MemeMachineGo!

This This Modern World cartoon features grainy 18th century engravings of a Roman orgy, retouched to remove anything explicit, in service of a point about the public being distracted from important issues by the salacious. There are a couple of breasts visible, but no genitalia. It’s clearly a depiction of group sex, but it’s difficult to imagine whose prurient interests could possibly be aroused by it. It was censored by Kuwaiti customs.

Stuff from Amazon usually gets to Kuwait no problem, although 9 times out of 10 it is opened by customs to check if it contains any pornographic material or material considered to be an afront to Islam. Censorship is rife here, and although almost any magazine or newspaper you can think of is sold in the bookshops (from Harper’s to Cosmo to USA Today… I kid you not), any photo that is slightly ‘fleshy’ or depicts images of ‘god’ is swiftly seen to with a big black pen. If there is an entire offending article, or the questionable picture is really big, they just rip the whole damn page out. It’s rather frustrating, as you may be halfway through an article about ETA activity in Spain, only to discover that the last page has been printed on the back of a Calvin Klien advert, and then you’re stuffed.

Anyway, to get to the point, the officers at the Kuwaiti customs found something offensive in your book. I got to page 172, only to discover that page 173 - 4 had been roughly torn out.

The cartoon also caused a ruckus during its original domestic publication six years ago.

When Anderson saw the strip, he hit the roof. The strip, he said, showed “people doing all types of sexual activities — oral sex, anal sex, group sex, bondage, torture, everything imaginable. You do not need to show illegal stuff to get a political point across.” Anderson said he didn’t even read the strip until he’d looked at it three times (possibly proving Perkins’ point). […]

The outraged citizenry also showed up en masse to a school board meeting in Moore County, a suburb of Oklahoma City, where they denounced the strip and the Gazette. Not coincidentally, Bill Bleakley, the paper’s publisher, is also a principal in the law firm that represents the Moore school district. The law firm’s $40,000- to-$60,000 contract with the school district, which was up for renewal at the beginning of the meeting, was not renewed. Lee Bocock, vice president of the school district, declined to comment in her official capacity on whether the cartoon influenced the school board’s decision not to renew. But she said she personally was offended by it. “When you’ve got group sex in a cartoon, frame after frame, the point is, ‘Who cares if we all have multiple sex partners’ — which is a gross lie,” she says. When asked if it was fair to punish Bleakley’s law firm for something his paper, a separate entity, did, Bocock responded: “I don’t personally see how a person can wear two hats.”

OCAF’s Anderson denies that his group was involved in the campaign to put pressure on Bleakley’s law firm, but says he supports the school board’s decision. He also says he believes that the very fact Bleakley published a paper that would run such filth raised questions about his capacity to practice law fairly. “If he is representing the school and a little girl is raped in the restroom and he’s the type of guy that runs this cartoon in the newspaper, whose side do you think he’ll be on? I think he’d be very biased.”

Because, clearly, if you own a newspaper, and you’ve hired an editorial staff capable of running a cartoon with grainy depictions of sex, then you would have natural sympathy with a child-rapist.