I've known that people can have unpleasant visceral reactions to things for a while, but it's only in the past two or three years that I've realised that there are things that squick me out, too. Part of it has to do with my upbringing, and part of it is that I tend to emotional detachment, but it's also that I have so very few myself that it's taken me almost twenty-seven years to find three ... ish. I'm not sure one of them counts as a whole squick, it's so specific. Anyway, because it's mostly foreign to me, even the ones that seem almost universal, I've always found it interesting to hear about other people's experience (or lack thereof) with squicks. Do you have them? What does it feel like? Do you have unusual ones or lack ones that almost everyone else seems to have? How does having or not having a visceral reaction to things affect you? Does it influence your behaviour, and/or what content you consume? (I'll talk more about my own experience later.) Edit: I'm counting anything that gives you a visceral feeling of revulsion as a squick. Edit 2: Here's a link to the HAPPY SPAM thread and another to the Cute Animal thread and another to the Pet Pics thread for those of you who, like me, are squicking themselves out thinking about their squicks.
Not sure if counts as squick, but: I have had pet newts, pet salamanders, pet snakes, pet mantises, pet orb-weaving spiders and pet goddamn tarantulas. I fed bugs of every variety to these critters with great enthusiasm. I frequently held and cuddled them. (Tarantulas actually have really soft bellies!) But I cannot fucking deal with cockroaches. Especially here, where they are everywhere and huge, and flying and affectionately dubbed "palmetto bugs". I had the stereotype "girl" reaction of squealing and yelling for my husband to kill it until my dog found out that cockroaches are delicious and now he comes running (and acts like the underside of the stove is a treat dispenser). Can't stand 'em. The way they move, the way you can feel them crunch when you squish them, their resistance to bug spray (which I can't use anymore because now Zee eats them) and the fact that they can survive toxic radiation and decapitation. BLEGH. Edit: Also leopard geckos. I have a menagerie.
95% of the time, gore, even real right in front of me gore, does not bother me. I was genuinely shocked when watching a TV show the other day to actually flinch at a scene where a character had bamboo inserted under his fingernails. I got tingling under my nails and an 'ugh' feeling in my stomach - not nausea, more like a muscle spasm, but not quite that either. I get the same thing (minus the tingling) when I see a bug, but I'm pretty sure that qualifies more as a phobia, because if a spider or a fly or even a butterfly touches me, I get so upset I burst into tears. Other than that, and, like, graphic rape scenes, I'm pretty hard to squick. I've been vomited and copiously bled on, and it wasn't pleasant, but I wouldn't qualify my reaction as a squick. Edit: @Aviari reminded me I used to own a snake and fed it live mice without a problem, too. Idek.
There's a show that I would love to watch, because it's made by the same people as another show I love, but I can't watch it because the subject is probably my biggest squick. It's a shame. I've been vegetarian for a year and a half now because of the same squick, but I don't mind that as much.
Of course when I try to think of my squicks I can't remember half of them, but there's: pregnancy, spit, that one rare condition where a person can't feel pain, remembering I have fingerprints (which is making it really hard to type)/situations where people have their fingerprints worn off or removed, some extreme gore. Concerning the fingerprints: now that I'm thinking about it, my hands feel really awful and it's hard to use them or touch anything. About the people not feeling pain one: I have gotten trapped in watching documentaries in classes about it, which was pretty much the worst, but I had no good way to try and escape the room.
Oh! I remembered another one. Medical stuff happening to me doesn't bother me at all. I watched the surgery on my mouth/teeth done in real time through a mirror (my dentist was super chill) and other minor things like stitches and getting a cauterizing iron through the nail of a finger I had smashed in a car door (to release pressure. Codeine is fuckin' awesome. Except it makes me hallucinate, which is awesome in a different way) and all of those got a reaction of FREAKIN SWEET, BODIES ARE GREAT. I love dissections and first-aid. I've shoved the muscle of a co-worker's thumb back into the severe slice he got from a box cutter and taped it up for the EMT. I've taped my own hand back together with paper towels and plastic wrap from a meat-slicer accident. Watching medical documentaries is fascinating. Hip replacement surgery is both incredibly brutal and high-tech. No joke, the one I watched had them grind out the bone of the hip socket with a spherical grinding attachment on an ordinary DeWalt power drill--both of which could be bought in the hardware store I was working in at the time. Edit: OH OH and they knocked the synthetic socket into place with an ordinary rubber mallet And yet, watching someone have a skin sample taken made me black out? /shruuug
I'm counting anything that gives you a physical/visceral/emotional NOPE feeling as a squick, so yeah @Aviari, roaches totally count. I used to have a roach squick, but it faded over the years and gave up the ghost completely after I had to watch a bunch of roach videos and look up pictures for reference.
What's really weird is like, Madagascan hissing cockroaches, namely, the ones in every horror movie/scene involving roaches ever, don't bother me at all. Of course they look completely different from house-roaches, so...? Horror movies/crime scenes/etc with oooOOOOooo MAGGOTS AND BUGS IN THE BODY oooOOOOOoooooOOOooo!! don't bother me at all because... "No, those are mealworms, those are tomato grubs and way too big to be real maggots, those are Madagascan hissing cockroaches..." Actual maggots get an "ugh ugh ugh gross" reaction but less severe than roaches, and mostly because "ew rotten food/meat" Edit: Yup just tested myself with Google images and Palmetto Bug: UGH KILL IT Hissing Cockroach: CUTE BUG FRIEND GIVE PATS *pap pap* ??????????????????????
ooh! i get squicked by the sound of kissing. not like, mouth-on-mouth kissing, but the little sound when you kiss someone's cheek or your dog's head. it makes my shoulders bunch up around my ears, i hate that sound so much. also squicked by the idea of any kind of parasite, masses of moving creatures (flies, caterpillars, maggots, ants, starfish, bees... if it wiggles in clusters of more than 5, i probably hate it), people talking about knee injuries, the idea of anything inserted anywhere in the human body-- throat, nose, ears, the other places that things can potentially be inserted. all of it: no. no, thank you. close-up pictures of most tiny creatures (especially arthropods) freak me the fuck out. i would include spiders but that's not so much a squick as it is a total primal terror that once inspired me to jump off a balcony. tons more! i am faint-hearted when it comes to my squicks, and they are many and varied. for me, reacting to a squick is like, this knee-jerk visceral full-body NOPE. i get overcome by this strong sense of unease and an urgent need to 1) not be looking at/hearing about The Thing and 2) get up and move and reboot my system briefly. i feel it, physically, in my neck and shoulders and face in addition to all the usual places that i associate with anxiety. blech now i need to go look at cute animal pictures
I'm the opposite, I can deal with that kissy sound, but I can't stand the mouth kissing sounds. so I don't like romance movies, and high school was pretty rough thankfully most people can control their PDA as adults :P Incest is a pretty big squick for me. I don't care if other people ship incest even if I can't understand it, and I don't mind if it depicts incest as unhealthy, but otherwise when incest is romanticized I am really grossed out.
@applechime I just edited the first post to include links to threads full of happy-making things in case that's a thing that's helpful. ...And I finally have a keyboard. So here are my two-and-a-half squicks, and some rambling about what happens when you don't have certain squicks. Because a lot of sexual/romantic squicks are also cultural taboos, and I'm a contrarian, I developed interest in a couple of things that get squicky for a lot other people pretty fast, notably relationships between cousins and relationships with large age gaps, particularly when one of the people involved in the relationship is underage. I resented it when people who found these kinds of relationships revolting would look at one, note that it was inherently prone to certain problems, and then act as if the problems were inherent to any relationship of that kind, which is not the same thing, even if it's kind of a subtle difference. As a result of that, rather than going the "yes, this is messed up, that's why I like it" route, I've wound up shipping a few weird things in a way that's probably romanticising it, because they don't have to be messed up just because they can be or usually are and people are uncomfortable. (Also @liminal because I saw your post before I was ready to post but after I had typed the above paragraph, I just want to clarify that I do not have a problem with people having squicks I don't. That's fine, it's interesting! I only get annoyed when someone acts like a thing is Bad and Wrong All the Time No Matter What and the only justification they have is "it grosses me out and it's problematic".) (Also also I don't like mouth kissing sounds either, but it doesn't get to the level of squick for me. It just very much does not ping me as sexy.) At any rate, I thought I didn't have an incest squick at all (and so was kind of relieved when a few other people mentioned they didn't have it in a thread here) until I realised that I do, I just have to think about it occurring between members of my immediate family to get weirded out; otherwise I don't care. So that's my half-a-squick. My single violence- or gore-related squick is tearing or peeling flesh or skin (I watched two seasons of Hannibal and Sukizake was the only episode that bothered me, on account of the scene with the guy extracting himself from the collage/mural). That makes me sort of cringe internally and feel kind of sick if I think about it too much. But violence tends to not register on a negative level with me, so I have, for example, watched a movie with a rating that I think is equivalent to R in the US (a few violent fight scenes and a couple of gory murders) and then excitedly recommended it to my easily-squicked mother because I had forgotten everything except that the main character was really cool when she smeared blood on her face and screamed like a banshee. My last squick is hardest to explain and also the one that's been with me for the longest. My experiences with it include: Running out of the house (crying, I think) after watching a scene in the Hunchback of Notre Dame where Quasimodo is first welcomed and then humiliated by a crowd of people. Reading Jack London's short story To Build a Fire for a class and finding it viscerally disturbing. Having a general aversion to intelligent animals, particularly ones that appear to be emotionally dependent on humans, like dogs. I don't know quite what to make of it myself, but I'm pretty sure it's all the same thing, and I think it's something to do with beings that are capable of feeling emotions because of things that happen to them but not capable, or barely capable, of reasoning or understanding why those things are happening. It makes me feel sick and horrified to see someone train a dog badly and then get angry at the dog for misbehaving, and it upsets me to think of an animal getting attached to me. I have no idea what is up with that and I have yet to meet anyone else who has it or can listen to me explain it with anything other than a look of blank confusion on their face. But then, I don't talk about it a lot because it's weird and it makes me uncomfortable to even think about it.
Human saliva is a huuuuge squick for me. (Why not dog saliva, brain? Why does it not bother you when your dog licks your arm, but you cringe at a drooling baby? ) I cannot watch, read, listen to, hear described in a news story, or otherwise deal with torture. Even offscreen. I'm completely unfazed by injury inflicted in any other way, but just. Nope. It will ruin my day and possibly my entire week. I thought about some examples and now I need the Happy Spam thread.
oh shit yeah same re: torture. can't deal with it. can't deal with intentionally inflicted pain AT ALL, no matter who is doing the inflicting and who is in pain. the most heroic hero in the world could be torturing the most despicable villain, and i would still feel sick to my stomach also going to chime in: i do not get squicked by fictional incest unless it is parent->child, which squicks me HARDCORE. cousins? sure. siblings? fine. uncle/aunt->niece/nephew? i can deal. PARENTAL? nope. nopin' right the fuck out. age gaps.... sort of squick me, depending on the relationship? on the one hand, i get super pumped when there's a gap of, say, five years in a young relationship. like a 17-22 difference, or a 20-25 difference. just enough for one character to be more Experienced and Worldly than the other. and i don't get grossed out by bigger ones until you start treading into cross-generational stuff. like i don't want to see a 45 yr old in a relationship with a 17 yr old. 27 and 55? that doesn't squick me. but middle aged adults and teens is an area of 'bleeaarrrghhhh noooooo' for me. also @Elaienar i think i get what you mean, with the intelligent animals thing? maybe? at least, it's really difficult for me to read things like white fang or. okay there was this old book we used to have called lad: a dog, and the eponymous dog was treated by the narrator as being as intelligent as a human. so when he was punished with beatings (it was QUITE an old book, and the author was clearly the sort of proper upright 'spare the rod, spoil the child' Man Of The House kind of guy who thought physical discipline was the only right and proper way to Maintain Order) it horrified me in a way i didn't quite understand at the time. all the men in books like that saying things like "see, you have to have a firm hand with them," and the dogs having this sharp intelligence, it was just. a bad combination, and it freaked me out. man i haven't thought about that in years.
@applechime Yeah, that sounds upsetting, ugh. People punishing animals and acting like it's the same thing as punishing a human for, say, stealing something - I don't know how much animals understand, really, but I'm pretty sure they don't do morals the way humans do, and it bothers me to see people treating them like they understood what was right and what was wrong and chose to do the wrong thing on purpose. Age gaps are funny in that the problems they can create are going to vary a lot from culture to culture. A large age gap isn't generally going to be as big a deal in a culture where teens are treated and expected to behave as adults and hang out with adults socially as it will be in one that tends towards age-segregation and treats teens like children in many ways. And the U.S. is the latter, so the almost universal age gap squick I've encountered makes sense.
i don't think i have many squicks (at least i can't think of many off the top of my head) and am generally pretty chill with way more body stuff than the usual person seems to be except for two things: ingesting someone else's bodily fluids (doesn't matter what, even thinking of someone accidentally swallowing minuscule amounts of spit from sharing a drink) and mpreg (specifically in fanfic). i don't like the idea of pregnancy itself if we're talking about me being pregnant, but if it's other people i'm fine with it. i have troubles thinking about mpreg because the very first fanfic i ever read, when i was about... 12? 11? was a teen titans fic with the pairing slade/robin. Spoiler: general description it was long, graphic, very rapey and stockholm syndrome-y, had all kinds of torture scenes, and ended with slade surgically altering robin to be able to have children then raping him. i never should have kept reading it, but it was one of those things that's so horrible you keep watching till it's over. i never read the sequel so i don't know what happened after. since then, whenever i see the tag mpreg, no matter if it's a male (of whatever body type) that is totally okay with being pregnant or a couple who would never be able to have children from their own bodies in real life ( i hope i'm phrasing that okay?) it's all ruined by this one fic i read ages ago -n-. i dunno what the fluids thing is about. germs, maybe? i can share a drink with someone else if i don't think about it though so idk. anyways thinking about this stuff is making my skin crawl, i'm gonna go do something else.
going to add a few more cause HEY why not fungus. any fungus. holy shit i hate seeing any kind of fungus, the only time i ever DON'T hate mushrooms is when they are the Enormous Glowy Kind, like Zangarmarsh in WoW and Blackreach in Skyrim. there is just something about fungi that deeply, deeply disturbs me also: a lot of kinks are HUGE squicks for me. not just like, 'ewww, not my thing' but full-on 'i am suddenly distressed and nauseated and i must Escape' Spoiler: spoilered so as not to kinkshame watersports make me really upset, particularly if it's an act of degradation. i once started crying part way through a fic because i didn't realise how bad my squick was. ugh i'm upset now just thinking about it um, public humiliation: can't handle it forced feminization makes me feel like shit and i don't know why A/B/O makes me REALLY REALLY uncomfy, and so does mpreg. most pregnancy makes me uncomfy but when it's a pregnancy happening in a body that's not built to support it, it gives me the same frantic 'no no no NO' feelings i get from the idea of parasites along the same vein: eggs. oviposition. whatever. i'm going to scratch off all my skin holy shit okay I'm gonna stop thinking about my squicks now
Saliva is one of my big ones but that's kind of boring so let's look at cotton balls. Yes. Cotton balls. I have a horrible visceral reaction of disgust to the feel and sound of the fucking things. Especially against my nails. They are gross unless SOAKED in nail polish remover and even then they are only barely not completely fucking horrid. I get this way about fabrics that are cotton like rubbing against one another or my fingers in general. Like I have to make sure to wear particular pairs of socks with particular pairs of shoes because if I wear the wrong socks then they aren't tight against my feet and my toes slide against them nastily. And if my shoes aren't tight enough they rub against the bottom horribly and make the most sickening sound. Hell for me would be cotton. Just endless fields of fucking cotton and cotton like fabrics to rub against and rub against me and I would wish for death before the end and never fucking get it because I fucked up this hard and what I deserve is cotton. COTTON. FUCKING COTTON. EVERYTHING IN ME FEELS AWFUL JUST THINKING ABOUT THEM.
@Aondeug Cotton/cotton balls as a squick seems really inconvenient, given that it's a fairly popular material and they don't usually put trigger warnings on clothes and things. D:
It's pretty ergh, yes. Thankfully I don't seem to mind it against my arms and legs. At least not as much? Like it has to rub in a particular sort of way on them to get it going. Fingers and feet though it drives me mad. I also hate car seats made of fabric because I dislike the sound it makes when it rubs a lot.
I am ok w most bugs and spiders (as long as they do not appear unexpectedly, especially near my face) but i haaaaaaaaaaate daddy long-legs. (they're also called harvestmen I think?) they're literally the most harmless things but their horrible spindly legs freak me the fuck out. I can kinda trace it back to a camping trip as a child where one crawled on my face and woke me up, but yeah. Consequently, there's an enemy in FFXIV that is basically a GIANT VERSION OF THEM with a body made up entirely of a mouth full of teeth. They're not even very high level and they freak me out more than the high level grotesque genetic experiment monsters.
