I’ve been browsing antique jewelry a lot lately and wonder about this. With jewelry specifically I think about hair, coral, pearls.
Then that extends out to animal skins, bones, human relics, etc.
What makes one thing gross but the other okay?
Wait till you think about where your water’s been.
Running through Belgians like cheap beer!
The water that I shoot at my butt or the water I put in my mouth?
I have no issues with drinking recycled water. I’ve even had beer made from treated wastewater. Never again! (Because I’m gluten intolerant.)
What we find gross is mostly arbitrary and emotional. It’s loosely based on the perception of filth but most people who find something gross will continue to find that thing gross even if they know it’s clean. If someone feels like snakes are gross, they watch you take a snake and scrub it clean with soap and water (don’t actually do this obviously) and you try to hand them the scrubbed snake, most people would continue to call it gross. Furthermore, if you ask most people why they find something gross, they won’t be able to give you a real answer. (Food seems to be an exception but we mean something entirely different and much more specific when calling food gross unless we are saying that the food is somehow foul or unclean)
In most cases, when someone calls something gross, they are doing so as a reaction to a feeling it gives them. Whatever they say after that tends to be some form of post-hoc justification to legitimize that feeling.
Ethics are the big line for me. The human remains market is pretty infamous for having dubiously sourced parts - people who did not consent to having their body bought and sold.
The exhibit Body Worlds, which travels to different museums, is an example of this. Some of the bodies are likely executed prisoners, who did not consent to have their bodies displayed in this way. The US has a horrible history of treating indigenous peoples corpses with disrespect. Two of the children who died in the MOVE bombing ended up in a universities collection without the knowledge or consent of their relatives.
I would be willing to have a skeleton or preserved organs as teaching materials, if I knew the individual involved gave their consent for that use. If I ever can afford a hysterectomy I would love to preserve my uterus for that purpose. I’d love to be an articulated skeleton in a science classroom after I’m done here on earth.
If I look at an object and I’m reminded that it comes from a dead human or creature i probably wont keep it.
An old jacket is ok because i just see a cool jacked but a tiger skin rug would always remind me of a dead tiger.
What about a tiger skin jacket with the head as a hood?
Yeah i’ll pass on wearing a corpse around.
Insertable sex toys and nothing else I can think of
Heck I don’t even eat food that was part of animals
I’m vegan btw
The necklace made of human ears my grandpa brought back from Vietnam is totally disgusting because they’re all really shriveled up so they look like little kids’ ears now.
But he also made one from human teeth, and that’s less disturbing because maybe he just got them from a dentist’s office in Saigon, you know? I never asked him while he was still alive.
I mean… how far down the rabbit hole are we going with ‘once part of a living being?’ Leather/wool/down?
Paper?
Cotton? Oil?
Plastic?
Well done! Rubber/latex?
That’s a plant. Not an animal.
was once part of a living being
He did not say animal.
Depends on how liquidy it is.
Skin and organs are no-no
Dried skeleton, maybe.
If its “artificial life forms” like a non-carbon based robot, I’d happily gouge its “eyes” (cameras) and put then in a necklace.
If it’s human
Does that include the ashes of people in urns?
Mostly, yes. I saw someone say something about wearing a deceased loved-one. That’s understandable. But if you somehow obtained the remains of some random person, that’s… Eugh
Although in my culture we don’t really cremate but I understand that others do
I don’t mind it as long as it wasn’t part of their body, like their skull. That does freak me out.
My line is at wet specimens.
I don’t even mind handling dead mice for my snake to eat, and I have a few small taxidermies around. I’ve even handled human teeth and had one of my own that had to get pulled (tooth fairy stole it though)
But wet specimens creep me TF out, especially if they’ve been diaphonized. I hate to say it but I’ve even seen wet human specimens (stillborns), that is a HELL FUCKING NO from me
If I ever were to lose a limb like a finger (and if it couldn’t be reattached) I would like to keep it like preserved in an alcohol jar or just the bone part as a good terrible conversation piece
woodworkers hate this one simple trick
I think human parts are a hard no for me, but I’m general good with anything, though usually much less so if the product isn’t being produced incidentally.
This means cow leather is generally a okay, but crocodile is something I’ll shy away from.
Here’s a fun story… Mark Gruenwald, the creator of the Marvel superhero team “Squadron Supreme” (a pastiche of DC’s Justice League) passed away.
As part of his will, he requested that he be cremated and his ashes mixed in with the black ink on a reprint of Squadron Supreme.
https://screenrant.com/marvel-comic-printed-creators-ashes-squadron-supreme-gruenwald/
His wife was also stamping his signature in books with the ash ink.
https://teddyandtheyeti.blogspot.com/2019/05/mark-gruenwalds-ash-o-graph-in-squadron.html?m=1
Same for human parts for me.
Weirdly enough, I still think my preferred way to dispose of my eventual cadaver is being made into a book.
I wouldn’t want to own book me, but I love the idea of being a book. Not like a gruesome one where someone could tell right off, something more boring than that.
You would have to check the legality of that in your jurisdiction. Aaaand find someone willing to do it. It would be dope tho… As for me, I would prefer a sky burial… Return to nature man, also metal as fuck.
I think human parts are a hard no for me
I’m pretty confident we still have the kids’ baby teeth stored somewhere in a box of mementos in the basement (where all our treasured family memories / water heater are stored). I think that is my personal threshold.
You might want to move your memories some place else a little safer. You know, just in case you have an incident with your water heater.
I think it’s more about presentation for me. For instance I have a turtle skull covered in snake skin on my desk. It make it look like a sick dragon head. So like a slab of human meat would be disgusting just sitting there. However if it was old skin preserved using a specific technique and presented in an artful way then I’d be down with it
I mean, what else should we expect from cryptTurtle?
