Bowdler old skool.
Thomas Bowdler thought of the children, and rewrote the distressing bits of Shakespeare and the Bible to gentle them for civilized folk. Anthony Comstock, who got his start harassing saloon-keepers who violated Sunday blue laws, made his name by poring through the mails and the penny-dreadful press, confiscating and burning anything obscene. In Saudi Arabia, pseudonymous blogger Alhamedi Alanezi tells us they use magic marker:
One of the few pleasures in life is to go to the larger bookstores here and buy a copy of an English-language newspaper. Usually it’s one of the British papers, occasionally the IHT or USA Today. They come on that very thin airmail paper. And invariably, they’ll contain apparently random splotches of black. Closer inspection reveals that a young western lady was showing some leg or shoulder, but has been “Magic Marker’d” vigorously, and of course it soaks thru the thin paper to obliterate the other side as well. My wife gets especially annoyed because her copy of Good Housekeeping suffers even worse; all those adverts for showers and “ladies’ things”, you can imagine.
So who’s responsible for poring thru the tens of thousands of magazines and papers that come into the country? Well, in the north of Riyadh there is a certain college of theology, the The Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University.
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
I [redacted] the included implication that Spider-Man comics are puerile entertainment and the highest level of art the [expletive deleted] censors could read. [Censored] that.
Still, an interesting read. Maybe we should invade them to set them straight.