Thursday, January 13, 2011

The New Victorianism

You may have read already but Canada has just banned a song. We've banned "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits.

Because it contains the word "Faggot"!

In the future parents will have to explain hatred to their children because it will have completely disappeared on account of the way governments cleverly banned certain words. Because it isn't like any snooty high school kid in the land could just turn around make a words like "gay"" into an insult.

If you listen to the song the word is put into the mouth of a character, a guy who delivers appliances for a living and he is marveling at how an effeminate little guy with an earring and make up can make so much money playing music. It's exactly the word you'd expect to hear in that context.

As I wrote just the other day:
At the time, obscenity laws were used to maintain a lie. Novelists were not allowed to describe life as everyone knew it was actually lived.
Contrary to what you might have been told, Victorians did not cover piano legs. Pornography was extremely common and the nude achieved great prominence during that era— Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were both great patrons of nudes and the Royal Academy was full of artists who cranked out nudes. What Victorian censorship really did, and what we are headed back to, was to allow certain powerful interest groups to impose a vision of public morals that only existed in their imagination on everyone. We're headed back to that.

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