What About Keywords that Aren’t Allowed
It’s been a fascinating journey pulling together That Sex Book and the relevant marketing and social media that is going into the launch planning phase of such a project. In particular, the use of Keywords, which is such an important part of marketing, has highlighted the strangulated view we have as a society (at least in the western world – aka USA, and to some degrees Australia, UK, Ireland, Canada and NZ) where the use of certain words is just bizarre sometimes. Has censorship gone mad?
For example, Facebook has issues with the word Sex. Also a number of profanity words – that’s quite understandable really. But Sex is a natural, pleasurable, happy and healthy thing to do – for most of us. Now I know, there’s a lot of people already reading this and shaking their head over that idea, and that’s because the media is very effective at having us think more about the negative aspects of sex than the positive ones, because that always sells more papers, magazines, TV shows etc. ‘Rape, indecent exposure, mysogeny, lust…’ all better headline components than ‘making love, enjoying pleasure, sensuality, and sexuality’ are. We’d rather look at a headline saying that someone has been indecently assaulted than one about two people getting moved on because they were found stretched out naked on a blanket at 2 am enjoying quality make up sex under a full moon… right? Unless we’re hoping to that the ‘inappropriate angle’ of the story has been well ramped up.
Trying to boost posts with the word Sex in them, registering adverts with too much of the ‘s’ word or it’s close cousins is a big no-no.
Ok, I get it, and I’m mindful of the fact that there’s a lot of crazies out there, and no one wants to offend anyone’s sensibilities either. And we in the west seem to be overloaded with our share of sensibilities and fragilities. Double entendres become fun things to play with when advertising too because context plays such a big part in any lines when the real subject is about sex, rather than a host of other things like cooking or decorating for example.
Words like Exposure, hard, easy, balls, (Deck or six – if you have certain accents), juicy, come, screw, penetrate, erect all have arguably double meanings and you have to be careful not to offend sometimes. But censorship and political correctness is affecting our use of language in general.
So why is it that we can laugh about these things, and share in a dirty joke quite readily, and yet using certain words together, to insinuate the concept of love-making can actually get you kicked off a marketing platform. Isn’t it time we explored the real reasons we don’t like to think about sex, let alone talk about it? We’re all (ok, some are not) doing it, or have at some point in our lives if we’re over 40. Some enjoy it, and some choose not to make it a priority in their lives, but it’s not all about the bad stuff. Often it’s also about beautiful, sensual, satisfying expressions of love, caring, commitment, intimacy between consenting adults.
So, let’s not go throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this subject. But let’s see how THIS post fares… comments please if you could take a minute to share. Maybe we’ll start a movement! 😉