Many people in this culture are intensely focused on rooting out “problematic” language and “toxic” messages. They insist that we must rename sports teams and objects in outer space, rebrand grocery items, ban books, and censor films, all for the sake of protecting society from the harm that inappropriate words and ideas may cause. Anyone who steps outside the perceived lines of decency is condemned with a hostility once reserved for rapists and murderers. It would be quite confusing, then, for any alien who lands on this planet, or any person who emerges after being lost in the rainforest for the past five decades, to discover just what sort of media these perpetually scandalized people enjoy.
Indeed, the very same people who were so traumatized by a fast food CEO’s comments that they boycotted his chicken restaurant for eight years, and the very same people who have tearfully denounced “offensive” Disney costumes worn by children, and the very same people who are liable to break into convulsions of anger if you say something really provocative like “men and women are different,” and the very same people who invented concepts like trigger warnings and safe spaces, are the ones who will listen to, appreciate, and celebrate the most vulgar and degrading television shows, films, and songs, made by some of the most loathsome people this country has produced. They are puritans about all that is innocuous, and libertines about all that is genuinely objectionable. They have everything backwards. And never has the contrast been clearer than with the reaction to the latest bit of audible sewage from the rapper Cardi B.
.png)
.png)
