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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

First time I've heard "pleading face" referred to as "the bottom emoji"

I chuckled at the headline, assumed it would be 'peach', now I'm just confused? The article doesn't seem to address it, except to link https://unicode-table.com/en/1F97A/ as 'U+1F97A Bottom Face Emoji' (which that page doesn't say at all), so seems very deliberate, must be some joke we're not in on (on the 'right' subreddits for or whatever) I suppose.

In communities that enjoy sexual power play you have a top/dominant and a bottom/submissive.

This is particularly prevalent amongst trans people on twitter (where I see it used a lot) you see a lot of people using this emoji under for example a powerful looking selfie of someone who appears dominant, as a playful offer of submission.

That's kind of weird to label it based on sexual roles by default. How would they go about explaining that label to a child? How about puss in boots face?

No no, that's why some people here are confused and out of the loop - the actual unicode name is not 'bottom face', but 'pleading face' or 'face with pleading eyes' (I'm not sure of a good reference for 'actual' names, got those from two different unicode dictionary type sites).

The emoji has another name, “pleading face”. This is basically how it became to be used by bottoms. Tops don’t plead, but bottoms do.

There’s lots of emojis that the culture has given alternate meanings to, for example the peach and the eggplant.

You could ask “how would I explain this to a child” to anything adults talk about that is sexual in nature. Usually the answer is “don’t.”

I don’t think TFA was written for children and the author wanted to include this common internet meme in to their article title.

Perhaps the author assumes that a child with a deep interest in rust Unicode edge cases has likely been on the internet before, and may well have been exposed to the existence of sex?

On the other hand, if anyone has a good way to explain variable-length integer encodings with constant-complexity backtracking to a child, please let me know.

Every sentence starts with a capital letter, and ends with a full stop. Now, imagine that every sentence is at most four words long. It might be one, or two, or three, but it won't have five words.

Imagine you drop your finger randomly on a word. How can you find the start of the sentence it's in?

(After this, if the child were familiar with binary, I'd show the actual representation of UTF-8, perhaps colour-coded. It's really quite intuitive. No need to go for the abstract straight away: if the child can generalise, they can generalise, and if not, there's no point making it artificially confusing.)

Imagine my surprise in Latin American places where Activo/Passivo is exclusively used to describe top/bottom. I kinda have to assume that those words mean more than their congnates in context, or else I kinda feel bad for gay Latin communities being shoe-horned into archaic roles.

> How would they go about explaining that label to a child?

You wouldn't. Just like you probably wouldn't explain the sexual meanings behind the eggplant or peach emojis to a child.

Not sure why this needs to be a consideration. If you're writing for an audience that includes children, sure, use child-friendly terms and concepts. If you don't care about including children in your readership, go nuts.

But, to explain the categorical meaning of the term, you have to lean on the sexual meaning. That is a pretty big difference. And unnecessarily scopes the audience to people that wouldn't be offended by this. Especially when ⊥ exists. Why is that not available as an emoji?

Granted, I don't think everyone needs to be prudish, such that this is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. But it is very different than claiming that explicitly sexual reframing of other items is the same thing.

Oh won't someone please think of the children reading articles on Rust internals??

It seems speaking of children is a trigger. My point is that it has been arbitrarily sexualised and doesn't seem relevant to the article.

Presumably this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_sex_roles

It’s a very weird choice of descriptions in this context, since it is neither about the domain in which in which that meaning applies, nor, even, anything really specifically about that emoji in particular. It’s exactly like unnecessarily dropping U+1F346 AUBERGINE into a conversations that applies to any emoji…and calling it “the male genitalia emoji”.

Never before has a programmer joked about getting screwed by a bug, the audacity!

Was I the only one looking for ⊥?

Yes.

You were not.

I expected something about type lattice representation.

There was a discussion on HN recently about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34454165

It's common in gay circles

Interesting. Is there a corresponding "top" emoji?

Appropriately, it doesn’t exist

I appreciate the subtle humor here, but I suspect most of the HN crowd won't quite get it.

Tops are considered less likely to use emoji from my understanding. They're supposed to be more stoic.

Unicode has these four: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_logic_symbols#:~:text=...

There's 𓂸, but I guess it's not an emoji.

First I rolled my eyes when some HN users had to explain to other HN users what that “puppy dog eyes” thing meant. But I felt a bit worse when I first heard that name for it, being used as if it was canonical.

[flagged]

I'm not really sure why I should take it as a sign of that. What crowd does this indicate I don't hang out with?

Queer people. This is an easily-inferred reference for anyone who's decently-good friends with at least one gay guy or lesbian.

I have a handful of very close friends who are gay, but I've never heard of this bottom-face emoji thing before today.

And I'm a little concerned why not knowing about something that seems like an esoteric piece of fetish-related in-group communication implies that I don't hang out with queer people? Is there an expectation that in order to hang out with people belonging to some group, I need to learn specific lingo regarding that group's sexual power dynamics?

[flagged]

LGBT+ BDSM enthusiast.

Hacker culture is queer now, and queer, kinky (but SSC) sex is an integral part of that.

If it helps any, its official name is U+1F97A, FACE WITH PLEADING EYES.

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