It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same...

Recently, one of my home pages, DeviantArt, went through a bit of a transition into a new layout. This layout, DeviantArt Eclipse, ended up pushing away more of its followers than past layouts had, but a few veterans stayed on. That could be because of the fact that there's no website quite like it that lets you submit a wide variety of content of varying levels of quality... but that, in the end, is just a fancy way of saying it holds a monopoly over creative content, that nobody can compete with it. At least, nothing that I know of.

So, because it has such a stranglehold on the creative industry, anyone who gets sucked into it must follow its code of conduct, and through a bit of a connection to a user I've admired, little old me got sucked into a bit of a mess. Not my first. What happened?

Well, a user I follow had done a pretty good picture of the main male characters of Star vs. The Forces of Evil in an embarrassed nude state, and me, being me, asked for a similar picture of the girls. The only question was... which girls would be featured? Well, due to the build and race of some of the males pictured, I suggested a girl to match up with each of the boys. All but the demon and the fat girl were considered for the pic, which was eventually made.

One problem, though... I've historically said that DeviantArt has a hatred of seeing characters the staff recognize in compromising situations, even if they aren't actually in one. So the pic of the girls was deleted for putting minors in a sexual situation. And yet... the pic of the boys in that scenario was a-okay for DeviantArt. Never mind that the situation was the exact same, never mind that no reason was specified for either the boys or girls to be like that; you just can't sexualize minors! ...unless they're male, in which case, emasculate away!

It's rather ironic. Given that the average Twitter user is one to claim that nude males exist to look good for guys, so it's not actually sexualizing them, then the same logic surely must apply to females. But then, Twitter also said a female pedophile was released because she “wasn't a real pedophile”. Once again we see that men are expendable, not just victims of the camera, but of the lust of those who would do them actual, lasting harm.

Perhaps, then, a website that offers less content yearly will lose it's chokehold. And then, those it's choking will walk away very quickly...