I am probably being suckered by Wish here. I can only assume that their business model is to generate traffic by being deliberately obscure and that, in writing about their ads, I am playing right into their hands. I have to stress ‘assume’ here because I know nothing about Wish. I have never clicked on one of their ads and I never will. I have not looked them up and I shall not do so now.
This is what I have come to infer about Wish only from having seen their ads pop up in my Facebook feed for what seems like a decade:
- It is an app.
- It is an app that sells cheap things across an extraordinarily broad range of categories.
- The demographic it is primarily targeting is ‘absolute freaks’.
Over the course of a year or so, I have been screenshotting the most perverse, perverse-seeming, and perplexing Wish items that I have been forced to look at while scrolling on my phone. My refusal to ever click on one of their ads and Wish’s design choice to leave them unlabelled has left the nature of many of these items as a complete mystery to me.
Maybe Wish exclusively sells things that are insane. Or maybe I have the digital footprint of an insane person, and this is what Wish’s inscrutable algorithms believe I am likely to purchase. Whatever the case, please drink in this smorgasbord of discounted, highly arcane goods.
Chrome arm blade
I’m almost certain this is the type of weird curved knife those guys try to kill naked Viggo Mortensen with in Eastern Promises.
Plunge neck catsuit with no butthole
I am not here to judge, and this four-star item will certainly match the needs of anyone wishing to cover up their entire body minus the chest and anus — a mood we have all been in before.
Arm extruder
Sick of your arm being unextruded? For the price of a cup of coffee, you can extrude portions of your arm to your heart’s content!
No idea!
I cannot even hazard a guess. I have nothing.
Russian book? Some take on a sexy schoolgirl outfit? An actual live human being?
I have no idea what thing pictured is being sold here, all I know that it is being done at the low, low price of $12.
Tube
Tube, now in two sizes!
Tongue grabber
Makes it easier to grab your tongue without all that mess.
Dick shorts
Finally, a pair of underpants that do absolutely nothing to disguise the size and shape of your flaccid penis. Four stars.
Cyclonic silicon wank sleeve
This gives off the distinctive air of something you would see in plastic packaging in a sex shop, but with no real indication of its purpose. It looks like it is ribbed for someone’s pleasure, but I simply couldn’t say whose.
Velcro stomach patch
This could be some sort of stomach-only waxing strip, but it could also be any number of other things. A face mask for your stomach? A layer of protective silicon? Secret drug pouch? I like to think it’s sticky on the inside and velcro on the outer layer, allowing you to stick your keys etc to your stomach for easy access.
Silencer
I don’t know enough about guns to know how plausible this is, or if that’s even what a functional silencer should look like, but .308 and 7.62 are both numbers I’ve seen in shooting video games, if that means anything.
Nazi helmet
That is certainly a German military helmet.
Portable medieval torture device
Because you can’t take an entire torture rack on the plane.
Knife-proof tights
Seeing someone cut into clothes with a boxcutter while they are wearing them is disturbing enough, but it’s the second image of the model doing their best job at imitating the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth that gets me.
Half of a portable toilet
Sure, it’s a thing you piss into that you attach to bottles. I’m sure there is a time and a place for this. What do you get in a “1/2 pack“? Which half? Very strange.
Cube o’ worms
Put simply: it’s a cube of worms.
Stunt pregnant belly
A generous reading of this would be that it is for film or TV purposes, but judging from everything else this horrid app has chosen to show me, I’m choosing to believe it’s for fetish stuff.
Thank you, Wish.
