Gregory's ServerFirst things first, if you use a screenreader, you'll have just heard your device attempt to pronounce something like "vand-g-won-at". That's not very clear, and furthermore, it's not accessible at all. That alone is a very good reason to reject this practice.
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64 comments
Someone designed the automated processes and algorithms. They didn't just magically happen. A decision has been made by some social media platforms to treat anatomical language as if it's something that must be hidden away. These decisions are dangerous. According to research by the Eve Appeal, 65% of women aged 16-25 have a problem with the word "vagina". A third of this age group would avoid going to the doctors with a gynaecological health issue due to embarrassment. Just last week, the Eve Appeal flagged that Instagram was censoring the hashtag #VaginalCancer, a tag containing vital health information. To avoid using the word "vagina" is to reinforce the decisions that have been made by social media platforms. To censor it as though it's a dirty word that you shouldn't be saying is to reinforce this taboo. We should be challenging the algorithms, not going with the flow. @Mary625 @vagina_museum on TikTok apparently. And on YouTube you can’t get payed for your video if you do say these forbidden words @vagina_museum @Mary625 you’re welcome. @kite @Mary625 @vagina_museum Maude Lebowski said it best: https://youtube.com/watch?v=xs3OWJ53rHE&feature=sharea  After challenging Instagram's decision, the #VaginalCancer hashtag was successfully uncensored. And isn't the fight for information, knowledge, and normalisation a fight worth taking up, even if it's at the expense of a few likes?   My mother would be protesting not using the correct language for parts of the human body. An English professor. Nope. She would have none of that! What an idiotic thing to censor @vagina_museum It's always amazed me, the extent that these algorithms will go to in order to promote what amounts to blunt sexism and objectification. This was never about morality. @vagina_museum did #instagram ACTUALLY stop #censorship towards the #VaginalCancer tag, or did they just claim they did while continuing to #shadowban it? As they've done with so many other tags and subjects they claim to have stopped #banned / #banning yet continue to do so, like #BreastFeeding and #BreastCancer 😠 I mean there's a pad commercial I see all the time that says "scents are for candles, not vaginas". Are we really at the point where the internet itself is becoming more censored than FCC guidelines for television? Shit. Thank you for fighting this. I hate the censoring of words that need MORE visibility, not less. All to cater to a minority of Victorian Era pearl clutchers. The damage they do by banning such words can be seen clearly when men ask questions like "is my pregnant wife drowning our baby by getting into the tub and preventing her vagina from getting air?" And those questions make me very sad for humanity. @vagina_museum ahhh and the last three GYN I visited were- actively horrible- made weird comments etc - so maybe it’s not embarrassment? Maybe it’s because even with female MD’s we’ve enough past experiences to… fill a book or two. @vagina_museum I remember this feeling as a teenager trying to buy underwear in a shop. I would cringe at the checkout and feel so awkward. Until my mum asked me if I would feel as embarrassed buying socks - it’s essential clothing. Of course, the answer was no. Same goes for the correct names for body parts. If we have no issue saying the word elbow or forehead, we shouldn’t have an issue using the word vagina or vulva. They’re just body parts (and ones ~50% of the population have)  @charllthomas @vagina_museum If you want to see words for body parts a lot, study Scottish place names, for example this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil%27s_Point - compare the English to the Gaelic 😉  @vagina_museum I remember a glorious rant by Germaine Greer on a BBC4 program about the origins of words. She asserted that "vagina" wasn't a good word as it comes from the Latin for "sword sheath", and it would be far far better if people just used "cunt" instead. Somehow, I doubt that the 16-25 year olds in that survey had quite the same problem with the word as Germaine.  @NaturaArtisMagistra @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @StillIRise1963 @mcnado Yikes. (Thanks for the tag!) @VirginiaMurr @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @StillIRise1963 @mcnado I actually had women get angry at me on bird for using that word. That's how brain-washed media has made some of them. @NaturaArtisMagistra @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @StillIRise1963 @mcnado That is absolutely bonkers, Puritanical nonsense. Should we be equally horrified by tibia and fibula? Or maybe phalanges. Along with vagina and penis and breast and toes, these are all parts of the human body. FFS. Humanity is the walking, talking symbol of a facepalm (face and palm, also parts of the body! ha!). @VirginiaMurr @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @StillIRise1963 @mcnado I lie not, Ma'am. Yes it's bonkers 💯 @NaturaArtisMagistra @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @StillIRise1963 @mcnado Hahahaha ... excellent point! Hell, can they even go to art museums? 😬  @VirginiaMurr Didn't they want to cover up David?🙄 @NaturaArtisMagistra @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @mcnado @StillIRise1963 @VirginiaMurr @vagina_museum @IveyJanette @mcnado Yes. It was considered obscene.  @vagina_museum I feel it's kind of instructive if you look at how anatomical words like that can be banned by corporate social media but inciting hatred against or even directly abusing minoritised people will return a ‘nothing wrong with this’ if it's reported. @vagina_museum “Freedom of speech” they cry. But you can’t say vagina. @Kirsty @vagina_museum  @vagina_museum this ^ even if it's a blooming "ai" that does the filtering a human somewhere approved it. Someone looked at what it's doing and said "yep that looks good ship it" someone somewhere is responsible for that filter existing. The higher up the org chart you go the more responsibility there is for that thing existing. If Zuckerberg said "don't do that" it wouldn't do that by the time he went home for dinner. @vagina_museum I asked Chat GPT how to pronounce v&g1n@ and... Well, it clearly knew, but it wouldn't tell me be because it thought it was rude. It knew where to put the word breaks in a lowercase hashtag too. I don't agree with managing the spellings of words out of a misguided sense of prudery, but also, screen readers could easily be better than they are and this sort of thing should not be a problem for them. |
We're aware that this practice of self-censorship is rooted in concerns about posts getting deboosted or outright banned. This is definitely a real problem with automated processes on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. We ourselves stopped using TikTok entirely because it was unusable for a Vagina Museum.