Teabagging

About

Teabagging, also known as corpse-humping, is an internet slang term referring to the griefing practice of squatting repeatedly over a player's corpse in an online game as a way to simulate a sexual act in which a man places his scrotum into the mouth of a sexual partner.

Origin

The term "teabagging" as a euphemism was popularized in the 1998 comedy film Pecker, which featured a stripper who is chastised for teabagging customers while dancing on the bar (shown below, right).

According to the blog Thought for Your Penny,^[2] the term was adopted by gamers to label the practice of squatting repeatedly over an opponent's corpse in 2001 with the release of the shooter game Halo: Combat Evolved.

Spread

On April 10th, 2005, Urban Dictionary^[1] user Demon Phoenix 1337 submitted an entry for "teabag," defining it as a sexual act and a trolling practice in Halo 2 (shown below).

On May 3rd, 2009, an episode of The Simpsons was broadcast in which the character Homer Simpsons teabags a downed opponent while playing Halo (shown below).

On November 10th, 2007, a character named after the griefing practice was introduced in the webseries Pure Pwnage (shown below).

In April 2011, a page for "teabagging" was created on Encyclopedia Dramatica.^[4]

On June 7th, 2015, a page for "tea-bagging" was created on the Giant Bomb Concept Wiki.^[3] On April 5th, 2016, YouTuber PewDiePie uploaded a video titled "Teabagging in VR," in which he players a virtual reality game using an HTC Vive headset (shown below). Within four days, the video gained over 6.2 million views and 11,600 comments.

PAX East Controversy

On April 7th, 2018, author Mike Futter posted a tweet advising game developers to not "intentionally team-kill a journalist and then teabag them… especially if she's a woman," referring to an incident that occurred during a game demo at the PAX East conference. In response, journalist Amanda Farough tweeted that she loudly proclaimed "And this is why I hate playing these kinds of games. Thanks for the demo" during the incident, noting that the teabagger "thought I was his 'dev buddy' by accident" (shown below, left). That day, Farough replied to Futter's tweet to confirm she would be "contacting their publisher" (shown below, right).

On April 9th, the news site Metro^[5] published an article titled "Man ‘team-killed and virtually teabagged’ female journalist during shocking in-game rampage." That day, two posts about the story reached the front page of /r/KotakuInAction.^[6][7] Also on April 9th, Farough posted a tweet announcing that she was "not interested in hurting devs because I was annoyed by a lack of professionalism."^[8]

Search Interest

External References