adventures. escapades. paroxysms. etc.

Censorship of sexuality, especially while simultaneously violence, particularly sexual violence, is left uncensored, and the harmful implication this juxtaposition has on our collective sexual wellness, is something I’ve written a lot about, like here and here. Hell, I’ve even written a book about it.

So when I found out there is a new “kid safe” search engine called Kiddle designed to block adult search returns for children, I feared it had sex-is-bad-and-violence-is-normal disaster written all over it. When I learned the results are handpicked by humans and not a computer broadly banning based on keywords, I was extra curious to see if I was still right. I was.

I typed in a bunch of different searches that a child might reasonably want or *need* to anonymously ask the Internet. Well, I’ll let you see the results for yourself:

“My girlfriend hits me” is also a bad word.

Inquiries about vaginal discharge are, you guessed it, also bad words.

Related bad words: menstrual care, menstrual pads, menstruation, and uterus.

When avoiding a gay dating website in the search results is considered a higher priority of “safety” for children than their homelessness, and you recommend confronting their abusive parents, we have a tish bit of a problem.

If I was 12, typed this into a search engine, and instead of results got a “bad word” finger wagging, I would take the answer to the “is it ok to be bisexual” question as a big fat NO it’s not OK :( 

But the human censors apparently allows kids to search for this one under their “kid safe” censorship policies:

NASA created retro travel posters for different locations in our solar system in hopes of inspiring young people to imagine a future where common space travel is a possibility. 

Benjamin Franklin invented the glass harmonica, an instrument that mechanizes the process of playing notes on the rims of wine glasses. The ‘armonica’ uses bowls on a rotating spindle, which produces a haunting sound when touched with moistened fingers. 

Both Mozart and Beethoven composed music for it.

This new type of 3D printing was inspired by Terminator 2

Just because we fight one type of sexism doesn’t mean we don’t care about other instances of sexism that don’t affect us directly in our day to day lives.

My heart goes out to this woman and the hundreds of other victims like her. I want to educate people about these kinds of incidents. I support organizations that help women like this.

You may think that dress code issues are trivial, but they are related to a larger issue of women’s bodily autonomy, which affects women’s health and safety.

"This is how men could be treating you, be grateful it’s only as bad as it is now."

And that’s actually an attribute of abusers, I believe I read somewhere. To compare you to someone being treated worse and tell you you should be grateful you have it so good. It convinces the victim they should be silent in the face of their abuse.

It’s literally an abuse tactic.