The Cutprice Guignol

Please note that this article will contain brief mentions of sexual assault.

A few months ago, I talked a little on this blog about the harm that social media censorship is doing to discussions of suicide, self-harm, and other topics relating mental health. But, over the last few months, I’ve found myself contending with another iteration of this censorship: the language we use to talk about sex.

In the last few years, online conversations about sex have been dominated by language intended to dodge community rules on appropriate conversation – sex has become smex or seggs, references to genitals replaced by a coy emoji of a cat or a chicken, . Even sexual assault has not been left out of this repurposing of language, with rape replaced with grape to dodge censorship – or, sometimes, just a grape emoji. This new way of communicating has been dubbed algospeak, and turns up on forums and even in conversation (with special thanks to the man who hopped into my DMs this week to send me a sexually-explicit message except for the censorship of the word “boobs”, who really has his priorities straight). While most of these phrases or slang spread due to their acceptability on the ultra-popular TikTok app, you don’t have to look far even outside the confines of the TikTok algorithm to see how swiftly they’ve spread – language around sex has undeniably shifted towards the less explicit, and, more importantly, the less specific.

And, look, I’ll admit that I might have a slightly more liberal view on these matters than a lot of people, given that I write erotica for a living – I understand that most people aren’t writing the word “cock” on a daily basis as part of their nine-to-five, and that might give me a bit of a skewed approach to all of this. But working in the world of Jacking It Off (or, perhaps more specifically, sex and desire) for as long as I have, the way this language has changed to hide behind these censorships in the last few years has left me genuinely concerned.

Because, in the same timeframe that this kind of language has started to take root, we have seen an uptick around coverage of sexual practices in the mainstream that we’ve never had before. From adult content creators serving as regular guests on mainstream news and podcasts alike to niche fetish communities popping up on popular apps and earning more exposure than they once had, the cultural conversation around sex has become louder and more varied than it ever has been, at least in my lifetime.

And I want to make it very clear that I don’t view those things as a negative, at least inherently. I find sex and sexuality a really fascinating topic and I think people should, for the most part, have appropriately-managed spaces to discuss their desires and how to act on them in a safe and sensible way.

But the bizarre mix of censorship and sexual openness has created this quite bizarre contradiction in terms. Once-niche sexual practices like strangulation have become mainstream enough that up to two-thirds of women report engaging with it, but the language of breath play often used to discuss it minimizes the evident risks that come with it. Porn use has seen a more than 90% rise since the year 2000, but the actual discussions around this kind of media are often limited to coy corn emojis. Sex and sexuality has never been a more easily-accessible or common part of our lives, and yet, the conversations around it are dwindling further and further into the sidelines as what can actually be said on certain platforms influences what people are actually willing to talk about. As interest rises in potentially dangerous sexual roleplay like consensual non-consent, how can we expect the risks to be discussed practically when grape emojis are still the closest many platforms will get to saying the word “rape”?

In order to practically and usefully discuss the risks, potential harm, and implications of certain sexual practices, we need to be able to use specific, explicit language. But that language has been, more and more, absorbed into the algospeak that limits the actual conversations that need to be had in regards to this matter, at a time when these conversations are perhaps more important and more relevant than they’ve ever been.

This is a topic I’d really love to hear from you about – have you found conversations around sex changing, for the better or worse, in the previous few years? Are they happening at all? What resources have you found useful in having these particular conversations? Let me know in the comments!

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, check out my other blog, No But Listen, as well as my fiction work! You can also support me on Patreon to help keep this blog running and keep my very demanding little cat in treaties, and me out of her clutches for another month yet.

(header image via Medium)