When we last left the prissy old gray gal, The New York Times was trying to describe a profane on-air row between two Gotham City newscasters. Problem was, the paper couldn’t repeat what they said — usually important to understanding an event based on what someone said -- for fear of upsetting all of the porn-addicted 12 year olds out there who are such fervent Times readers.
Now comes an even more egregious omission in the Times’ quaint quest not to offend. In an A-1 feature about the “scandalous German best-seller Wetlands, in which the heroine chronicles cleaning the naughty nooks of her body, Nicholas Kulish writes: “With her jaunty dissection of the sex life and the private grooming habits of the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, Helen Mermel, [author Charlotte Roche] has turned the previously unspeakable into the national conversation in Germany.”
Funny that Kulish calls it unspeakable because he really can’t speak about it. “It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel,” he writes, “and hard to describe in a family newspaper.” Hmm. Times policy makes it hard to describe the very thing you are writing about, which happens to be the national conversation of Germany. Maybe the Times should start publishing an adults-only edition so us older folks can understand what they can only coyly hint at now.
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