A Social Platform by Another Name
The truth? They really had me going. It was that site, the one that acted like a forum for people to support your every whim. It works like many others nowadays where you heart a bunch of stuff, whether you like the thing you’re hearting or not. It wasn’t important. What many of these participants were going for was popularity by getting the most hearts. This place was called Raslr (misspelled like that because it was being genuine). At least, that was the idea behind it.
The way it works is you open an account, and it’s yours. You call it whatever you want. You take whatever optimistic or sardonic attitude you want to instill in it, and you hopefully give it your own flavor. Then you start uploading your entries. You can write stuff about it, or share some image. You could do whatever you want.
It was going like that for a while, and I enjoyed this particular internet circle because of all the outlandish imagery you were getting from some of the fellow clients. They were no holds barred about it. They were sharing as it was occurring to them, like there was no tomorrow.
But then, Raslr came down with new rules. It was something familiar to many of us who had lived with that sort of thing years ago. It was an idea that had dropped off our social awareness. We used to call it censorship. But Raslr was calling it something else. I don’t remember the words they used, but it all sounded false. The people rebelled. I was rooting for the outspoken spirits, but I was doing it from the sidelines. I had no real time to get involved.
Some people were saying, “Come on, it’s just tits.” And it’s funny how that kind of declaration served either side well. Read the above quotation with the idea that the new rules should not bother censoring them, and then read it again with the idea that it should not be a big deal because you weren’t really going to miss them. They meant two different things to the opposing parties.
The reality about Raslr is that it had already fallen into disfavor before they even went into this reactionary quagmire. They were considered a social slum in most decent online circles. I didn’t care when I had gotten onboard because I had nothing else going, and I actually liked the content I was finding there. But the writing was on the wall months before the rules ever turned up.
This new proposal was doing Raslr’s waning image no good. They even gave everybody a deadline. On their list of images disallowed to the community, the words Raslr chose for one of these new rules were: “No women presenting nipples.” And the rebels had a field day with this piece of verbal ridiculousness. They fired off entries on the site displaying female hands unveiling male nipples. Women uncovering a tray of Venus pastries shaped like the offending body part. Even famous paintings of reclining nudes that were in no way considered erotic in this day and age. The members were providing a sounding board for how grounded Raslr’s sensibilities appeared — which was to say, not at all grounded.
And there were those that just countered Raslr by bringing more salacious pictures of women presenting nipples as their mouths were fellating some guy. Or a naked Venus in an old painting spreading her nakedness all over a bed, ass in the air while cherubs held a large ring that produced soap bubbles from the draft in her backdoor. It was telling Raslr, “Oh, you mean like this?”
Raslr tried to sound quirky in their retorts to these responses, trying to keep the layer of cool their board members deemed appropriate for this sort of thing.
What a turnaround! I was in awe of what was happening. How could an apparently progressive entity be supporting such limitations in their platform? Raslr had been a place to find all such things without any censorship. It was the cool place, even if it were a social slum. Their new position on the matter, and the coming deadline for when they were going to crack down made people go supernova. Nipples were now brought on a grid of multiple images that catalogued varieties of contour and texture, making me reflect on just about every possibility.
The community members resisting these changes were also getting out signed petitions against this sort of thing, this censorship. A few of them even appealed to Raslr, declaring their livelihoods depended on the content they were posting on Raslr.
I knew it was soon going to be over. The rebels were going to lose this fight. There were bigger forces at work here. It had to do with policies that did not actually originate with Raslr but with a monster corporation, which was just then enforcing limits on the content viewed on its devices. (This well-known corporation will remain unnamed.)
I thought about all the things I was going to miss most from Raslr — the lurid satanic images of witches and goats, and the Japanese form of bondage that has some specific name I can’t think of right now. With this gone, I would have no real reason to go back to Raslr.
What was next? They were burning witches in hundreds of posts — a comment on what Raslr was going to do in two short days. Now, satanic images of women fornicating with mules. Then, labia stretched across a horizon of gruesome mountains populated by bug-like goblins. Hills becoming breasts, and penises were at every druidic formation, where the massive stones were no longer monoliths.
I was the one being led into these insinuations, and now that Raslr was closing the gates, I knew the inspiration was going to end. The signed petitions and the vocal denouncements made a lot of noise but did nothing, and I was left waiting on the sidelines wanting more witches.