Censoring in Kuwait...

Image from a Kuwaiti news-stand, showing examples of the inconsistency in censoring various women's magazine covers. The magazine to the left has its shoulders blackened out, a body part the three right hand magazines show. On the other hand the side of the chest and armpit have been censored in the second magazine from the right, an area left exposed in the cover to its left. The magazine to the right shows shoulders, upper arms, chest as well as abdominals...

Often, particularly whilst passing a news-stand or going to the movies, I've been wondering about the guidelines according to which censorship is applied in Kuwait. Beyond the general dismay that a kiss, even between a married couple, is censored in a film whilst a gory decapitation seems to be acceptable, and with cable channels and Internet permeating almost every household makes censoring somewhat redundant, there also seems to be a marked inconsistency in how and what is censored. Female cleavage, shoulders, legs above the knee, abdominals and buttocks seem generally to be blackened out. On men, however, most of these areas appear to be acceptable to show (even though some of the bodybuilding magazines show men with much more pronounced cleavages than those found on female models in a women's magazines).

These same conditions also seem to apply to more representational, even abstract, renditions of the human form, such as paintings and sculpture, where many an art history book have become unreadable due to the ink daubs permeating its pages. Where does the threshold of censorship lie on more abstract work? Would, for example, the nonfigurative nudes in Picasso's Mademoiselles d 'Avignon need to be selectively blackened? How about the photographer Andre Kertesz's distorted nudes (who photographed his models' reflections in a warped mirror) would his images, that sometimes require a concerted effort to distinguish heads from tails, need censoring?

Image from a recent International Herald Tribune, where a number of sculptures have been selectively neutralized of their more risky bits...

When does a chest turn into a cleavage? Why is an upper arm and shoulder considered more suggestively agitating than an elbow or forearm? Why is it that semi-exposed men are considered less sexually provoking than women? At what height should the imaginary hemline of a censors black marker or scissors actually go when reviewing the latest issue of Italian Vogue? As can be seen in some of the included images it seems like some of the censors themselves aren't too sure...

On the other hand, many books (without provoking covers) and texts seem to be left untouched. An interesting example of which can be viewed below, where in an article about wine, the images of the wine have been blurred and pixelated, but the piece itself is untouched. I also remember a while back coming across a samples of Voltaire, Mishima's, Focault's, Satre's, Beauvoir's and Miller's work at a local bookshop which seemed a bit surprising considering their chosen subject matters.

A blurred glass of wine...

Pixelated wine bottle labels...

Some Victorians used to shroud their table legs with covering hemlines to avoid provocation. They did so whilst simultaneously subscribing to some of the most explicit kink of any age that would make even the most sordid of today's Berliners blush. It is important to find some form of a balance between unreasonable censorship and excessive exposure, as, if either condition goes too far, there will inevitably either be a backlash, usually resulting in the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, or a quasi-covert sub-culture develops where any such 'alternate' behaviour will be practised anyway.

In the end, 'impropriety' is always in the eye of the beholder, entailing that at least some of the judgement regarding what should and shouldn't be seen and practised by an individual should be left to their subjective selves to decide.