Lurid stuff on your newsfeed

Am I the only one here seeing images of boobies and booties everywhere? It’s not that I am suffering from hallucinations; what I am talking about is the lurid stuff that we see almost every day, especially on social media.

It gets worse in the summer, especially when celebrities’ bikini pictures that trended online become part of the nightly news broadcast. And don’t get me started on Instagram and Facebook, where the showing off usually starts. I can rant all day!

Picture this on your newsfeed. A girl has recently changed her profile picture, and although you hate to admit that she is not as pretty as the Caucasian beauty that many Filipino women are dying to approximate (filter didn’t do a great job in covering her pimples and pockmarks), the number of “likes” on her picture is astounding. It even bested your professionally shot wedding picture by hundreds.

What could be her advantage? You can’t deny it. It’s the cleavage. Curious, you check the comments. There, you see the praise — if that’s what they really are.

“So hot.”

“Uwi ka na, di na ako galit.”

“Rapbeh.”

“Ginalingan. May nanalo na!”

Dear, welcome to the digital age where editing a picture can make you look like a goddess, or even erase your nose due to too many alterations. I personally think that the latter is more

acceptable than enthusiastically using a different set of filters to turn yourself into a dog.

But whatever changes we do on our online facial identity, it’s virtually impossible to beat the popularity of those who have boobies under their neck. Nobody can really know the amount of padding and pushing that was done to achieve that cleavage, but one thing is for sure: Social media is very open to those who like to show off their mammary glands or just twerk for the camera. What’s ironic is that in some cases, posts like these come with the hashtag #respect.

On a different note, sort of, I tried reporting the notorious Rbreezy page multiple times but for some reason, Facebook did not find the sexually provocative page offensive. On that page you’ll see a lot of bashers, but you’d probably understand why this is the kind of bashers that I actually like. You can’t imagine the times I cringe when I read comments from minors defending their online idols. What did these kids see in those twerkers aside from their booties which, really, all of us have? I don’t know about these kids, but if I were to see the Rbreezy women gyrating and showing off their booties for the rest of my life, I would rather have those dog face filters on my newsfeed.

Meanwhile, the nerdy profiles of the achievers and smartheads barely have followers. To be honest, I don’t know if they really exist because their musings, while worthwhile, are barely shared. What’s worse is that it seems the fake news pages have more popularity than they. Maybe if these female prime movers would show their precious cleavage on their pictures, they can become trending, too.

Sure, you might think of me as a self-righteous parent who cannot accept the fact that in the online world, kids can have access to all the vile things imaginable. I get it. What I cannot understand fully is how almost everyone is rooting for a random woman’s profile picture with a ravishing cleavage but ignoring my very own profile picture that carries the result of my IQ test.

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Kriselle Jhean Tabalanza, 29, is happily married and has three children. She is a Regional Training Center 3 instructor and owner of www.deviant.zone.