Reinventing the Hays Code

Unalive [v]: an attempt to get around internet censorship of the word “kill”

When I was a child, Mr. Hooper died. I mean, yes, Will Lee, the actor who played him, died first. But after much discussion, it was decided that we as a generation could accept that Mr. Hooper didn’t just, say, move to Florida. The executives at the Children’s Television Workshop as was decided that we could handle a plotline in which the actual character died. It’s one of the most beautiful hours of television ever made. We as a generation pretty well tear up when Big Bird is saying he’ll give Mr. Hooper his drawing when he “gets back.” And we learned, and we grew.

One of my jobs as a parent is to decide what my children are and are not capable of dealing with. The movies in my household are divided into “okay for the kids,” “okay with the kids with supervision,” and “not okay for the kids.” This is because I know that not all content is acceptable for children, regardless of the age of the child. The joke with my friends is that someday there will be a shelf in my house that just has Watchmen and Secretary on it, and every other movie in the house will be just fine for my kids to watch, at least if I am there.

One of the problems with the Hays Code was that it expected that every movie should be acceptable to every audience. It’s obvious even now that, even if every single individual frame, every single individual word, were perfectly acceptable to every audience, not every movie would be. I recently rewatched Mr. Skeffington, and there’s nothing there I wouldn’t show my kids but also they wouldn’t want to watch it. Why? They’d be bored. Some plots are inherently adult, and not adult in quotation marks but literally just something adults are more interested in than children. And if everything needs to be fully for kids, that’s going to be its death as something to use for creative expression.

But, yes, the YouTubers I follow have to talk around a lot of things because of the vagaries of the YouTube algorithm. There’s a pseudoscientist who gets covered now and again in debunking spheres who is an admitted rapist. It’s on camera. He said he had sex with a woman without her consent “because of how much he loved her” [shudder], and while everyone who covers him wants to make sure you know that, they can’t just tell you that, because the word “rape” gets flagged and they get demonetized. And that means their video is less likely to come up in your recommendations, and that means their other videos are less likely to come up in your recommendations. So he’s a “grapist.”

I stopped watching the Casual Criminalist for several reasons, but watching an actual true crime channel skip around describing the crimes he was detailing was deeply frustrating. The expression “PDF file” shouldn’t have to be used when discussion of the actual pedophiles detailed in the Epstein files are so desperately important. I can use the real word here because Magpies doesn’t censor what I write, but if you’re on a platform people have actually heard of, you have to worry about your language because you might even get your work taken down.

I’m not suggesting that YouTube should allow, you know, full frontal nudity. That’s not what they do. The problem, though, is that YouTube is a de facto monopoly. There is no other site you can go on to do the kinds of things the people I know, some of whom are friends, do on YouTube. So even though, yeah, there’s Nebula and other similar things, there’s no entry-level way to build yourself a following unless you start on YouTube or TikTok, and if you’re trying to do real educational content TikTok is not what you want. And also, TikTok has the same problems.

The argument is that we’re protecting the kids. However, it won’t bother my kids if Dr. Kipp Davis cannot control his potty mouth, because they don’t care about the Dead Sea Scrolls and aren’t watching his content in the first place. This is to me no different from Will Hays—or, more honestly, Joe Breen—worrying about whether Bette Davis gets to say the word “damn” that is so close to slipping from her lips in half her movies. My kids won’t watch the movie either way. Kids in the 1930s wouldn’t have watched the movie either way. Mr. Skeffington was a woman’s picture, as they called them—a picture made for and watched by adult women, who were presumably capable of dealing with characters who were imperfect.

Because it only starts with words. Now, part of the problem is the complete opacity of the algorithm. We can’t say what’s going on behind the scenes. But people have tested it, and we know that it doesn’t take much for you to be pushed into the alt-right pipeline, where you’re not going to see the content by queer creators, about more diverse issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s the same pearl-clutching thinking of the children to prevent them from seeing “perversion” or if it’s the simple bigotry of your garden-variety transphobe. Philosophy Tube is on Nebula and can withstand it; smaller channels like Better Than Ember are less likely to.

One of the concerns of the Hays Code was not letting governmental or religious figures be subjects of mockery. How different is that from the firing of Stephen Colbert? History may or may not be repeating itself, but it is certainly echoing. It starts with having to work around basic language out of fear of what you can’t say. The bigots worry about not being allowed to say slurs, but we should all worry about not being allowed to say “kill.” When a science channel can’t talk about animals’ being killed and a true crime channel can’t talk about what actually happened to victims, it’s time to think about who’s writing the rules.