Ladies, Your Clitoris Is Not Safe

Posted onAuthorMs. Naughty1 Comment

This is not my topic but I thought I’d blog about it because it’s caused a stir.

Tony Comstock’s distressed crusade against the insanity of Google’s “safe” filters continues. He’s found that, with SafeSearch turned on, Google delivers NO results for the word “clitoris” but 33 million results for the word “penis”.

The sexism and stupidity of this speaks for itself, so I won’t write too much as other people have already done it for me:

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Here’s Tony’s post: Dragged into Google’s sex ghetto….

Here’s Susie Bright: Clitoris on Google’s banned word list.

And here’s Trixie’s passionate response to both Susie and the whole issue of censorship: Can’t find my clit on Google.

Trixie’s post resonated with me, especially given the fact I recently had a heated comment discussion with someone advocating censorship because porn was an evil, capitalist, heterosexist, misogynist, right wing, Patriarchy-with-a-capital-P exploitative abomination. I liked Trixie’s defense of the idea that our celebration of women’s right to pleasure should also extend to men, that feminism should stop being so paranoid about the idea that “every boner sprung is a rape waiting to happen.”

And I also liked her point that there’s an unspoken dividing line happening in these discussions about censorship – that “porn” belongs in the Google ghetto but “artistic” representations of sex or erotica don’t. Considering I’m usually lumped in with the evil capitalist pornographers I’m less than impressed with this way of thinking. One in, all in.

I guess that’s the thing with censorship. Who gets to decide what’s “erotica” and what’s “porn”? Who gets to decide that a penis is safe but a clitoris is dangerous?

Safe Search is essentially supposed to be “for the children.” Most people agree that the majority of porn is inappropriate for kids and that it deals with adult concepts that kids aren’t ready for. Thus the option within Google that filters it out. The problem emerges when people start to think that children must be protected from sexuality at all costs – even if they’re exposed to violence or hate without a moment’s thought. And then weird standards and executive decisions about what is “safe” start to make it illogical and twisted and suddenly little girls are learning that “vagina” and “penis” is a safe word but “clitoris” isn’t.

When you hand over your parenting responsibilities to Google, or the church, or the schools, or the government, there’s always gonna be a problem.

You know, it would really help if people stopped trying to bring the internet down to “kid level”. Some have suggested creating a secondary “children’s network” (e.g. the domain .kid) where everything is child-friendly and pre-vetted. And then the rest of us can get on with being grown ups. It’s not such a bad idea.

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One Reply to “Ladies, Your Clitoris Is Not Safe”

  1. Susie’s comment about “commercial pornographers” is unfortunate. She’s one of them left coast lefty types that doesn’t always see the emmence pro-social role that commerce plays in our society, and using it as a foil muddies the message: No matter how you feel about cordoning off certain words/ideas whatever, it’s almost by necessity going to be done in a ham-handed way that’s going to catch a lot of people you didn’t mean to catch. Bacchus is lucid on this point:

    Is there any hope that the sex bloggers of America can shame Google into being less shame-faced about the sexual contents of its search index? Given the massively overwhelming numerical superiority of the prudish majority to whom Google is catering with searches “safe” from female sexuality, probably not. But it’s important to remember that the actual people at Google are unlikely to be all that prudish or sexist; they are just, as Tony has pointed out so well, taking the lazy way out when attempting to do something (catering to sexist prudes) that they’d probably rather not be doing anyway, but for their perception (or perhaps assumption?) that it’s a corporate necessity.

    Thus, I see at least a faint hope that if the mockery of their weak and lame filtering shortcuts is loud enough, they’ll have to improve their filtering systems out of a mix of professional pride and a sense of public relations necessity. If we can just disrupt their comfortable assumption that all sexual discussion is acceptable collateral damage, to be readily sacrificed in their (very difficult and endless) war against spammy porn sites, that alone would be a worthwhile step in the right direction.

    That Google sees even clitoris as “acceptable collateral damage” probably says more about the sea in which Google swims (not just the ‘net, but the culture at large) than it does about about the sort of fish that Google is.

    (Me? I’m not a fish at all. I’m a pterodactyl!)

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