Boob Tube

I submit I am a pretty media-savvy person—I worked for years in tech and for years in media production and have further studied and taught various aspects of media production. I used to work at a search website and I fully understand why it’s next to impossible to automatically filter out ALL the content you don’t want to see. Laymen would say “why doesn’t Facebook or whoever just take down the bad stuff,” but people who know a bit about it understand that it’s an extremely complicated technical issue, not to mention all of the cultural complications, with no easy solutions.

Given my background, I would not have expected to be surprised today by how easy it is to find explicit nudity on YouTube. By explicit, I specifically mean “female nipples,” because that’s usually the line we draw in the US; I do not mean the line-pushing type of sexual exploitation of women that seems almost pornographic but isn’t because certain parts remain covered—this is ubiquitous in western media, but a different topic. I’m just wondering why, when YouTube says, “Explicit content meant to be sexually gratifying is not allowed on YouTube,” they very much allow it.

I discovered this when I discovered that a lot of hard-to-see cult films have been uploaded to YouTube—and that sometimes this is the only way to see them without paying an additional fee. This copyrighted material is uploaded in violation of the rules but YouTube can’t catch it for the same reason it can’t catch the nudity—the videos are far too obscure to attract the attention required for a takedown. This is a tough scenario for the censor—if you can’t find it, you can’t censor it.

But why is it as simple as typing the words “blurred lines video explicit” into YouTube search to find that old controversial music video right there on Robin Thicke’s official account, and watch Emily Ratajowski’s beautiful, completely bare breasts and nipples bounce across the screen? In this context, those titties are clearly meant to be sexually gratifying. In seconds, I found an old Justin Timberlake video, on his official account, that also featured topless females. And, in seconds more I found dozens more by typing “explicit” in the search. This will also get you the explicit language versions, of course, but plenty of actual nudity, too. And beyond that some very basic searches such as “naked breasts” yielded endless nipples in sexually gratifying contexts. Again, I get how hard it is to keep up with what people upload, and generally YouTube has to be notified to take things down, but it also seems like they are not trying, if stars can put bare breasts on their official channels.

It’s not that I want YouTube to censor nudity. Drawing the line at nipples is also bizarre and just a US cultural thing (lots of nipples on regular TV in much of the EU). But if I was a YouTube creator it would be infuriating to have to play by a separate set of rules than stars like Timberlake, when the policy is stated so explicitly. Some creators reach a really wide audience—they are not obscure, like the cult films—and that’s why YouTube might say they hold them to the rules. But the “unrated” Blurred Lines video has 75M views. It’s one of the least “obscure” things on the site. (Click the link—I’d be curious if you get a content warning, or can’t find it. There ARE settings people can use—but if I generally want uncensored YouTube for me, but prefer censored for my kids, and also don’t want them to see a million ads, I’d have to pay for two “Premium” accounts and set different settings for each one and constantly switch between accounts on all our devices. The YouTube Kids app is far too restrictive for them.)

I think my point is just that, culturally, this is an example of one of the many things we lie to ourselves about. We pretend to have rules, but we actually don’t really, or apply them so inconsistently as to render them meaningless—yet we still make some people follow them.