Quench
In Review: www.grouphug.us
By Dom Mukwamba-Sendall
I’ve been having sex with my 23 year old cousin for about six months now…she’s just told me she’s pregnant and that the baby is mine. Both our parents are gonna freak when they find out as she doesn’t believe in abortion so she’s got to have the baby. I’ll stand by her and support the baby but the bad part is I’m worried about the sex with her stopping.”
It’s about 11:30 at night when I happen across this confession sandwiched below a guy admitting to wanking over his brother’s wife whilst she slept, and above someone jovially owning up to provoking fights when bored. As I read on I begin to wonder whether I’ve finally found the seedy underbelly of the internet I’ve been looking for all these years. The online equivalent of a secondary school toilet cubicle’s wall that’s had pupils’ pretentious scribbling daubed over with jarringly honest insights into the minds of their grown up counterparts. Countless hours later I’m still engrossed imbued with caffeine, and feeling like an omnipresent 3am girl. The website, Grouphug.us was established in 2003, to provide an open, anonymous forum for people to share secrets with strangers the world over. At the time of writing this the site is home to 446,900 confessions of varying levels of exhibitionism. Content-wise the site is a cavalcade of the bizarre, scary, and often uplifting. Some of the entries that reflect frustrations of everyday life are nothing short of hilarious. One college student moans “I hate how the sexy- assed girls wanna bang my roommate and not me”. Whilst one lucky lady comes to terms with her own self image “My boyfriend and I are both ugly.” Some utilise the guarantee of anonymity to confess to their darkest urges. One man admits to fantasizing that his girlfriend would don a strap-on and sodomise him adding “I’m too afraid of what she’ll say if I ask her”. Others seem written with such clinical forethought that it makes you question if you should ever leave your room again; “If there was some way of knowing for sure that I wouldn’t get caught… I would gladly murder. I’ve got people in mind and I would enjoy doing it. It would genuinely make me happy”. My confession then is this; originally I was ready to slate the hell out of this site and all the ‘freaks’ that use it. But if you have a confession that no volume of over proof spirits can release, or just need some reassurance that your problems aren’t that bad Grouphug.us is the perfect site for you, definitely worthy of residing in your favourites tab.
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