Censorship On TV Is Kind of Ridiculous

There's a lot of hypocrisy in the world, from politics to business to just your average person on the street. And, as Laci Green points out in "You Can't Say What on TV?" hypocrisy extends to television standards for what counts as OK to say on air. Except in this particular case, hypocrisy is mixed with some good old fashioned sexist double standards. Because this is television, after all.

As Green points out, television stations (and the FCC) have a lot of rules against using words referring to female genitalia, with not a lot of corresponding rules against talking about male genitals. Which is not only unfair, but reflects a general, unspoken cultural attitude that there is something inherently vulgar or "improper" about both female bodies and female sexuality. And since vaginas fall squarely in the intersection of those two things, talking about them on TV tends to be pretty censored.

Fortunately, we have Laci Green — someone known for making good feminist points and making good points about feminism — to break down some of the madness for us, because this stuff has been going on for a long time, and doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

(Though thankfully this isn't the 1950s. Seriously, that sounds like a weird time.)