The Puritans in the Playroom

This is a Blogger blog, hosted by Google. Like all Blogger blogs containing adult material, there is a content warning, with an orange thing to click on, saying, "I UNDERSTAND AND I WISH TO CONTINUE" in big letters.

Two of my friends have had emails from Blogger (Google, really), containing the following. "In the coming weeks, we'll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We'll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary or scientific contexts, or where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content."

It's sad that the puritans are once again trying to take over the playroom, but what is surprising is that it only applies to pictures and video. My posts The Naming of Parts and How Far Can You Go? both contain explicit language, but there aren't any pictures (or videos). My short fictional pieces contain explicit language and descriptions of sexual activity, but Blogger haven't said anything. I don't flatter myself that it is because of any educational, documentary, or scientific content. My suspicion is that it is because the puritans only look at the pictures, like semi-literate children.

I could congratulate myself on having got away with it, except that the semi-literate are dangerous. In 2000, a paediatrician had her house daubed with white paint, because "People don't want no paedophiles here". It's presumably the same people who failed to understand the meaning of "WISH TO CONTINUE" and clicked on the orange thing by mistake.

Watercolour by Gerda Wegener

Luckily for Google, however, the puritans' lack of expertise when it comes to clicking on things means that Google can contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or videos. You can type a word like 'topless' or 'penis' into the search box, but then you have to click on the link to 'images'. Try it. Some of the results are educational, possibly documentary, and scientific, at a pinch, since human biology is a science. Meanwhile, here is a watercolour by Gerda Wegener. I assume I could have used it to illustrate my short story, The New Leda, since it's artistic. You can find a lot more of Gerda Wegener's art by typing her name into the Google search box, but you will probably still have to click on the link.

The Beaufort scale

Sir Francis Beaufort is best remembered as the originator of the Beaufort scale, describing wind strengths. However, there was more to the man than that. He was the author of a guide to the coastline of Asia Minor, and it may well have been Beaufort who suggested Charles Darwin to Fitzroy as the ‘scientific gentleman’ to accompany the second voyage of The Beagle. He was a naval hero, having been wounded in 1800 and again in 1812, and he slept with his sister Harriet.

This isn’t the stuff of idle gossip. Francis Beaufort kept journals, written in code, which were deciphered after his death. Nor were he and Harriet a pair of unruly teenagers, experimenting behind the handcart sheds. Their affair took place after the death of Francis's first wife, Alicia, in 1834, when Francis was sixty. His unmarried sister Harriet was only some three years younger than him, and in a letter to their sister Frances in 1838, she wrote, "My face has become so wrinkled and odious." In the same letter she says of her 'dear Master', "You know in days of yore I used to be called his slave, and so I am still if it be called slavery, to wish to oblige so dear and so kind a friend - who certainly never unreasonable in his demands - and to whose tenderness and affection it is but due to try to please him in small as well as large things." She calls him 'my dear Francis', too.

The whole thing is rather touching, but it wasn't to last. Later in 1838, Francis Beaufort married Honora Edgeworth, Frances's stepdaughter. He was knighted in 1848, and he died in Hove in 1857. Harriet died in 1865.

On the Beaufort scale from nun to Fred West, Francis and Harriet shouldn’t create enough of a stir to rustle a puritan’s skirts, so it's sad that Francis was apparently tormented by guilt. How much nicer it would have been if he and Harriet had lived happily ever after, breezing gently together through their twilight years.