Corey Pierce

Just the other day I received an ad for a local seafood restaurant in the mail that declared, “Your new neighbour has crabs.” This nearly trumps the roadside advertisement that encouraged patrons of a fresh fish market to “Surprise that June bride with a case of crabs.” Humour and sex travel hand in claw when it comes to this vulgar dermatological conundrum: after all, if “Virginia is for lovers,” as its state motto so proudly boasts, then certainly it follows that “Maryland is for crabs.”

According to statistics, some 20 million people will become infected with crabs (a.k.a. pubic lice or Phthirus pubis) each year. These little butt-biters are an ancient pestilence that has been bugging humankind for at least 2,000 years. And unlike the long list of insidious venereal diseases that threaten to invade our pleasure-seeking bodies, crabs are a parasite, another animal living on our flesh, hiding where the sun don’t shine and feasting on blood. The truth is, you don’t even have to bump uglies with someone who’s hosting the critters to become infected. More than one unwitting couch-crasher or motel guest has checked out with an extra souvenir onboard. No wonder — a single crab louse can lay some 200 nits every 30 days from the time it’s a week old.

Seeing is believing, and at three millimetres long, these slow-moving grey vampires and their eggs are visible to the naked eye, only adding to the gross-out factor. Bed sheets, clothing, furniture, towels and, yes, even toilet seats, are prime pick-up joints for these itchy bastards. Though they don’t walk and are wingless, they have been found living in every hairy recess imaginable: armpits, beards, moustaches and even eyelashes and eyebrows. Despite rumours to the contrary, “clear-cutting” just doesn’t work. Although it’s bound to take years off your appearance, just because you’ve “been to Brazil” doesn’t mean your tiny residents have been evicted.

A dark secret exposed, crabs made primetime when Sex in the City’s Charlotte learned her lesson in the episode “Twenty-Something Girls VS Thirty-Something Women,” when a romp in the Hamptons resulted in a bad case of love crustaceans. A symbol of youthful recklessness, promiscuity and a general lack of hygiene, crabs and their fellow skin-sucking creepy crawlies have a unique cachet among insects. French poets eagerly seized on the pun that finds the word puce for flea coming dangerously close to pucelage, or virginity; romantic English poet John Donne uses the flea as a courier of his nectar of love (and perhaps the bubonic plague). He famously said, “It sucked me first, and now it sucks thee. And in this flea our two bloods might mingled be….” Similarly, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ariel sings, “Where the bee sucks there suck I.” A side order of melted butter and a bottle of Genitrex, please!