R.I.Peach: An Elegy for the Status Quo
Four score and seven billion emoji ago, some brave soul who-knows-where discovered that the peach emoji looked remarkably like a human butt. Five seconds prior, that same brave soul pioneered the eggplant-as-penis maneuver. These protosexts have now been lost to the sands of iCloud, but their impact is as steadfast as the first attempts at written communication scrawled in Lascaux, as potent as Egyptian hieroglyphs.
But today, we gather in almost-memory of the soon-to-be-defunct but never forgotten peach emoji, that luscious symbol of tantalizing desires and unfulfilled promises. Many of us will mourn the demise of this signifier. We tremble at the sound of its final salacious death-rattle (which is not so unlike that of its endangered cousins Quechua and Limousin). As its replacement crests the horizon like an overinflated popover, cries of “too real” resound across the internet.
The Unicode 9.0, iOS 10.2 version of the peach is too similar to a regular, grocery store peach. This verisimilitude disturbs us as much as it limits our symbolic options. The allure is gone. The new peach, I hear, looks too much like a peach to be anything but a peach. (Ceci n’est pas a peach?) The archaic peach emoji is more figurative; it is less definitively like a peach, more closely resembling a ripely mature rear end. (Also not a peach.) It’s this wink at profane possibility that we stand to lose.
And yet, is this little wink sent with invisible ink that much of a dirty secret if everyone knows what it means? For years sexters have pulled a literal meaning from a figurative (and figural) emoji. Isn’t it also valuable to see figurative meaning in literal things? (Literally!!)
Virtual brethren, I urge you to open your eyes and see the truth. Think of this system upgrade not as losing a peach, but gaining an orchard.
The benevolent overlords at Apple have blessed us with a challenge — a wake up call from the complacency of our generation. This is our moment to rise up and challenge the status quoji. This is our time to develop Creative Sexting Solutions™. This is exactly what the Common Core Means by Higher Order Thinking Skills (appropriately, HOTS).
The human mind is a beautiful, plastic thing. If we cannot come up with novel emoji-mediated representations of human pudenda, then we are truly done for. If Anthony Weiner can rock a multi-million dollar political campaign with his Adaptive Virtual Slithering™, then by Jove we can find new ways to rock each other’s virtual worlds!
And this is just the beginning of what dares to be a national — nay, global — movement of crowd-sourced creative problem-solving. Today your butt cheeks, tomorrow ISIS.
Don’t give into your reactionary tendencies. Don’t ask Apple to Make Emoji Great Again (#MEGA2K16). That’s a dark path we can’t go down more than once every 30 years. This is our moment to start a revolution. Soldier on, little buckeroos. I know you can do it. Let’s all give peach a chance.
Update 11/16/16 — False alarm, apparently.
