Offensive and tasteless
Apparently, this website - yes, this one - is listed as 'offensive and tasteless' by a net nanny.
I don't know what to think. Except, perhaps, that I understand the 'offensive' bit. I don't mind being called offensive. I like to think I offend a lot of people. I don't go out of my way to offend a lot of people; and often I get upset if I think I have offended people who needn't be offended. On the other hand, though, offending people isn't the worst thing in the world to do. Some people deserve to be offended. Others, I don't care whether I offend them or not.
But 'tasteless'...? Well I'm not so sure where that comes from. Sure, every now and then there may be times when I wonder aloud whether people should be sandpapered to death, or made to drown in human faeces, or whatever. Is that so wrong? Maybe it is. Maybe I should just write about bunnies and unicorns and nice things, and then everything would be OK.
Apparently, though, this isn't an isolated incident. Quite a few people have been telling me that the swearing sets buzzers off all over the place, not just in prudish circles but in perfectly ordinary companies where they'd rather their employees didn't see *clutches pearls* rude words like bum, or winkle.
Sigh. Is this really where we are, in the 21st century, where you can't read what you want to read because your employers think that you might fall off your chair and start foaming at the mouth if you see something slightly sweary? Must I start using asterisks all over the place, or euphemisms? Must I call Richard Littlejohn a tuppence? Should I use less earthy intensifiers to ascribe emotional outburstiness to the things I write?
Every now and then this kind of thing happens, and I wonder: should I try and modify what turns up here in order to make it more accessible? Is it better to try and censor myself a bit, and blunt things off a little bit? It wouldn't really make this a lot less fun, just a little - and more people could see this site than can do at the moment.
But then I think: no, fuck it. The whole point about this kind of writing is that there are no boundaries, there are no censors, there is no editor, except yourself and what you decide. And if I write the nonsense that comes out of my head, well it might be nonsense, but it's my nonsense. I'm sorry if people can't see the website because their employers' net nannies are too sensitive; but there are always workarounds if you know where to go, and since the mobile version of the site doesn't have the post tags on the front page (including those scary and rude words which will corrupt you) it seems less offensive (and possibly less tastless, if less of a lessness thing is at all possible). It's not even as if I swear all the time, because I don't. All right, I do, quite a lot, but that's me. But there are worse things out there on the internet, less tasteful things, and less fun things too.
In short, then, I'm not going to change anything. Balls to that. Double balls and bollocks.
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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April 20th, 2010 - 15:28
If people can’t sort out an RSS feed to Google Reader, thereby circumventing all of this hoo-ha, that’s their own fault, surely?
April 20th, 2010 - 15:30
Tell ‘em to read the RSS feed instead. I always do this with all blogs — it means you don’t have to read the comments. Bonus.
April 20th, 2010 - 15:31
fuck the lot of em. (sounds like a UKIP Slogan)
April 20th, 2010 - 15:34
Cuntingly correct, my good vowl.
April 20th, 2010 - 15:37
The link to B3ta probably helps set off net nanny alarm bells as well… Which I am all in favour of by the way.
April 20th, 2010 - 15:38
It’s not about accessibility, hits, clicks and all that shit. I started writing my blog to entertain myself.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about how many views I get, but if that means tagging mindless fuck wit celebs, jumping on trends and tapering my content for everyone then what’s the point.
Write about nothingness and call people cunts. I’d rather that than 200 comments like “great post!”.
Stir things up a bit. Enjoy yourself. It’s only a fucking laugh.
April 20th, 2010 - 16:38
Certainly agree with you.
Unless, of course, you mean that
No-one should feel offended?
Tosh, you would not otherwise
Feel as though you maybe would
Like to take the sword to the
Anodyne and most truly
Pointless bloggers, journalists
Said alleged ‘Nannies’ et al.
Tell whichever NetNanny it is that there’s more than one way to make a point. Preferably in an acrostic.
April 20th, 2010 - 17:12
Like you said, it’s your blog, you can write whatever you fucking well like.
As for the net nannies – what a bunch of tedious, prudish, sanctimonious, tremulous, knock-kneed, dry-vaginaed, droopingly-endowed, joyless, arid-titted, buttock-clenching cunts.
April 20th, 2010 - 18:00
Fuck ‘em.
April 20th, 2010 - 19:09
Tell them to suck your furry monkey dick. Surely the Daily Mail website should be considered far more offensive, as it is a bastion of ignorance, racism and anti-intellectualism? Yet why don’t workplaces care when people visit that steaming pile of dogshit?
April 20th, 2010 - 23:53
Damnable net nannies. At a company I worked for (here in the US), they put the net nanny kibosh on web pages that debunked false Republican talking points. You could get to the right-wing blogs with all sorts of lies about Secret Muslim Non-US-Citizen Obama, but you could not get to websites that debunked these claims. Interesting, that.
April 21st, 2010 - 06:24
It’s so subjective, this net-nannying. Some of the ‘guardians of internet morality’ use perfectly acceptable standards, whilst one or two others seem to use rules drawn up by Southern-USA Baptists. What we need is a net-nanny to oversee the standards of net-nannies so that……
April 21st, 2010 - 09:09
Good for you! Screw the nannies, it’s absurd to think that grown-ups in workplaces should be protected from swears. As many comments have pointed out above, it’s easy enough to bypass such censorship and read the blog via RSS. And please don’t tone down the language. I’ve written at great length elsewhere about my thoughts on swearing – Basically, a well-placed Fuck can make a point brilliantly. The only thing I object to is idiots who swear constantly, using ‘fucking’ as a replacement for ‘erm’ as their brain slowly gets up to speed. Those bastards water down the power of the word for the rest of us.
As for ‘tasteless’? God only knows what they mean by that. Some people are always looking out to be offended, I suppose. I presented a radio show last night which we decided to make a ‘Volcano Special’ – A few volcano facts, a volcano quiz, pretty much a junior-school project with records in between. And yet we got two complaints from people claiming it was ‘in bad taste’ because “People are still stuck out there”! FFS. Never mind that the chances of the show being heard by someone in a Madrid airport were minimal; Two tossers still took offence on their behalf. Amazing…
April 21st, 2010 - 10:53
Fuck those motherfucking fuckers. Or, to quote Professor Donald Trefusis, fuck those motherfucking fuckers “whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.”
What they are trying to censor, after all, is not just language, but thought.