Nudity and Art and YouTube
PBS, of all things, has run afoul of YouTube’s age restriction policies. I happened to see a Tweet regarding the PBS channel “The Art Assignment,” one of the various PBS channels I subscribe to. It took me to an episode that aired before I subscribed, “The Case for Nudity.” It is an analysis of our uncomfortable relationship between, art nudity and the censors.
As an art class figure model, I have a special interest here. Many colleges have stopped using nude models because of the protests of a small but vocal group of cultural conservatives. (The far left and the far right seem equally bent on censorship of conflicting POVs. They just censor different things.) Colleges are notoriously cowardly and readily surrender to the heckler’s veto.
So, I was going to write an essay of the history of nudity in art and link to the PBS video as an outstanding bit of intelligent thinking. But then, this is what showed up:
There’s nothing about this video that is even vaguely pornographic or sexually explicit. It is an academic treatise. But there are a small number of people out there who would make a big noise so of course, YouTube must protect itself against being yelled at. That’s the power of the heckler’s veto.
Yeah, we can still watch it but we have to log in to our YouTube accounts to prove we are old enough. I have yet to find out what YouTube considers old enough. To me, this is crazy. As an experiment, I changed my age in my YouTube account to 14, logged out of YouTube, cleared my cache and cookies, and then tried to view the PBS video. Here is what I got:
I hit the sign-in button and the video launched. What age range are they “protecting?” I went back in and tried to make myself younger. The algorithm wouldn’t let me be younger than my YouTube account, so I called it quits. Maybe 5-year-olds couldn’t see it but I’m too lazy to make a new account to find out.
Continued… Read full original article…
Source: This is my place.
Original publication 28 January, 2021
Posted on NatCorn 7th February 2021
Reference to an article does not infer endorsement of any views expressed.