Vice Principal Luna and the Curious Case of the Female-Presenting Nipples
By Fuzzyfurvert
Principal Celestia, undisputed administrational head of Canterlot High School, entered the main school building ass first. Hip-pushing the heavy metal door aside she waved again at the mob of parents that made up the vast majority of the PTA. “Yes, yes! We’ll see to it that these regulations are put into practice immediately. Don’t worry, I’ll see to it personally.”
She smiled warmly, waving goodbye to the last stragglers filing out of the gym before she took another step back into the hall and hip-checked the door shut hard enough to rattle the lockers. Only slightly under her breath, she muttered. “Yes, my liege, you will be done…ugh...finally. I swear…” Turning, Celestia sighed and meandered her way back to her office though the dim, after hours abandoned hallways. She glanced down at the paperwork in her hands, the result of an hour or so discussion with the concerned parents of the city. It was still toasty fresh off the printer.
“Like hell am I seeing to this ‘personally.’”
“Luna! Guess who has a new duty?” Celestia smiled, not warmly, and slapped a sheet of paper on her sister’s desk. “Spoiler: it’s not me, because I actually went to the PTA meeting!”
“I had stuff to do.”
“So did I!” Celestia groaned, pressing her palms into the small of her back as she arched and cartilage popped. “Like it or not, the overlords have handed down yet another decree we are to comply with more or less immediately. So I’m going to hand it off to you.”
Luna groaned, pinching between her eyes and rubbing her brow. She reached out and delicately slid the paper closer. “How immediately are we talking here?”
Taking a seat on the edge of Luna’s desk, Celestia shrugged, folding her arms. “They were surprisingly lenient there. But they did set a hard deadline of the seventeenth.”
“So next week sort of immediate?” Luna squinted at the document, lifting it gently in her hands. “Mandatory removal of all inappropriate artwork and materials from the school grounds? Isn’t that part and parcel with the whole school thing?”
“Skip the first paragraph and check out the second heading.”
Luna skimmed down, letting her eyes pick out choice words from the summary until she hit the real meat of the document. “Wait...this applies to the Student Artist Gallery? This is from the PTA?” Her sister nodded. “The same people that cried and screamed, threatened lawsuits even, if they weren’t given the absolute freedom to express themselves are now—a scant decade later—demanding the limitation of student expression?”
Celestia nodded harder, lips tight.
“Geez, it’s like they suddenly had an epiphany about what their parents went through.” Luna sucked in air between her teeth, blowing it back out and up into her hair. “Entitled much?”
“I suspect this actually has little to do with the puritan movements of old and more to do with local ordinances and geographical metadata.” Celestia huffed, unbuttoning the top button of her jacket and fanned herself gently. “Have to make the community rank higher online as a nice, family-friendly place to visit or move in to. An review somewhere online that says we allow explicit materials at a school where theoretically impressionable technically children could see it without context of why we would… Well, there goes Canterlot’s coveted five stars and then the whole community starts to suffer from less tourism and these parents lose profits from airb&b’ing their second and third homes.”
“Ah.” Luna tapped the recommendation sheet against her desk’s top. “Entitled VERY much.”
“Indeed.”
Once more Luna started to scan the paper in her hands, reading over the bulleted points outlining precisely what was and was not ‘inappropriate.’ Obviously, things such as artwork displaying topics of violence or sensitive, complex issues like racism or perhaps something intentionally offensive like strong political views or bullying were on the PTA’s chopping block? “Back up...this is about nudity and sex?” She squinted harder, trying to make the words in front of her make sense. “What are ‘female-presenting nipples?’ Wouldn’t those just be nipples? And what’s with the hyphen in there? Does this mean images of a female presenting her nipples like some game show award? Or does it mean the nipples of persons who present AS female? Plus, this covers both photography and illustrations but not paintings if they are famous and old? Who wrote this?”
Celestia sighed, shrugging helplessly. “Not me. And your guess is as good as mine. The PTA wants action taken and they don’t seem to care about any sort of consistency or nuance. If it is a nipple, toss it. If it looks like a nipple, toss it. If someone could imagine that it reminds them of the concept of a nipple, toss it just to get them off our collective ass.”
“This is so going to be a hack job.”
“I believe you will do your best, Luna.”
Luna paused where she was, rolling her shoulders to ease the ache that was building between her shoulder blades. She sighed tiredly for what must have been the millionth time today alone, planting the end of her pitchfork on the ground and frowned at the most recent tear-stained, angry face that had the audacity to approach her. “Look, for the twelfth time, this is all about those Russian remote controlled camera drones. They swoop in, take pictures of your art on display and then paste it all over the internet.”
“But...but...that doesn’t make sense!” The face, a Canterlot student artist, stammered. “That’s exposure. International exposure! That’s supposed to be good, right?”
“Perhaps it once was.” Luna spun her trident-like forking implement and hooked another bit of artwork, banning it to the dumpster with the rest of a growing pile of such inappropriate content. “But in this modern climate of interconnectedness, we must be careful with exposure. Without proper context, it could send the wrong message. So the best way to avoid that and for the Canterlot Student Artist Gallery to remain friendly to the advertisers which help fund us is to remove all inappropriate content from the site.”
Luna turned and looked at the remaining mass of potential content, mentally flagging a piece named ‘Exposed Paper-mache Bust’ as excellent fuel for the imminent cleansing dumpster fire. The words ‘exposed’ and ‘bust’ definitely count under the PTA’s guidelines. It’s a male in a turtleneck, but those words DO conjure the idea of a nipple. In it goes!
“But you can’t just throw out everything! I worked really hard on that, and so did all the other artists that made this stuff.” There were more tears, then more vitriol. “We are the reason anyone even comes here in the first place! It sure as heck isn’t for the fandom based poetry slams! Please, be reasonable.”
“I am reasonable.” Luna paused again after yeeting another pencil drawing of a two-dimensional sphere that had a smudge on this that might be mistaken for a basic part of human anatomy if the observer were drunk enough. She reached into her pant pocket and pulled out the folded single page of guidelines from the PTA. “I am following well reasoned and researched points on identifying materials in the Gallery that no longer meet strict criteria and must be dealt with posthaste.”
Luna unfolded the PTA’s bullet list of no-nos and handed it off to the student. “As you can see, I have performed my duty efficiently and effectively.”
“Horse apples you have…”
Luna ignored the muttering. She understood the frustration, honestly. The demands of a mod of parents frequently seemed inane and counter intuitive to her. But the reality of being an admin was caring for the brand of the school and the greater community as a whole. Sometimes that meant doing uncomfortable things. The students would come to understand in due time. Surely. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted another posted piece being added to the backlog. With a flick of her wrist, her pitchfork shot out and she twirled around in an excessive show of skill, flagging, banning, and expelling the probably inappropriate material into the dumpster.
“You just tossed out your own guidelines.” More tired than angry, the teary student next to her watched Luna’s paper transmogrify itself into future kindling with a hint of passive aggressive joy. With more resignation than someone so young should be able to generate, the student turned away to join the others in salvaging what they could before Luna got to them.
“Wait...what?” Luna blinked, her brow furrowing. The PTA’s guidelines hit the dumpster near the floor, right on top of the exceptionally flammable ‘Exposed Paper-mache Bust.’ Why had she done that? It was a knee-jerk reaction, right? There was nothing ‘inappropriate’ about the instructions on judging appropriateness. But there it was, along with all the nipples and things that might be nipples if you squinted sideways. Am I...am I doing this wrong? Is there a better way to address the issue? Am I pushing harmful policies? Wasn’t the whole point of the Canterlot Student Artist Gallery to be a place where students could express themselves freely without fear? To be a place where students that felt marginalized could come together with others over shared interests, regardless of grade? Am I ruining things for them? Am I so out of touch with their needs?
Luna set her pitchfork down and looked back at the retreating student artist and the ones behind them frantically snapping pictures on their cellphones or stuffing backpacks full of displays they wanted to keep and cherish. The students were crying. Her students were crying. They were hurting.
Dropping the pitchfork, Luna resolutely straightened her shoulders and dug out the book of matches in her pocket to throw it away into the shrubs. “No. It is the PTA who is wrong!”
Vice Principal Luna spun on her heels and marched off toward her students, a smile on her face and an idea in mind. “Listen up everyone! Much like the rules about no student parking in the faculty lot, this new change in policy is something we all must live with. But there is a way around it! There are other places you can display whatever artwork you wish. It may be a pain to move and set up elsewhere, but at least that way you won’t lose what you had here.”
“But where can we take this stuff?”
Luna tapped her chin. “Well, I seem to recall a gallery on the other side of town I once patronized in years past. The new Grounds, I think it was.”
“That place ain’t been new since we were born.”
“Yet it is still open and welcoming to all types of expression! Go! Quickly, take your lovely art with you and don’t look back.” Luna flashed a thumbs up.
“Why don’t you use it anymore?” One student arched an eyebrow Luna’s way.
“Oh I once caught a nasty virus there, but fear not, I’m certain they’ve cleaned that all up by now.” Luna shrugged, smiling apologetically. “Or if that seems like too much, maybe you could shift to an online forum that isn’t affiliated with the school or Canterlot’s greater geographical metadata? It’s a bit limiting for longer posts, but one such service I use myself is a handy app on your phone. Since many of you are already capturing images with them, you can use the app to upload them as well.”
“Are you talking about MyStable? That place is out of date AF.” The once teary face pointed out, looking unimpressed.
“I was referring to Bleat-er, the app with the blue goat head icon.” Luna countered. “It’s hip and fresh and many of your fellow students likely already have accounts there. I’m sure if you spread the word, your audiences and friends would follow you there.” Luna opened her mouth to continue with a warning about unfiltered feeds and online trolls, when she was interrupted by the iconic warbling goat screech of the app in question coming from her back pocket. “Er...seems I just got a new like, myself.”
“Hey...look at this.” One of the other student artists reached out with their phone, pointing the screen at tear-face. The artist blinked a few times, surprise flooding their face. Looking back at her, this new student grinned. “I see you use Bleat-er to back up your own photos, hmm, Miss Luna?”
“Of course.” Luna nodded, her eyebrows arching as the app screamed from her pants again. "I set up my phone to auto-,” again with the fainting scream, then another and another in quick succession, “upload new pictures each night.” All around her more and more students had the phones out, heads down, thumbs swiping. Again and again her phone choked out goat noises, vibrating her left butt cheek each time.
“You might want to check your settings.” Tear-face no more tapped their own phone screen, eliciting another demonic sounding app bleat as they rebleated a post to their feed and the feeds of all their followers.
Fishing out her phone, Luna tapped on the screen and her notifications. Bleater was reporting a wave of likes she’d rarely seen on the platform. Thumbing the app open, Luna stared at her screen as more and more bleats and rebleats flowed in on a selfie she’d taken a few nights ago while feeling pretty and only slightly intoxicated. Higher and higher the numbers climbed right before her eyes. Her students were well connected indeed. Luna’s finger hovered over the delete button.
“Well…,” she hesitated, thoughts of her actions and complicitness in the actions of the PTA to stifle the voices and creative spirits of these young artists, “...fuck.” Nothing was visible, but nor was anything left to the imagination either. Had her own selfie been featured in the Gallery, it would have been flagged, banned, and burned along with all the other nipple presenters.
Luna sighed for the million and one-th time and tapped the button to set the notifications to silent. She deserved this. But damn the PTA, at least now she’d be measurable more popular with the students than her sister for once.
Author's Note
Press F to Pay Respects.
