Drawing the Curtain

In the early days of the OEDILF, any limerick dealing with topics of an adult or offensive nature were kept out of the Tentative pile altogether, let alone our growing body of Approved limericks. Individual lines and whole limericks were rewritten to avoid rude words, some of which didn’t even seem that rude to their authors—such as my angry, which originally had a rhyme using a word (rhyming with word) that our Editor-in-Chief found beyond the pale.

Within a year of launch, we’d implemented the Curtained Room, where any limericks deemed unsuitable for hypothetical nine-year-olds are kept; essentially, it’s a user-controlled filter to hide curtained limericks from view, which is switched on by default for new visitors. With U.S. governments forcing school libraries to use filtering software that blocks entire websites deemed to be adults-only, all of the OEDILF would otherwise be inaccessible for the sake of a handful of adult limericks, especially as American ideas of what constitutes adult content are pretty conservative.

I’m from a country with quite different ideas about adult language, so it’s sometimes been hard for me to be too insistent on curtaining, especially when I’ve encountered stiff resistance to it.

I should curtain it? Please, tell me why?
You’re some anti-obscenity guy?
Or it’s just that you’ve heard
That this four-letter word
Is another for turd? Okay. Sigh...

But I try to encourage curtaining wherever I think it’s needed. I understand people’s reasons for not wanting their work curtained—cutting off potential audiences, not seeing what the big deal is, and so on—but are we really cutting off that much of an audience? The biggest audience for most of our limericks is each other, and few of us are actually using the Content Filter in our daily workshopping.

I’ve applied the curtain freely to my own work to head off potential objections before they arise. My own baa doesn’t even mention the word bestiality (I wanted it to be ambiguous, for one thing), but I curtained it as soon as it was an option.

When the Curtained Room was implemented, there was some initial uncertainty around the etiquette of curtaining a submission. What should happen when the author disagrees about curtaining a piece? Does the author have the final say over it? If it were always the author’s choice, the curtain would become meaningless, as it could no longer be relied upon by those who wished to use it; but insisting on the curtain conflicts with the principle of authorial control over how a piece is presented.

In more than one case, my assessment of whether a piece is ready for approval has hinged on whether or not it’s curtained: if it is, then it’s perfectly acceptable, but if it isn’t I can’t consider it approvable, because in my estimation the hypothetical maiden aunt would have the vapours. If the author doesn’t want it curtained, we’re left with a piece that I consider a good definition, funny, well-written, everything it needs to be—but not ready for approval. Not a satisfying result for either party.

I try to avoid these problems in my own work by curtaining whatever seems doubtful. If the topic is sex, I curtain it just to be on the safe side. (Bad luck, kids. Bad luck, Aunt.) If an editor suggests curtaining for any remotely valid reason, I can’t imagine being bothered, and would almost certainly comply. But I can imagine being bothered by someone else presumptively curtaining my stuff.

The guidelines around curtaining emerged in response to just such concerns. Editors should curtain any limerick that in their judgement needs to be—that is, any that isn’t a borderline case—and authors need to learn to live with it.

If as an editor I ignore authors’ ambivalence and curtain their work anyway based only on my own instincts, they’re going to feel mildly pissed off and might even think that I’m some kind of prude. If, on the other hand, I curtain according to clear principles, and it’s clear to all parties involved that I’m performing a routine function of the same kind as setting a New piece to Tentative or putting a four- or six-line submission on Hold, the chances of my being the specific cause of disgruntlement are minimized.

If I make it clear that I think a piece should be curtained, yet don’t actually curtain it as Workshopping Editor, I’m leaving the author room to make the final decision. I might argue that I’m just giving the situation a few days to sort itself out, and hoping that the author will come round, but what if they don’t?

Curtaining is for our benefit as much as for the few who will actually use the filter, because it allows us to discuss adult topics like adults, rather than pussy-footing around for fear of scaring the kiddies and riling their parents. None of us want to be put in the awkward situation of having to decide whether to impose curtaining on authors who don’t want it, but it’s in the best interests of the site not to make material that could raise the hackles of the Moral Majority automatically available to all readers.

When I was a high school student in mid-1980s Australia, the autobiography of one of Australia’s most famous sons was banned from my state’s English curriculum because it featured humorous tales of teenage masturbation. That’s right: 16- and 17-year-olds were being “protected” from this heinous subject (in theory, though certainly not in practice) by exactly the kinds of noisy parents who could make our lives at the OEDILF difficult if they wanted to.

Before we had the curtain in place, adult subjects presented us with a quandary, but since it went up, people have been much more willing to submit risqué limericks (which, let’s remind ourselves, is the traditional character of the form). That’s all to the good. The curtain isn’t punitive, it’s a tool that allows us to get on with writing limericks that entertain the rest of us.

Ultimately, I don’t see the Curtained Room as censorship, but as self-censorship by those who read the OEDILF with curtaining switched on. That’s their choice, and we should respect it. Sure, there’s a transgressive thrill that comes from shouting “f—!” in the face of someone who has explicitly asked you not to, but that comes at the price of division and discord. All of us value the OEDILF for having such a low amount of discord compared with most forums on the web.

An OEDILFer bemoaning his luck
While defining the common noun duck
Said, “This rhyme, I am certain,
Is doomed for the curtain.
Oh, quackity f—ity f—.”

Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from August 2005–October 2008.