Friday, June 22, 2007

And Now For Something Completely Different

If you go to the ever-fabulous Lesboprof, you will see that you can get your blog rated. Hers is rated R.

So I went to Mingle 2, which is actually a dating site that does this on the side, and found out that:



OK. So I was feeling a little downcast, as I am very competitive, even with people I do not know, and I thought: what is Lesboprof doing that I'm not doing? (Probably many things, come to think of it: she's considerably younger, and you will notice which one of us is up blogging on a Friday night and which one of us is not.)

Then I looked at the justification for my rating and saw "dick x 4, dead x 2, sex x 1." And I thought, that I should have used the word dead seems reasonable: dead tired, dead wood, whatever. And sex only once? Not so bad. I would have thought more, since I teach the history of sex. But "dick?" OK, I would say it but I wouldn't write it down. Was this in my pseudonymous days, that I referred to someone or ones -- colleagues, students, strangers, people who spam my blog over imagined slights -- as "dicks?"

Then I recalled my last post. Mingle2 is referring to my discussions of the Vice President of the United States. So only my invocation of this truly obscene man, who once flung the F-word at that lovely Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) on the Senate floor, has saved me from being right down there with Shreck III and Evan Almighty.

Don't you just love the internet?

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

graduating before taking a class with you is one of biggest regrets.

squadratomagico said...

What I want to know is, why does the word "dead" drive up your ratings? Is it no longer acceptable, in polite society, to mention that death exists? Has mortality itself -- free from any association with violence -- become vulgar?

squadratomagico said...

P.S., I love the word "downcast." I will have to start using it.

GayProf said...

My blog is NC-17.

Clio Bluestocking said...

I got an R rating for excessive use of the word "death" as well. Perhaps that is because the baseline is G, and G is for kids, and we can't have the kiddies know about such icky things as the fact that we all one day become wormfood (or that people have sex, or that homosexuals exist, or anything like that -- no wonder change takes so long).

cantdance said...

So far as I can tell, the rating is just based on posts on the main page. Didn't see more specific rating criteria anywhere on Mingle, but don't have time to dig deeper. My blog's rating was based entirely on one instance of the word dyke, which pops up several times through out the blog, but only once in the newest seven postings.

Anonymous said...

Wesleying got a R rating for using the word gay 11 times.

Anonymous said...

this was truly funny. I passed the link on and so far they are all in the R-NC17 range for use of the same set of words: gay and queer. hmmm . . . my blog got a G but then I have only talked about the break up of families b/c of migration raids . . .

anthony grafton said...

Well, as to Dick and "dick"--the Romans used to say that "Nomen est omen" . . . The interwebs are wonderful!

Tim Lacy said...

H&E received an R rating based on the following: bomb (5x) murder (3x) sex (2x) slut (1x). It's a good thing a number of Friday trivia entries are double entendres. - TL

gwoertendyke said...

all you have to do is add "whore" to your name and you too can warn youth. as in film, how these ratings are determined is an education in itself.