This is not a trend we can get behind.
Whether it’s due to pure curiosity, misguided ChatGPT advice or, you know, sex stuff, a shocking number of people end up in the ER every year after putting something up their butt that very much shouldn’t be there.
But their secret shame actually isn’t so secret after all: The US Consumer Product Safety Commission actually keeps a database of ER visits and what’s bringing people in — meaning the government has an extensive list of every time a patient has said, “Really, doc, I just fell on it.”
Of course, the database is entirely anonymous, so the unfortunate soul who lost a corn cob holder inside their rectum can rest easy that no one knows it’s them.
But Defector has gone through the most recent data for 2024 to pick out the most shocking, confusing and squirm-worthy items that were reported to be stuck inside American anuses.
It ain’t pretty.
In addition to numerous sex toys — including a 24-inch-long dildo — the highlights include:
Confoundingly, there were also several examples of people who weren’t sure if they still had a sex toy inside their butts from earlier or couldn’t remember putting one in.
It’s no surprise, then, that Chicago emergency room Dr. Kenji Oyasu said that one of the most common questions he gets asked is: “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever pulled out of someone’s butt?”
In a viral TikTok posted in September, he said that at the top of his list was the man who inserted a full-size pumpkin spice-scented Yankee Candle.
“I’m talking about the desktop jar — and not just the top but the whole damn thing,” he said. “The question now becomes how to get it out, and really, for things that are really big, you can’t just reach up there and grab them and pull them out because the suction causes a vacuum to pull it back in.”
In 2023, the Visual Journal of Emergency Surgery published a case study about an Iranian man who needed emergency surgery after the deodorant canister he’d inserted in his backside traveled up his digestive tract.
And in Florida this year, a man who was arrested for drugs walked through a body scanner and was found to have a thermos inside him. Police said it had gone in “up the exit ramp.”
Fortunately, ER visits for these kinds of mishaps are not very common — though some would argue they’re still too common.
From 2012–2021, about 38,948 people were hospitalized with foreign objects in their rectum each year, according to The American Journal of Emergency Medicine. The average patient age was 43, and 78% were male. Forty percent needed to be admitted.
Of everything doctors pulled out, 55.4% were sex toys.
And unfortunately, it’s not just tushes getting mistreated. Defector also put together lists of the craziest things people put in their vaginas and penises.
