Wholesome Assumptions

Here's the only difference I've seen so far between the censored and uncensored versions of Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt;




NSFW, I guess. I'm afraid you'll have to explain to your boss why you're looking at a picture of a white blob vaguely suggestive of a vagina.

Censorship's always been strange in Japan. Well, censorship's always been strange, it only seems normal when you're somewhat programmed for the same moral preoccupations as your culture. Censorship almost seems like a fetish now on Japanese television, though. Back when it was just ridiculous thin black strips over parts of genitals, it seemed totally perfunctory, meant to serve some mythical morality no-one really understood or sympathised with. Now it's like a strip tease--except on certain channels, new shows are broadcast with shadows or steam placed over the naughty bits with the promise that those things will be removed when you buy the DVD.

I'm reminded of reading yesterday about letters sent in to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in the Victorian era. From Inside the Victorian Home;

. . . the magazine is notorious among Victorian scholars today for its columns of correspondence supposedly sent in by parents on the nature and extent of physical chastisement for girls: all, to a modern eye, clearly sexual fantasies. What is interesting is that to contemporary readers it was not clearly bogus . . . correspondents whom we would to-day guess to be fetishists used words like "suffering," "agony," "delicious," and "exquisite" to describe the effects of tight lacing . . .

Of course, I've been googling like mad to find some actual examples of these letters, but, despite a lot of books and articles remarking on how extraordinary these letters are, no-one seems to find them interesting enough to actually bloody post or publish the things. Irritating. Corset blocked.

I've been trying to find uses the past couple days for cocoanut milk. I've been trying to expand my milk substitutes beyond soy--I figure too much soy's probably not a good idea. So far, cocoanut milk's okay in coffee, pretty good in oatmeal, and fantastic in green tea with some honey.

Twitter Sonnet #239

Red cat faces miss the dizzy black mark.
White water could possibly be soy milk.
Caffeine turns to coffee when it gets dark.
Bitter teas are of the oversteeped ilk.
Honey sinks to the cocoanut bottom.
Sour pellets catch at the funnel throat.
Flooded spring is the bizarro autumn.
Starched Wool walls stand for the smiling grey goat.
Jackets remember walks that made streets real.
Columns of frozen black trees pin moth clouds.
A jelly bean's beetle leg taps a reel.
Mexican orange film burns big in dyed crowds.
Piano strings snap on a blood checked grid.
Rubber clothes squeak on Persephone's lid.