Internet Censors and Real Speech

The cover art from Sharon Van Etten’s
Remind Me Tomorrow

I had no idea, until this week, that Sharon Van Etten’s folk-pop electronic album Remind Me Tomorrow might be off-color. Specifically, the cover art. I’ve linked to my review of the album several times on several platforms without incident. But this week, I had a link yanked from Instagram by the parent company, Meta, on the grounds of “child nudity.”

As you can see, the cover image is a childhood snapshot of Van Etten and her brother. That’s Van Etten half-folded into a laundry basket, partially unclothed. Small children often hate clothes, and have to be conditioned to wear them in time to start school. Because of this, most people recognize a categorical difference between innocent small-kid nakedness, and smut. I suspect any impartial judge would consider this the former.

This isn’t my first collision between Meta and nudity. I’ve repeatedly needed to appeal them blocking links because my essays included Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, a panel from the Sistene Chapel ceiling. It depicts Adam, not yet alive, lolling naked in Eden, including his visible genitals. Nearly every blog essay I’ve written that included this image, I’ve had to appeal against lewdness regulations.

Any reasonable person would agree that social media needs basic standards of appropriate behavior. Without a clear, defined threshold, one or a few bad-faith actors could deluge the algorithm with garbage and destroy the common space. Consider the decline of public spaces like Times Square in the 1970s: if nobody defends common spaces, they become dumping grounds for the collective id.

But those standards are necessarily arbitrary. What constitutes offensive behavior? We get different answers if we ask people of different ages, regions, and backgrounds. My grandmother and I have different expectations; likewise, Inglewood, California, and Doddsville, Mississippi, have wildly divergent community standards. But because Facetube and InstaTwit don’t have geographic boundaries, they flatten distinctions of place, race, age, and economic standing.

TikTok perhaps embodies this best. Cutsie-poo euphemisms like “unalived,” “pew-pew,” and “grape” gained currency on TikTok, and have made it vitally difficult to discuss tender topics. YouTube restricts and demonetizes videos for even mentioning crime, death, and the Holocaust. Words like “fascism” and “murder” are the kiss of death. In an American society filthy with violence, the requirement to speak with baby talk circumspection means that we can’t communicate.

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, from the Sistene Chapel ceiling

Watching the contortions content creators have to perform whenever called upon to address the latest school shooting or overseas drone strike, would be hilarious, if it weren't heartbreaking. Americans have to contend with legislative inertia, lobbyist cash, and morally absolute thinking when these catastrophes occur. But then the media behemoths that carry the message have the ability, reminiscent of William Randolph Hearst, to kill stories by burying them.

I’m not the first to complain about this. I’ve read other critics who recommend just ignoring the restrictions, and writing forthrightly. Which sounds great, in theory. If censorious corporations punish writers for mentioning death and crime too directly, the response is to refuse to comply. Like any mass labor action, large numbers and persistence should amend the injustice.

In theory.

Practically speaking, media can throttle the message. In the heyday of labor struggles, the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain, unions could circumvent media bottlenecks by printing their own newspapers and writing their own folk songs. But most internet content creators lack the necessary skills to program their own social media platforms. Even if they could, they certainly can't afford valuable server space.

Thus, a few companies have immediate power to choke even slightly controversial messages, power that creators cannot resist. Which elicits the next question: if journalists, commentators, and bloggers cover a story, but Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk stifle the distribution, has the coverage actually happened? Who knows what crises currently fester unresolved because we can’t talk about them?

This isn’t a call to permit everything. Zuckerberg and Musk can’t permit smut on their platforms, or even link to it, because it coarsens and undercuts their business model. But current standards are so censoriously narrow that they kill important stories on the vine. If we can’t describe controversial issues using dictionary terms, our media renders us virtually mute.

Given how platforms screen even slightly dangerous topics and strangle stories in their beds, I’m curious whether anyone will even see this essay. I know I lack enough reach to start a movement. But if we can start speaking straightforwardly, without relying on juvenile euphemisms, that represents a step forward from where we stand right now.

Andrew Tate, Master Poet

Back in the eldritch aeons of 1989, art photographer Andres Serrano gained notoriety for his picture “Piss Christ.” The image involved a crucifix with Jesus, shown through the glimmering distortion of an amber liquid, putative Serrano’s own urine. The controversy came primarily through Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), who aspired to become America’s national guilty conscience. This outrage was especially specious because Helms only noticed the photo after it had been on display for two years.

I remembered Serrano’s most infamous work this week when “masculinity influencer” Andrew Tate posted the above comment on X, the everything app, this week. Tate is a lightning rod for controversy, and seems to revel in making critics loose their composure. Sienkiewicz and Marx would define Tate as a “troll,” a performance artist whose schtick involves provoking rational people to lose their cool and become angry. To the troll, the resulting meltdown counts as art.

Andres Serrano remains tight-lipped about his politics, and repeatedly assures tells that he has no manifesto. Following the “Piss Christ” controversy, he called himself a Christian, but this sounds about as plausible as Salman Rushdie calling himself Muslim after the Satanic Verses fatwa: that is, a flimsy rhetorical shield that convinces nobody and makes the artist look uncommitted. I think something else happened here, something Serrano didn’t want to explain; the image itself doesn't matter.

Specifically, I think Serrano created a cypher of art. Unlike, say, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” Serrano’s picture doesn’t actually say anything. Instead, it stacks our loaded assumptions of religious imagery and bodily waste, and asks us what we see here. The image itself is purely ceremonial. Serrano cares more about why seeing the Christian image through urine is worse than seeing it through more spiritually anodyne fluids, like water or wine. Our answer is the art.

Critics like Helms, or let’s say “critics,” see art in representational terms. Art, to them, depicts something in the “real world.” This might mean a literal object, such as a fruit bowl in a still life, or an event or narrative, like the gospel story in “The Last Supper.” The representational mind seeks an artwork’s external, literal reference. This makes “Piss Christ” dangerous, because dousing the sacred image in something ritually unclean is necessarily blasphemous.

Progressive critics abandon such one-to-one representations. In viewing more contemporary art, from Serrano’s photos to Jackson Pollock’s frenetic, shapeless splatters, they don't ask themselves what object they ought to see. They ask themselves how the art changes the viewer. In the Renaissance, audiences assumed that art created a durable image of the transient, inconstant world. But artists today seek to amplify and hasten change. We viewers, not the world, are the purpose of contemporary art.

Ironically, as progressive critics tolerate more receptive non-representational standards in visual art, their expectations of language have become more exacting and literal. From religion to poetry to President Taco's id-driven rambles, they take words to mean only what they mean at surface level. Every online critic who considers it their job to identify “plot holes” in Disney’s Cars, or insist the Bible is disproven because we can’t find the Tower of Babel, makes this mistake.

At the surface level, Andrew Tate’s macho posturing seems like the opposite of art. His insistence on appearing constantly strong leaves no room for contemplative ruminating over language’s beauty or nuance. He doesn’t signpost his metaphors like Emily Dickinson, so it’s easy to assume he has no metaphors. Yet the weird prose poem above, with its apparent insistence that it’s now “gay” to be straight, defies literal scientific reading. By that standard, it’s pure poetry.

Tate seemingly contends that, in a world without obsolete gender and sexual designations, while nothing better takes their place, words become meaningless. If men feel sexually homeless nowadays, Tate lets us relax our burdens and shed our doubts. If words mean nothing, then words can’t control us. If it’s gay to be straight, then we can expunge archaic goals like love and stability. Yield to language’s poetic flow, let it transform you and be transformed by you.

This doesn't forgive Tate’s crass misogyny and weirdly self-destructive homoeroticism. He still treats women as ornaments and men as something to both desire and despise. As with any poet, it’s valid to say when something doesn’t land. (This one landed so badly that Tate eventually deleted it; only screenshots remain.) But we must critique it in its genre. Andrew Tate is a poet, not a journalist, and his words change us like art.

Party Politics and the Art of Forgiveness

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

This weekend, Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the Democrats “a big tent…. that’s got room for Marjorie Taylor Greene.” This statement deserved the immediate blowback, as Greene’s history of race-baiting, antisemitism, and harassing school shooting survivors doesn’t just go away. But it exemplifies two problems with American politics. First, that our parties have been reduced to the Trump and anti-Trump parties, without underlying principles. Second, we keep steadily eroding the relationship between forgiveness and repentance.

Raskin’s invitation is only the latest Democratic effort to dilute their brand. The Democrats continue providing a nurturing cocoon to aggressive nationalists like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, simply because they personally refuse President Taco. Former Representative Joe Walsh, who holds truly noxious views, has become a resistance leader. Yet the party leadership, including Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, still haven’t endorsed Zohran Mamdani, even after he won the party primary and the majority vote.

Throughout the last decade, we’ve watched America’s mainstream parties reorganize themselves around one man. Republicans, who had legitimate policies in the 1990s when I was one of them, have become the party that endorses whatever dribbles out of President Taco’s mouth. Those who disagree, the party deems “traitors.” Meanwhile, Democrats, once the party of Civil Rights and the New Deal, have jettisoned all principles to pursue whatever and whoever opposes this President. This isn’t sustainable.

To accomplish their agenda, Democrats have ushered their onetime opponents up the leadership ladder. Although professional pundits claimed Kamala Harris lost last year’s election behind issues like queer, trans, and racial rights, Harris actively avoided those issues. Instead, she spent the campaign’s final weeks touring as a double-act with Liz Cheney, whom observers have described as “arch-conservative.” Democrats have pivoted away from their base, including labor, minorities, and queer voters, to chase the ever-shifting center.

Democrats have made conservatives like Cheney, Walsh, and now Greene their preferred leaders, despite their voting base’s opposition. This rush to promote former enemies makes sense if, like I suspect many Democrats did, you read Clausewitz in high school, without prior context. Many military strategists contend that former enemies make the best allies. Which is probably true, if your only interest is winning. But because the Democratic base has certain principles, winning alone isn’t enough.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

“Forgiveness” has become the defining stain of contemporary American life. News reeks with commentators who demand forgiveness, not as a culmination of a penitent journey, but as a precondition. From ordinary criminals who want forgiveness without facing consequences, to widespread abuse in religious congregations, to loyalists eager to excuse treason, we’ve witnessed a reversal of the forgiveness process. It’s become something powerful people demand from their perches, not something the wronged offer from God-given mercy.

I can’t unpack the full underpinnings of forgiveness in 750 words. In brief, “forgiveness” is half of the continuum, one face of a coin. The other half is “repentance,” the process of taking account and changing one’s life. This isn’t merely verbal contrition, as I learned in White Protestant Sunday school. Repentance, or metanoia in Greek, means literally walking a new path. We know somebody’s repented, not by their words, but by their changed life.

Cheney, Walsh, and especially Greene have shown no inclination toward changed lives. Though Greene has verbally apologized for past violent rhetoric, observant critics claim her manner hasn’t shown signs of authenticity. More important, this change in Greene’s loyalties has happened too suddenly to reflect in her actions. Perhaps Greene has literally reversed herself, and she’ll demonstrate a more cooperative, nonviolent, and restrained manner. But it’s too soon to know whether her words match her actions.

Please don’t misunderstand me: verbal apologies matter. Humans are language-driven creatures, and speaking with one another is a necessary part of bond-building. But who among us hasn’t known somebody who says they’re sorry, while showing no acts of repentance? This may be innocent—small children think “I’m sorry” is a blanket ticket to forgiveness—or malicious—abusive spouses love voicing their regrets. But only when words and actions come together do they make a difference.

Part of repentance includes asking whether one will handle power better in the future. Current or former elected officials, including Greene, Walsh, and Cheney, want the Democratic Party to offer them unconditional leadership, like they had before. But from my vantage point, they’ve shown no signs that they’ll use that leadership to uplift the downtrodden, heal the hurting, or support large-D Democratic principles. They haven’t shown a new life, so they haven’t yet earned forgiveness.

In Search of Lost Adulthood

How do we define an adult? This question has surged in the last week, as Megyn Kelly defined fifteen-year-old girls as “barely legal” adults, mere days after online rumor-mongers redefined twenty-eight-year-old Rama Duwaji as a child. We saw this happen five years ago, when columnist Joseph Epstein called First Lady Dr. Jill Biden “kiddo,” just days after Donald Trump called his son Don Jr. “a good kid.” They were seventy and thirty-nine years old, respectively.

This problem recurs in America. Last month, J.D. Vance dismissed vile, racist comments from leading “Young Republicans,” ranging from their middle twenties to early forties, as “kids do stupid things.” But a decade ago, Connecticut schoolteacher David Olio lost his job for letting students read a sexually explicit poem in A.P. English, nominally a college-level course, because his students were “kids” and needed protection from adult sexual expression. Childhood excuses vast repressions in its defense.

Our society keeps moving the boundaries of adulthood further out. America has the world’s oldest legal drinking age, preventing youth from learning how to handle alcohol responsibly until they’re most of the way through college. An increasing number of upwardly mobile jobs require graduate degrees, keeping young adults from commencing their careers until they’re around thirty. The average first home purchase now happens around forty, keeping adults from building equity or developing rudimentary financial independence.

Every few years, Congress suggests adjusting the national retirement age. This probably makes sense to legislators, who are mostly lawyers and financiers, and can work as long as their brains remain active. But manual trades, like construction or manufacturing, erode your joints and tendons, so laborers get old faster than office workers. But for our purposes, keeping laborers working will prevent managers from retiring, keeping rank-and-file workers trapped in entry level positions for literal decades.

Perhaps worst of all, Western society overall no longer has clear adulthood rites. The rituals we Americans witness in travelogues like Roots are inspiring, and of course the mitzvah rituals of Judaism, and similar minority religions, still exist. But in the mainstream, ceremonies like baptism or marriage, or benchmarks like high school graduation, carry little weight anymore. With neither ritual nor financial independence, we no longer have any standards to objectively call someone an adult.

Because of these convergent forces, we see people performing the rituals of childhood well into physical maturity. Sometimes this influence is mainly turned inward. Incels and “masculinity influencers” like Andrew Tate perform peacocking displays of manhood that look like middle-grade boys flexing on the schoolyard. But we’re seeing more outward-facing, harmful displays, too: men like Bill Clinton and President Taco collecting sexual conquests like overgrown fraternity boys, leaving trails of scarred women in their wake.

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes that, in market-driven societies, men achieve adulthood by collecting the most toys. But as it now takes longer for youth to achieve financial independence, hoarding toys becomes prohibitively expensive. Therefore men adjust adulthood rituals to strength, dominion, and conquest. Who do they dominate and conquer? Women. Thus, as Badiou writes, men remain boys well into physical adulthood, while girls, to survive, become women at absurdly early ages. Just ask Megyn Kelly.

America’s shared definition of adulthood has become mushy and subjective because, in a society organized to protect capital, we turn humans into capital. Adulthood becomes contingent on economic productivity, freedom from parental support, and resources enough to have and raise children. Standards that many citizens don’t achieve until they’re approaching forty. To be enforceable, we need a standard age of majority: sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty-one. But for all practical purposes, these numbers mean nothing.

We’re witnessing a rare moment of bipartisan moral outrage over the continued lack of accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s clients. And we should; very little encourages universal outrage as surely as child exploitation. But economic instability and job loss cause trauma as real as SA, if less visibly offensive. We’ve created a society where nearly everybody, in one way or another, is nursing the psychological scars of long-term trauma, and the people responsible suffer no consequences.

Within my lifetime, America has become a society comprised of traumatized children, trapped in cycles of learned helplessness, desperate for adult guidance. We only disagree about who, exactly, we consider a responsible adult. Does our society need a macho disciplinarian, a nurturing teacher, or some third option? Until we find a useful shared definition of adulthood, we’re all, in different ways, trapped at the level of dependent children, desperate for our lives to finally start.

Megyn Kelly, “Kidult” Culture, and Me

When I was fifteen years old, I fell deeply in love with my geometry teacher. Let’s call her “Ms. Shimizu.” In my recollection, she was tall, thirtyish, and resplendent with confidence and grace. I would’ve gladly let her teach me the rudiments of grown-up romance. Ms. Shimizu possessed wisdom enough to strategically ignore my fumbling teenage flirtation. But she spoke to me like an adult, teaching me the respect I should expect to give and receive as an adult.

I remembered Ms. Shimizu this week, when former Fox News ingenue Megyn Kelly delivered her cack-handed and obnoxious defense of grown men chasing teenage girls. Kelly’s claim of a categorical difference between prepubescent children, and adolescent teens, provides just enough rhetorical coverage to justify those who already believe that. But it does nothing to address the question of whether teenagers can provide informed consent to adult sex.

My teenage infatuation with Ms. Shimizu taught me two tentpole principles of my philosophy of consent. First, yes, adolescents are sexual beings, and censorious adult efforts to squelch teen sexuality have maladaptive consequences later in adulthood. But second, adolescents don’t have sex for the same reasons adults do. Teenagers have sex for the reason grade-schoolers run and jump and scream constantly: they’re learning to control their rapidly changing bodies.

This carries an important corollary: I can only imagine three reasons adults would pursue sexual relationships with teenagers. Either they’ve forgotten the different reasons adults and teens have sex; or they’re enacting their own arrested adolescent psychosexual development; or they’re simply bad people. Each of these reasons carries its own appropriate response: education, treatment, or punishment. But fabricating excuses, as Kelly did, only makes other adults complicit.

Mass media in the last twenty-five years exacerbates this tendency. (Maybe longer, but that’s when I noticed it.) Prime-time dramas like The O.C., Gossip Girl, or Pretty Little Liars feature sexually precocious “kidults” who often pursue relationships with surrounding adults, including teachers. I still cringe at Veronica Mars, whose teenage protagonist dated an adult cop. Though targeted at teenaged and twenty-something audiences, these shows have significant adult viewership.

These are mass media caricatures, sure, but as our economy allows adults fewer opportunities to make friends their own age, it’s easy to forget the distinction. Age-inappropriate relationships reflect a common adolescent desire: many of us thought ourselves unfairly circumscribed by social standards. And many of us wanted an adult mentor to teach us the ways of adulthood, skipping the fumbling experimentation we needed to understand ourselves.

If the phrase “DNA evidence” took human form, it might look like these guys

Furthermore, these shows distort adult perceptions of what teenagers even are. Labor laws and the vicissitudes of puberty make real teenagers difficult to work with, so most mass media teenagers are played by actors in their twenties. Except for parents or working teachers, most adults have limited opportunities to even see teenagers regularly, and as we drift further from our own teens—when we considered ourselves very mature—we think TV teens are realistic.

Our society produces two equally deleterious responses to adolescent sexuality. Conservative parents advocate for “purity culture” and abstinence-only sex education. These movements keep teenagers swaddled in childhood innocence for years, then dump them on adulthood’s doorstep catastrophically unprepared. More progressive parents take a permissive hand, if not outright encouraging adolescent sexuality, at least providing insufficient adult guidance for making good choices.

Then there’s the third option. Jeffrey Epstein is perhaps an extreme example of adult exploitation, an attempt to commodify teenagers’ sexual inexperience. But almost every teenage girl, and no small fraction of teenage boys, has the experience of being propositioned by adults who see adolescents’ bodies as something to consume. When youths are mature enough to have sex, but not experienced enough to understand sex, they exist in a precarious balance.

Bill Clinton and President Taco may be extreme examples, insulated from consequences for years by power and money. But even before the Epstein revelations, both men were famed for their voracious sexual appetites, both seeing women not as fully developed humans, but as vessels for male gratification. Both men, born to absentee fathers, pursued wealth, power, and the attendant sexual attention, as shields to protect the festering wounds in their souls.

All this is to say, I understand Megyn Kelly’s intent; but she’s still wrong. It’s possible to acknowledge teenagers as sexual beings, and respect their arc of self-discovery, without throwing them to the ravening appetites of dangerous or damaged adults. If we don’t provide the guidance and defense they need, then we’ve failed an entire generation.

On a related topic: Are Age Gaps the New Scarlet Letter?