let’s talk about ***

i hate to say it, but i might have to cut off a long time friend on the socials…

…and to clarify, i mean cut him off on the socials. not that i only know him online – we’ve known each other since the 1980’s.

every post he does is about the sins of the maga crowd; and while i’m not their biggest fan, and fully acknowledge that there’s a lot more scum than water in that pond, it seems like it’s almost bigger news to report one of them is an upstanding citizen who did cool shit then to point out that one got popped for touching a kid, or being a racist, or anti-trans, or any other number of things that, quite honestly, don’t surprise me in the slightest.

but through it all, with all the noise…

what i can’t fathom is why we can’t type the word “sex” any more in news stories or headlines. i get that you can’t say “fuck” on public media. but when (and why?) did “sex” start needing to be, for lack of a better term, bleeped? if you do a google search for “*** charges” it brings up child pornography…so “XXX” is now the known abbreviation for the adult version, and that’s for kids, i guess?

but seriously, it’s not just him…i keep seeing stories all over the place about “s3x addiction” or “caught up in *** trafficking ring” or what have you…why the fuck can’t you just type “sex”? it’s like when i make fun of my religious friends for saying, “i wanna get the ‘f-u-c-k’ outta here” or something. when i ask why they spell it instead of saying it, they always respond it’s always for faith reasons.

so sky daddy can make heaven and earth but can’t spell?

as a guy who’d been published countless times in magazines and newspapers and has a journalism degree and used to teach folks how to write copy i’m confused…if you can’t type “SEX” in print, how do you say “***” on air?

“star-star-star”? “asterisk-asterisk-asterisk”? or do you just say, “you know”?

i don’t know when the era of this being the industry standard started, but it needs to stop. seriously.