We talk about censors as if they weren’t real, but SCMP serves us this useful reminder that the people deleting your videos, expurgating articles, handcuffing artists, destroying the TV and entertainment industry, and — the of course of “of courses” — blocking porn, are made of flesh and blood, with intellectual capacities, however stunted, and human desires.
Well, some used to have human desires, before they were forced to watch porn all day. Desensitized, sex is but gymnastics with bad theatrics, something to pass the time, like a run on the treadmill.
At first, the experience was “awkward, my face and ears turned red and my heart skipped a beat”, Liu Xiaozhen, a 70-year-old member of the investigative team, said as he recalled his first day on the job.
His job censoring porn, is what we’re talking about.
Liu is a member of the Hunan provincial “eliminate pornography and illegal publications” office. Such departments exist throughout the mainland, and because of their indecorous duties, officials usually keep quiet about their work.
The poor dude is 70 years old. Christ. How cruel can his superiors be to force him to watch young, sweaty bodies, “two beings with evolved eyes,” as Robert Haas puts it in the poem “Privilege of Being,” “rapacious, // startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet // lubricious glue”?
Speaking of glue, someone should put Old Liu out to pasture — for his sake, and that of the shuddering angels.
‘You have to watch it even if you don’t want to,’ says senior pornography censor in China (SCMP, h/t Eldes Tran; the image is via SCMP, with one particular tweak by yours truly)
props for the subtle photoshopping up there