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Comment by amake | Hacker News Reader

The linked article's title is "Why do all old statues have such small penises?". Why was the word "penises" censored on HN?

Edit: It's now been changed. It used to say "male genitalia" instead of "penises".

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Guessing that https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=okket self-censored due to perceived American "sensibilities". Those of us who aren't from the USA never really understand what causes insult or not. (no joke, and no snark, it's absolutely true that this causes confusion to Australians, and I assume it does to a whole bunch of people from other nationalities!)

EDIT: Title has been changed. Good for whoever changed it!

Where America has a huge hardcore pornography industry, common nudity on major motion pictures and award winning TV shows, nudists, hippy communes and sex cults in the country, Burning Man and San Francisco, it also has a strong protestant conservative prudishness. It's very confusing to a European.

It's very frustrating to someone who lives here. Folks often go to great lengths to maintain a "holier than thou" appearance yet enjoy the same vices they condemn.

It's more fun that way.

Europen conservative protestants are hanging around here as well, we just seem to try to avoid annoying everyone else with our choices ;-)

And, BTW, that title should be no problem to most of us IMO.

The American sexual liberation movement started in the 1960's, and centered on the west coast/San Francisco specifically.

Before that America was literally founded (in the north at least) by religious conservatives who were too prudish for Europe. In fact the early US Quaker movement banned sex all together.

Shaker, not Quaker

You're probably thinking of the Shakers, compared to other non-conformist sects, the Quakers had relatively few hangups about sex.

That being said, I can attest to at least the Shaker melody (well known from Copland's "Appalachian Spring") as a touchstone of American culture. It's pretty good.

Also Puritans.

Puritans were actually very pro-sex (within marriage), which was a marked contrast to the pro-celibacy views of Roman Catholicism, and opposite the view of the Shakers.

See, for example, http://www.challies.com/quotes/the-puritans-and-sex which quotes quite a few Puritan writings.

Roman Catholics are pro-celibacy? You mean the priests?

yes, sort of -- I mean that Roman Catholicism includes pro-celibacy views, particularly regarding priests (to go along with pro-marital-sex views; it's not single-sided.)

The point was to show the contrast -- the Puritans were only pro-celibacy for the unmarried, which they viewed as a temporary state; they had a pretty one-sided "everyone should get married and have lots of sex" view. They themselves considered this to be in opposition to RC views. (And, in particular, comments about the Puritans being anti-sex are way off base.)

I thought RCs had the same view?

Also - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk :-)

Murica's a big country with many diverse regions and cultures

Sorry, I falsely assumed there was an auto censor for "penises" when the word got shortened the first time I try to post it. So I rewrote it (to "male genitalia"). The title is now in its intended original form.

No problem, I think your original title was fine, and the ensuing over-examination was nothing but a diversion from the point of your post, which is quiet an interesting article.

No double-entendres implied.

> Those of us who aren't from the USA never really understand what causes insult or not.

Believe it or not, some of us from America don't understand it either. IME, your best bet is to think of the most uptight, prudish, puritanical person you know, and that's what composes the moral censors in good 'ole US of A.

This comment has illustrated the honest confusion and double-taking the topic of sexuality brings up.

The comment turned out to be a false supposition, and both the commenter and the OP were (not unreasonably!) conjuring a HN or American-sensibility censor to explain things they noticed. The censor did not exist.

But it's funny, a large part of the OP is about the dichotomy between the Flesh and the Intellect, a boundary which some Greeks wanted to highlight symbolically and visually.

They had their virility symbols (like Priapus and Dionysius), which were separated from other characters with smaller members but more lofty concerns. (E.g., from the OP: "large penises were associated with very specific characteristics: foolishness, lust and ugliness...").

My point is that it's not reasonable to foist off this drive to separate the Flesh from the Intellect as being an American-specific peculiarity. Clearly the Greeks viewed this distinction as sometimes worth highlighting.

Um, it's not?

Maybe the submitter changed the title after seeing your comment?

Yes, it was changed since I posted my comment. "Penises" used to be "male genitalia".

The submitter changed it. All we did was take off the quotation marks. Though they were interesting quotation marks—almost like clothing for the question.

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