All The Emo Boys & All The Emo Girls

[[Note: I labored over where to put this. In the end, I decided to maintain the sanctity of the official site blog and keep it free from rants on "sensitive issues" but you can bet your ass that some form of this is making it to my deviantArt journal. Fucking hoodlums.]]

I am 21 years old and, yes, I have a hard time saying that. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice, put two close friends in the ground, lived through the fear of a best friend with cancer (and, no, she’s not one of the one’s who died) watched my married mother attach herself strongly to the description “polygamous,” destroying my father. I’ve made the call to institutionalize a friend. I’ve known people in hospitals who, by all rights, should never have come out alive. And the worst part is, I so don’t have even close to the worst life ever.

This morning, after waking up too early and responding to said early awakening by simply getting up, I grabbed my lap top and started doing what I do nearly daily – browsing the dA stock photography gallery. I do this, by the way, because in the great computer crash of 2006, my extensive supply of vector stock links was lost and I no longer have reference photo’s for projects. Not that it matters, but anyway – carrying on. Like many mornings, my search was fruitless, until – hark, is that another kid with a handgun?

Call me crazy, but I’d like to schedule a restructuring of the photo galleries at Deviant Art – Kids with Sharp Objects and Blood, Kids with Guns and Naked Kids with Low Self-Esteem. It would at least make my searching process easier.

Now, now – before you go on a “but it’s art!” rant, I, dabbling in hentai as I am want to do, appreciate a good naked female as much as the next girl. True, I tend to shy from the 300lb women who feel the need to take off all of their clothes, photograph themselves with a single long-stemmed rose and call it artistic nudes, but I’ve found many a use for the others as reference photos in vector renders and cell shading. Still, I’ve yet to get anything other than a stomach ache from seeing someone playing with a handgun and photographing it. Yes, I assume that anyone intelligent enough to operate a digital camera and the dA interface is intelligent enough to make sure the thing isn’t loaded and the trigger lock is on, but I cannot for the life of me fathom a need for this image to exist in the world. Not to make an example of her personally, though, because I’m certain a search of “gun” would reveal more than you could shake a stick at. If you looked really hard, I’m sure you could probably find Naked Kids with Sharp Objects, Blood and Guns.

I checked, it isn’t as though the dA’r is making a political statement – speaking to the strangulation of our generation or the tragedy of what happens when you send kids to war. They’re not trying to say “Hey, future suicide hotline callers – there’s another way out.” They’re just another little emo girl amidst all of the little emo boys glorifying yet another one of life’s many bad decisions.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not just Kids with Guns – if I see on more drop of cornstarch blood on that site outside the context of Halloween costume stocks I may borrow that girls gun and end it myself. They run lines of the stuff down their cheeks and pretend like they sliced themselves open. They douse their tongues in it and then run their mother’s cleaver along the faux wound with an angsty look on their faces and scream “high art!”

Call me crazy. Call me biased. Call me bitter. That’s just not art ladies and gentlemen – that’s an utter lack of coping skills and a total absence of perspective