Was Emma Horsedick Substack's first digital centaur?
“A warrior chieftain, girthy of intellect and well-endowed in all her varied attributes..."
The pornbots have arrived on Substack. Drawn to the platform, no doubt, by the feculent slurry of disingenuous engagement farming that is currently clogging up Notes – Substack's baked-in Twitter clone, as the site transitions to a kind of LinkedIn for people who have read a Dostoevsky novel.
I watched them from a distance as they hauled their longships ashore: Bots whose storied names embodied dynastic sagas of debauchery that pre-dated the online era – Marcie20478; Diane14509; Ultra_Titz23. Prominent among them was one Emma Horsedick whose arrival and subsequent banishment from Substack kindled a flurry of excitement, upon which I will now capitalise with a short essay that resembles nothing I have posted here before, nor ever will again. There are some who will accuse me of riding the coattails of the zeitgeist, while others will claim that it is nothing more than a childish exercise in repeatedly writing the name Emma Horsedick. In the words of TLC:
“Haters gonna hate People gonna say what they say But we don’t care about that anyway Whoa whoa whoa.”
Who was Emma Horsedick? We should take with a pinch of salt an account by the Georgian writer and self-confessed opium fiend, Thomas De Quincey, who describes her as “a warrior chieftain, girthy of intellect and well-endowed in all her varied attributes. Viewed in silhouette it seemed as tho [sic] she was sat 'pon a three-legged milking stool”.
Nor should we give too much credence to an oft-circulated description provided by one Kevin of Stevenage: “Emma had a luxuriant flowing mane of long red hair and an absolutely massive cock”.
The fact is that we know very little about the horse dick in question. Was it simply a disembodied member that was waved around by its owner in a lewd and/or threatening manner? If it was somehow attached to her body, then was it a natural part of her anatomy, or an artificial phallus that was held in place using some manner of studded black leather holster or mechanical apparatus? It could have even been allegorical in nature – a moniker applied to a girl who embodied the boundless confidence of one who is in possession of a giant swinging horse dick.
It has been pointed out by students of the theatre that Horsedick was a popular moniker during the vaudeville era. It may well have been a stage name, alluding to an act in which the clever manipulation of light and shadow was used to convey the impression of a horse dick that was never revealed and perhaps didn't even exist.
But there remains another tantalizing possibility: There is an outside chance that Emma Horsedick was a centaur – one of that elusive race of half-human / half-horse hybrids. Back in the day when Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn, shared a student flat in Peckham, South London, they conceived the World Wide Web, and subsequently the Internet, on the mutual understanding that “nothing short of a revolution in global communications would draw centaurs to the borders of human civilization”. And not just any centaurs but (according to the manifesto penned by the three flatmates) “female centaurs with penises so inconceivably huge that they have to be dragged around on the ground behind them like heavy sacks”.
The converging history of personal computing and the Internet can be regarded as an ongoing attempt at attracting centaurs. Operating systems such as Windows and Linux, the social media platform Myspace along with its many inferior copycats, and cutting edge search engines like AltaVista and Ask Jeeves, were all successful to some degree, and yet all failed in this key area. Quite by accident it was Substack who succeeded. Out of the digital fog clopped Emma Horsedick, brimming with curiosity, perhaps hoping that someone would feed her a handful of peppermints or that other equine delicacy, the sugar lump. The owners of Substack, who were not quite able to grasp what they had achieved, shooed her away. With a flick of her mane and a swish of her tail she was gone.
We do know that Emma Horsedick, during her short time on the platform, was a voracious reader; a cheerleader who was always on hand to compliment a “valid observation”, “a significant point”, or a “compelling perspective”. It pains me to say that she never visited my corner of the website. Am I envious, and maybe even a little jealous, of those who got to bathe in the light of her attention and encouragement? Of course I fucking am.
Sorry, I lost my temper there for a moment, but this Emma Horsedick we're talking about. Maybe I am just old fool, but I had this dream that I would take her to a village in the Basque region of Spain where there is an annual horse dick festival. As a towering, ten-storey horse dick, sculpted from hay in the town square, was put to the torch and the fireworks exploding from its tip filled the night sky with a cacophony of colour and smoke I was going to get down on one knee and propose to her. I would have even been willing to forgo centuries of patriarchal tradition and take her surname as my own. Forsaking 'Redlark', I would henceforth have been known as Sam Horsedick. I would have made that sacrifice for her.
Earlier this evening I wandered down to the beach. Someone had spelled out the words: 'Come back Emma Horsedick' in seashells at the shoreline.
Upon my return, the incoming tide had mauled some of the letters. It now read: 'C me ck mm orsedick'.
When I returned again later, only the word 'dick' still remained. Somebody had dug a small moat around it.
Didn't really get the three-legged part until I saw the last image. Good one, Sam.