Five British Universities Vote To Censor, Ban "Blurred Lines"

I told you there was actually a political angle here. And you guys thought that all I was doing was linking a video with lots of bewbz.

By the way that's "lad chatter." That's also been banned.

Once upon a time, students’ political leaders kicked against authoritarianism; now they enforce it.

In the space of a generation, they’ve gone from demanding the right of young adults on campus to listen to, dance to, read and watch what they want, to placing a paternalistic hand over students’ ears and eyes lest they hear something a bit raunchy.

Blurred Lines, a massive global hit sung by Thicke with Pharrell Williams and the rapper T.I., has been the subject of controversy since it was released in March. The modern breed of sexless, censorious feminist has been particularly vocal in slamming both the song and its accompanying video, which features the three singers, fully clothed, cavorting with some very attractive models wearing only flesh-colored thongs. Blurred Lines is “creepy” and “a bit rapey,” says one observer.

Now, British student unions have taken this shrill reaction to what is just a pretty good and perfectly harmless pop song to its logical conclusion. The student union at Edinburgh kicked things off on 12 September by banning Blurred Lines from every student building. It did this as part of its policy to “End Rape Culture and Lad Banter” on campus.

End "Rape Culture and Lad Banter"? WTF is lad banter?

Well it turns out that "lad banter" is the sort of folk wisdom that lads pass around as to how to seal the deal with a girl. Apparently they don't like the prominence of such chatter in the "lad magazines," such as Maxim. So, they seek to ban it.

The instinct behind the Edinburgh union’s banning of Blurred Lines is the same one that has motored every act of censorship in history: a paternalistic urge to keep the little people’s base motives in check by protecting them from sexy, blasphemous, or shocking imagery.

...

We seem to have nurtured a spectacularly narcissistic generation, many of whom seem truly to believe that it is perfectly natural and reasonable to demand the squishing of anything that offends them. This is the grisly end product of the self-esteem culture: having educated young people to believe that their self-esteem is sacrosanct, and that anything which dents it is evil, we cannot now be surprised that they believe they have the right to erect a moral, censorship-powered forcefield around themselves and their peers in order to ward off any idea or image or song that makes them feel bad.

What's especially risible about such types is the idea that the censors here are "Big People" with Big Brains who must protect the Little People with Little Brains.

In fact, the sort of person who pushes these idiotic bans are Little People with Little Brains. They think they're at the top of societal evolution, and therefore have the right and duty to patrol others for unclean thoughts; in fact, they're rather at the bottom of that evolution, and really should just fuck off in silence.

posted by Ace at 12:11 PM

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