A number of people have written to me, telling me that the photos from the Butt Skirt posting are Photoshopped. Cass pointed me to the ever-reliable Snopes site, where they very recently debunked the photos, and also feature the infamous breast scarf shots.
My friend Zooko points out that if the butts were actually silk-screened onto the skirts, they’d look right from only one angle. And if you silk-screened butts onto skirts, it’s most likely that you’d choose an image from a right-behind-you viewing angle. That’s clearly not the case in this shot:
So alas, the photos aren’t of some new fashion. It’s probably just Japanese porn catering to their underwear fetish. It just seemed so plausible because of the breast scarves, the tentacle porn (almost work safe), the vending machines that sell used girls’ underwear (this link is work safe), the hentai video games (including a particularly vile one called “Battle Raper”, a Mortal Kombat-style game that takes “to the victor go the spoils” way too far) and all the other weird stuff that comes from The Land of the Rising Contradiction.
(The breast scarves, however, still seem to be real. I stumbled across this Japanese page which seems to have some information about them.)
I think it’s also that we — okay, maybe I mean “I” — really wanted to believe that such things existed. So here’s a revised butt skirt photo, with a little X-Files twist:
Recommended reading
Michael Dingler has come up with an answer to the butt skirt that should please the ladies.
The phrase “fact-check your ass” has been attributed to blogger Ken Layne. Samizdata.net’s Blog Glossary says that the phrase means “to use Internet search engines to ascertain the veracity of dubious claims made in the press.”