Chapter 2:
Frenemy
“I think it’s okay for a man to eat a woman’s ass…” Erika said as she slurped her black coffee.
“But I’ll be DAMNED if I EVER eat a man’s ass.”
This was how my day started with Erika every day.
We drank coffee strong enough to kill a horse and talked about the most ridiculous bullshit. Every single day for eight years. This was our ritual. It went with the territory. Two creative geniuses attached at the hip all day—every day.
We were codependent as fuck. Dangerously codependent. We had a three-bedroom apartment from which we lived and worked. It was a universe unto itself. We rarely had visitors. We kept to ourselves. Two writers up in that house all day. With anywhere between four and eight cats. More if you counted their stray lovers. With nothing but our crazy thoughts — it always made for great discussion.
She was a Tumblr feminist.
This is a VERY niche type of personality. VERY.
People on Tumblr were thoroughly indoctrinated in a worldview that ran counter to mainstream Western values.
Tumblr Circa 2018 was the original woke mob. Everyone was a communist or an anarchist. Everyone used pronouns — long before pronouns were a thing. All the girlies were leaking the tea about racism, intersectional feminism, and all things LGBTQ.
Tumblr’s user base was younger than most other social media sites. About half the users are under 25 years old. It was where all the kids absconded because their parents were now on Facebook, which meant that Facebook was no longer cool. It was full of high school drama, silly in-jokes, and kids trying to figure out who they were and what they believed—sometimes by getting into absurd arguments with strangers.
There was always something hilarious going viral on Tumblr.
It always made for great conversation in the morning.
Most people on Tumblr write for a small audience of their friends, not for public consumption by their grandmothers and coworkers, as you write on Facebook. Most people use Tumblr with a pseudonym and don’t connect it to their “real name.” Because of the anonymity on Tumblr, there were some real psychos on the platform. This was a place where sex workers would do long, deep dives into their entire lives and how they got into the business. How much money do they make per night? What positions do they like? What they think about the Johns they fuck. You would be surprised at how much thought goes into being a prostitute. Many sex workers had husbands and children. Some parts of their lives looked very ordinary on the surface.
People would be incredibly open with each other on the platform. This was the place to let your freak flag fly.
There were all sorts of strange parasocial relationships, lasting for years between people who had never met in real life. It was such a wacky place.
Where all the nerds went to be nerdy together.
Naturally, the discourse of that day on Tumblr was ass-eating, and Erika was weighing in with all of her Tumblr friends. The whole of Tumblr was split down the middle on ass-eating. Some for, some against. There was even a microbiologist who weighed in. She was definitely against it. Scientifically speaking… there was no way to explain away the millions of microbes you can see under the microscope with your own two eyes.
But some people on Tumblr defended ass-eating vociferously.
