I’m a martyr (on metafilter)

I was spending this last day on campus before summer hanging out in my dorm floor’s lounge with my lappy. This usually means I end up ignoring what is actually going on around me, a problem when funny things go down. But this time the fact that I was directly hooked into the internet at least led somewhere.

It started with a idle thought by a friend of mine while he was packing all the random crap in our lounge into the celling for next year. He stands on the arm of the couch I’m sitting on, looks down at me and asks, “If you smoked a cigar with your butt would you get colon cancer?”

“Yes, if you smoked enough.”

“If you had a three pack a day butt smoking habit.”

“But from just one, no, right? I’m going to ask IRC.”

And I did, and it was in the channel for the Metafilter TF2 group. No one had an answer, but it cracked a few people up. One of the guys there said it was totally AskMetafiler worthy, which lead me down the dark path toward this post (You may notice the clever title for the post is “Blowing smoke up my ass.” That was by the same friend in IRC who pushed me into posting this.):

If you smoked a cigar with your butt would you get colon cancer?

It was a weird question a friend of mine had and now I just have to know.

I assume that if you get into a cigar a day butt smoking habit you’ll get cancer of some sort eventually. But would it be colon? And can you really smoke a cigar in your ass, and if you did would you have to inhale? Can you inhale with your butt? And if you could, would the smoke or other carcinogens get to your colon?

I assume we’ll never know because I don’t think anyone will get in the habit of butt smoking, but please help me settle this bet.

After I had this post all written out I sat around getting nervous. I still didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t because I thought it was going to get deleted, which as you can see is what happened (“This post was deleted for the following reason: not here please. because it is hypothetical and because it is about butt inhalation”). I was more afraid that it wasn’t going to be deleted and I’d be known as the ass smoking guy. I could post something awesome, like an epic list or something like that, and every would be all, that’s the ass smoking guy! But by the time I wrote, titled and tagged it I had gone too far to turn back. I posed that bitch!

The first comment (which was deleted) was “Posting while drunk.” I actually wasn’t drunk when I wrote this but I decided that pouring a little rum into my Coke was probably a good idea. The alcohol made the little star that ignited inside of me each time my question was favored burn just a little bit brighter.

Though I only got 16 answers in the end, there was some interesting stuff put in there. I marked this one by ohshenandoah “best answer” even though the question got deleted. Good answers deserve a little reward.

lining of mouth = mucous membranes
lining of butthole = mucous membranes

seems like cigar smoke would trigger the same irritation and ulceration in mouth or butthole.

Plenty of people take medicine as suppositories, the drugs absorb quickly. As a nicotine delivery system, you could catch a buzz.

Finally, I read as a child regarding a yogi practitioner. He could lie in a bathtub full of water and suck the water thru his anus into his intestines. With a few years of training, you could learn to inhale and exhale cigar smoke. (#)

This one by TedW is especially cool for bringing up Le Petomane, so he gets a best answer too.

One cigar would probably not do it, but repeated exposure to the carcinogens in smoke certainly could cause cancer. The first reported link between occupational exposure to chemicals and cancer was made by Sir Percival Pott, who noted that chimney sweeps had high rates of scrotal cancer due to exposure to soot.

As to the mechanics of smoking via the anus, Joseph Pujols, AKA Le Petomane, did it as part of his act, so it is possible. (#)

And then there’s crapmatic messing around.

You know, back in 1979 I never thought one day that I’d be on some global computer network answering a question about smoking a cigar through one’s butt. I can only wonder what wonders 2039 holds, and that makes me a little bit excited about the future. (#)

Who knows what kind of weirdness would have been posed had the thread continued?

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Was my post deletion bullshit? Well, of course it was. People talk about gross things on AskMetafilter all the time, as well as purely hypothetical questions. I guess that by being both my post crossed the line just barely, but this is hardly good form on jessamyn‘s part (jessamyn being the admin who’s icy hand of judgement came down and swept my post of the main page). This was especially the case when she originally deleted my post with no other reason than “not here please,” but she covered her ass with the rest of the explanation later.

I’m not really mad, though. It’s not as if she closed my account and the question itself is still around for posterity. In any case, it’s a lot cooler to be the guy whos AskMe about ass smoking was deleted than just being the guy who asked about ass smoking.