body parts become food and others become offal? There are a lot of people who react to the thought of eating a steer's spinal column or a slice of snout with genuine horror, while still being unable to understand how vegetarians can find hamburgers offensive. I struggle to find the disconnect, the failed leap of logic that pertains to this phenomenon. Sure, cultural conditioning is partially responsible, but most people (in our culture, specifically) aren't born vegetarian.
And this isn't a pro-vegetarian rant. I'm just trying to understand: if animal, why not ALL animal?
They showed up willing to suck down maggoty worm smoothies, but confronting the reality of where milk comes from was the thing that actually made them pause and wonder just what they were willing to subject themselves to for money.
The milk is produced in the animal's gland, secreted from the nipple, and served eventually to humans in a nice clean glass. It astounds me that what causes people to recoil in horror is the physical act of drawing the milk from the animal's body using the exact mechanism that nature intended for this very purpose---for BABY GOATS, of course, but it's still a mouth, it's still a sucking action.
Another interesting aspect was how completely willing the men ended up being. I chalked it up to competetiveness. They split the teams up into guy-girl pairings, which I thought was very unfair. The men have bigger mouths and presumably stronger facial muscles with which to suck. Oh, the Manly Man irony.
Funny how the camera never actually showed a single goat nipple being drawn into a human mouth. You could see them approaching the nipple with their mouths open, and you could see the backs of their heads as they suckled, but they showed not a nanosecond of cross-species nursing. I was completely into this challenge from the get-go, but it wasn't until I realized how they were editing the footage that the delicacy in filming this situation was purely sexual in nature.
Which leads me back to my original point. They're human adults drinking breast milk from a completely different species---does it really matter how it got into their mouths? The fact that a phallic-looking body part is being sucked on by a human mouth is where this all goes wrong? Seriously? You're sure?
In that case, I am eagerly awaiting Fear Factor's blow job challenge.
Purely from a spectator's standpoint, mind you.