I fell victim to the ultimate form
of censorship this week, and it has gotten me so irate that I decided to
dispense with my ‘no ranting’ rule and have a bloody good, full on whinge about
it. Allow me to explain what happened . . .
I am in the process of creating an
internet ‘buzz’ around my forthcoming novel Peeper and am doing the usual
rounds of social media bombardment and guest appearances on blogs. One of these
blogs is that of fellow writer of erotica Kay Dee Royal, who kindly agreed to
interview me and provide a little advertising for my novel. So she sent me a
list of questions to answer, and I dutifully filled in the form and sent it
back, and Kay told me I would be appearing on her blog on June 8th
and she would send me a link so I could spam the fuck out of all my friends. All
good so far.
The problem occurred when her blog
went live and I received the link to go view it, and instead of seeing my
interview and lovely pictures of my book cover, I saw the following message
from my mobile network provider: This content is designated adults only and is
blocked.
As you would imagine, I used
several words at that moment which would have the internet censors scrambling
for cover with their hands over their ears. “Fuck!” I shouted. “Fucking
arseholing bollocking ball bags.” I was – I should point out – in the middle of
nowhere, and without access to my home broadband was entirely reliant upon my
smart phone to conduct my online affairs.
In a nutshell, my mobile network
provider EE had censored me from reading back my own words; answers I’d given
as part of an interview were being deemed far too rude for my poor little mind
to cope with. Thank fuck these cocksniffers are here to protect me from myself,
huh?
This opens up a whole new debate as
far as I’m concerned. Namely, why are words being censored? I can see the point
of censoring hard core porn sites - making sure that people who have no fucking
clue about anything can happily hand over a smart phone to their offspring and
sleep content at night, secure in the knowledge their little darlings can’t see
anything they aren’t supposed to.
But the censorship of words is – to
my mind – the ultimate nonsense. Allow me to explain what I mean. I want you to
read the following sentence, and then close your eyes and allow its meaning to
sink into your mind:
Barry and Mary went upstairs to
make love.
Okay, so what did these words make you
see? Maybe you’re a Mary Whitehouse type, and the idea of Barry and Mary having
sex leaves you frothing at the mouth and indignantly reaching for your bible.
Maybe you are slightly dirty minded, and saw Barry and Mary going at it hell
for leather, naked and sweaty. Or maybe you are a total deviant, and saw Barry
as a shy bi-curious man finally coming out of his shell and taking the
butt-pounding of a lifetime from a seven foot tall Congolese transvestite named
Mary.
The point is, any one of these scenarios
are entirely possible. Words are nothing but symbols on a page which, when fed
through our brain, can be transformed into images by our imaginations. So what
is it exactly that needs to be censored – is it the words themselves, or is it
our own thought processes? The only place that words can truly be transformed
into pornography is in the depths of our own minds.
Censorship of words is censorship
of the imagination - of our interpretation of a description, which is as
individual to each of us as our fingerprints. How can you stop people from
seeing things in their mind’s eye that you may not like? If I were to say the
word ‘stiff’ I may be talking about a yardbrush, but you may see a massive,
throbbing cock. Should the word ‘stiff’ be removed from the dictionary to
protect the terminally fucked up, or would it be easier to simply lobotomise us
all at birth so we’re protected from our own imaginations? God forbid we should
think about something that a Daily Mail reader may not like.
And of course, the ultimate irony
to all this is that while I was staring at the screen of my smart phone in
disbelief at the declaration that I was being blocked from accessing a page
full of my own words, there were probably myriad teenagers sitting in the back
row of their geography lessons, giggling as they used their phones to watch the
latest sex tape of some wannabe glamour model getting pounded by a footballer,
as they are far smarter with smart technology than the rest of us.
I’m sure my mobile provider would
argue it is easy for me to remove this block from my service, but why should I
have to go to the trouble? They didn’t presume I was under eighteen when I
signed up to their credit agreement and handed over my money, so why are they
assuming I’m a child now? Should censorship not be an opt in device for
concerned parents, rather than the default setting used to piss off innocent
perverts like myself?
For anyone who is interested, here
is the link to Kay Dee Royal’s blog:
She’s a very nice lady, and you
should all stop by for a visit. Hopefully the words you see written on the
screen won’t damage your mind and condemn your mortal soul to the flames of
hell.
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