If this were an Italian language website, banning the word “tits” would result in banning a discussion of at least a dozen – if not more – classic Italian dishes, some of the actually made with the teats of animals, or others that use the word descriptively to describe a pastry, the most notorious being a mound of meringue topped with a candied cherry called “nun’s tits”. These pastries are on publicly on display at child’s-eye level in pastry cases, tagged as such.
My own view is that any English-language international food website that disallows an expression like ripped to the tits is a less educational space for me. I regularly follow the comments on the Guardian UK website, and as an American it’s been a great expansion of my off-colour vocabulary. (Which by the way, when I was a American media worker, already had grown to tremendous proportions and got plenty of daily exercise, all day long, in every office meeting and editorial conference I attended – True of both men and women.)
But I also follow an international movie discussion forum, and the site uses some kind of automatic bleeper that instantly renders all of George Carlin’s 7 Dirty Words (was tits one of them?) to beep, and it does the same to racial/religious slurs. People will get around the automatic censor with inventions like “fooking”, and people who persistently post racial/religious slurs get complained about and booted, but what is good about the system – if you feel you must censor – is that it doesn’t inhibit people from writing what they really think on the fly. What other people will see is “Man, when she walked into that room, I dropped my entire beep box of popcorn” so you don’t lose the flavour of somebody’s style.
Don’t know if others saw the news report not long ago that talked about how most people writing on the internet, even privately, now feel obliged to pre-censor themselves and not use words like “bomb” or “terror” or even “god willing” because of the NSA. So creating any space where people feel like they can say what they think to each other across borders strikes me as an adult responsibility!
I don’t know if the Guardian considers its online website a family website for 13+. Does Slate? Is there a way to offer yourself up for V-chip inclusion or whatever it is parents do to computers to make sure their youngest are not traumatised by reading a word like tits while researching items of educational interest?
If I had a kid whom I discovered was spending their free time hanging out on a website like Hungry Onion, I’d be thrilled and relieved – even if I occasionally saw somebody post one or all seven of George Carlin’s Dirty Words (but I think no matter who or how many complain you cannot ban balls no matter how people use it, however they use it – but then again to me, balls are just balls and tits are just tits. Parts of mammals.