Why Do Liberals Hate Pussy?
Commenter Pope Jimbo points us to a censorship* controversy at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Director** of social media Kurt Greenbaum recently ran a Friday thumbsucker asking commenters to name the "strangest things" they had ever eaten. Greenbaum's narrative:
Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted in reply a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman's anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.
A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again.
Through the power of advanced internet technologies, Greenbaum discovered the commenter's IP address and sent it to the commenter's employer, a local school. Greenbaum again: "Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, [the school's IT person] tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot."
The most serious charge lodged in the Post-Dispatch's comment thread is HalJordan's claim that Greenbaum violated the paper's own privacy policy. I don't think that's supported by the text of the policy. The PD specifies that personally identifiable information will not be "shared with [the paper's business] partners," but the paper makes no promises and provides itself essentially unlimited exceptions with regard to sharing such information with outsiders:
We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in "Compliance with Legal Process" below…
Compliance with Legal Process
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.
(My emphasis)
But as many commenters point out, Greenbaum's self-congratulations reveal the real bias in our testiculacentric media. While the female anatomy remains under lock and key, any male sack is good enough to dangle in the faces of people who oppose socialized medicine. Says dr-debunk:
–Nice speech coming from someone who has used "tea-bagger" in anger and despair talking about those you disagree with…
–You, other liberals, and "elite" media members and even Bill Clinton have used and continue to SERIOUSLY use the much more vulgar word. One which could be called "hate-speech", since it is used in a derogatory manner trying to demean conservatives.
Asks the always prepared Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum:
Kurt, can you explain why some vulgarities are removed and others are not? How is it that you and other editors/moderators permit the vulgar expression "Teabagging" to be posted endlessly? If you dont want to post the answer would you send it to me at nomoonbats-svppb@yahoo.com?
Fun Gus adds:
Dr. De-bunk has made an excellent point Kurt. YOU at the PD have chuckled as you use (and print) the word "tea-baggers" to describe conservative activists voicing their opinions. You and all your sophomoric liberal chums at the PD know exactly what that word means yet you still print it. Why don't you explain to some of your older readers (that maybe aren't as hip as the majority of your dwindling readers) in graphic detail exactly what a tea-bagger is.
And many others along those lines.
I'd just like to point out to Greenbaum that clitoral stimulation is still considered so novel and shocking that there are UN-member nations where it is officially illegal for a woman's sex partner to go downstairs. Anti-bilingualism is bad enough; we don't need anti-cunnilingualism on top of that. And in this era of extreme dining, you can't even be sure this person wasn't talking about a meal at an unlicensed Chinese restaurant.
So quit your showboating, you big dick.
Long before Eve Ensler organized the first V Day event; before America's favorite woman columnist predicted that we would soon be "awash in vaginaism" and become "vaginas on the plain seeking out other vaginas" (Where do I sign up?); while the Decade of the Penis was still fully engorged; Nick Gillespie proved by Napierian logarithm how the hole in 21st Century culture would be filled:
If the Year of the Woman helped beget the Decade of the Penis, then it's an even-money bet that the Decade of the Penis may well usher in a Century of Vagina. And sure, while there have always been occasional Muffys from Family Affair available for public consumption and there were four years of an actual Bush administration, the next 100 years may well show more pussy than the average issue of Cat Fancy.
* Censorship is used here in a generic sense and does not imply the use of force by a government.
** "Director of Anything" at print publication = Useless Charity Employee.
Update: It's 1998 all over again. The site kurtgreenbaumisapussy.com reveals that Greenbaum is getting hit by a Web 1.0-worthy flame attack.
