Sufficient Scruples

Bioethics, healthcare policy, and related issues.

June 24, 2007

Ghosting Through Your Monitor

by @ 2:15 pm. Filed under General, Women's Issues, Reproductive Ethics, Sex, Child-Rearing

Mingle2 - a blog that links a lot of quizzes, surveys, and other online game-type-stuff, offers this nifty service: What’s My Blog Rated? Enter the URL of your blog, journal or other Web site, and it gives you an MPAA-style rating of its content.

I’m delighted to report Sufficient Scruples received the following:

Why, however?

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

  • sex (17x)
  • abortion (14x)
  • breast (6x)
  • death (3x)
  • drugs (2x)
  • gay (1x)

Ah, yes. The old “dirty words census” protocol. Some anginal panty-sniffer with a clipboard checking off all the naughty words - predictably, mostly related to sex - that send his blood-pressure up gets to determine whether your interests - and your audience’s - are worthy or not. In this case, it’s obviously done with a script, which I guess is not as bad as that “CapAlert” clown crouching in the back of movie theaters obsessing over “the foulest of foul words” and “female body parts ghosting through clothing”. I gather this site is intended ironically, also. But even so, it functions as a kind of childish dirty joke - that is, that there could be such a rating system, and that it could function on a mere count of perfectly ordinary words like “sex”, “abortion”, “breast”, or “death”, and not be nonsensical or unrecognizable as a rating system, is a measure of how immature we still are as a society. We have allowed self-appointed evangelical Beavises & Buttheads to censor our airwaves, Super Bowl Halftime Shows, and now blogs (”It says ‘breast’, huhuhuh!” “NC-17!!!1!”). Mature people don’t let themselves to have their tastes dictated or censored by immature children.

From any reasonable perspective, rating Web sites on how often they use the words “sex” or “gay” makes as much sense as rating them on how often they use bold-face fonts, or adverbs - the idea that ordinary elements of language could be dangerous in themselves is comprehensible only in a world in which the crazies who have made certain elements of language objectionable are taken seriously. That world is long past its freshness date.

Hat Tip:: Echidne of the Snakes, and several others.

June 1, 2007

Abortion: History and Attitudes over Time

Making with the sorely overdue link-love: two months ago, Amanda Marcotte (of Pandagon, and the best thing that ever happened to John Edwards) linked my prior post on right-wing propaganda about Margaret Sanger (as a way of attacking Planned Parenthood). She points out the fact that, in Sanger’s day, PP was actually anti-abortion (largely for reasons of the relative safety of the procedure, much lower then than now), and that the wingers seem to have no conception of the irony of their slanders.

The article generated a fascinating discussion thread, however (with minimal, but nonzero, trollage) - one that I only stumbled across today by following a visitor link (thanks!). I’m sorry to be so late on this but I encourage everyone to run over there; the discussion is interesting and, collectively, it includes a fascinating list of resources on the history of abortion, abortion and race, and sexual autonomy as seen from a variety of times and places, and presented in a variety of media (the rock-opera version of a 19th-century German play about the link between lack of sex ed and unplanned pregnancy sounds . . . wild - and I had no idea there was a whole list of early silent movies on the same topic!). Now I’ve got a lot more reading to do! So do you.

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