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over time this might affect our collective consciousness in regards to the purpose & function of the eggplant; and
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can we please just get a straightforward penis emoji already?? Half the human population has a penis attached to their bodies anyway, why are we still so prude about incorporating actual penises into mainstream vernacular & daily life?
addendum:
There’s actually kind of a funny history behind the Eggplant emoji. Emoji are Japanese in origin and around the time they were taking off there was this Survivor like gameshow where one guy was confined to his apartment and he had to try and survive past the basics by applying for and winning sweepstakes items from various promotions from newspapers and magazines.
The participant’s shortened form name was Nasu - which means “eggplant” so since the guy started the challenge with literally nothing including clothes they put a little Eggplant over his junk in post. That became a Japanese cultural meme that translated over once emoji became more widely adopted.
You probably won’t see actual dick emoji in the actual set because emoji are an all ages access thing and exist on an international level. It’s actually kind of funny how different cultures use the same finite set. Like in China how the angel emoji is construed as “I’m going to end you”. One could see the things as becoming essentially a hieroglyphic set where they gain their own full individual linguistic meanings.
Last time I checked, penises are an all ages thing too. But who knows, I’m no urologist.
They are an all ages thing for some… But remember when I said international? I don’t particularly like puritanical prudishness but the conservative held belief as those things being inappropriate for all points of society is also pretty common.
I doubt those who keep the emoji want any hassle of the conservative European diaspora middle East, the Americas, facets of Africa and China getting their knickers in a twist.
In the world of stockholder retaliation some things people count as just above their pay grade.
Are there not already words to represent the same thing to anyone old enough to read a message? A different representation of something they are already potentially exposed to isn’t something that technology standards should be censoring.
Especially when the defacto replacement for this is a symbol of something that could very easily give young men a serious sense of inadequacy and insecurity.
edit: (you -> young)
I would countee that wouldn’t any single depiction of a penis set an unreasonable standard? Color, size, circumsized vs not etc? At least with a euphemism it is fairly abstract. I don’t think anyone looks at an eggplant as a goal.
There is already skin tone support for emoji. Size is not a problem because there is nothing to compare it to. Circumsized could be a separate emoji.
They could include it. Give it a spot. But blank. And then it would be up to each OS if they want to include the icon on their device. That way we could at least let those less prudish nations and companies start with a common code point.
Like flags for example. They got codepoints, but Microsoft has decided to not take sides and have ignored country’s flags.
The problem with leaving it blank is that it harms communication if the other party doesn’t have that symbol. You may send it because it exists in your country but then they have no idea what you mean.
Maybe having a “tofu” missing character box is ok, but even then if a substantial amount of the world’s population isn’t going to have this character it maybe be best to leave it out.
That being said, I am still in favour.
Is that the show where the contestant came out about how horribly abusive the production was? Like he was tricked/coerced into doing it and basically imprisoned the whole time?
Oh yeah… It was horrible. Dude was traumatized.
What the fuck that sounds amazing and horrible!
Yeah the ethics of Japanese game shows and reality tv more generally particularly in the 1990’s is a fraught topic. Some of them were quite cruel.
It’s up to the app/os how emoji are rendered. You can hack your os to display whatever you want instead of 🍆 , or add support for 👨🍆 with zero width space between, but it’s less likely to be used.
It’s not even at OS level (unless you’re thinking fonts are OS level). So basically you’d just need to define a font, with certain unicodes with images you want, and make sure it ranks higher than other fonts. So the application will search for any characters in that font, and then for those you didn’t define, it’ll search in other fonts.
Damn, after reading the first paragraph I really tought this was going to include masturbation by insertion of an eggplant. Now I’m a little disappointed to be honest.
I suppose there are worse things to insert but an eggplant, particularly the type being depicted in the emoji doesn’t seem like a particularly prime candidate. Seems like a good way to end up in hospital looking for a manual extraction.
A person I know used to work as a nurse in an operating room, stuff like this happens more often than you’d think. I haven’t heard an eggplant mentioned by them though.