Art

Reader Submitted Photo: Be Careful Little Eyes What You See

157 Comments

An alert SFL reader was helping in children’s church and happened up upon a children’s book (charmingly titled River) and saw that someone had taken precautions that the little children should not see even a smidgen of immodesty.

157 thoughts on “Reader Submitted Photo: Be Careful Little Eyes What You See”

    1. With that out of the way, was this is a private collection, or in a library somewhere? Private is bad enough, but I’d hate to think it was publicly available.

      I occasionally (thankfully rarely) come across books in the library where bad words are marked out. I’ve seen where some pages or photos have been ripped out. It galls me when someone takes it upon themselves to censor public materials.

      That being said, the censorship here is just plain silly.

      1. A book about young kids camping while wearing black sackcloth-like clothing. How sad and wierd and so IFB… 🙄

  3. Nooooo……….Second place?

    THat book is messed up though. Really? Coloring cartoon people in a children’s book?

  4. I think in that third picture, the kid is tipping a bucket of water on the napping person’s head to wake them up.

    And as for the drowners, Darrell, you’re a silly. They’re obviously doing those swimming training exercises where you practice going into a pool fully clothed so that you can learn survival techniques.

    3. Those look like hit victims in the Godfather that have been sent to permanently sleep with the fishes, but the water level apparently is low & clear this year, and you can see the corpses from an aerial view.

      1. Now see, if they’d just dumped the body in the East River, the raw sewage would’ve provided great cover!

        2. Not usually! Everyone just jokes about it. Though a few months ago, there was a fire at a treatment plant that led to a spill, and they closed all the fishing piers and such.

    4. actually I think its called waterboarding, the little girl just wanted to be told the truth about Santa Claus, and her fundy school teacher told her enhanced interrogation was the best way to get parents not to lie

  5. Actually they were trying to help out the MoG. He likes to look at the children’s books sometimes and it’s best to give him as few temptations as possible.

      1. That was really mean? Shucks. Please never backtrack and read anything I have posted. *I* am really mean. YOU are really funny. 😳

      3. Nonsense, its obvious the MOg has a problem. As we learned in comments in an earlier post, his mind was so much in the gutter that he was sending out missionary questionnaires asking what the missionary wives wore to bed. Clearly this is a reasonable precaution! 😆

  6. When I was teaching at Maranatha back in the early 1980s, someone in the bookstore ripped pages out of books and magic markered pictures considered to be indecent. I used the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, and it featured a picture of the Sistein (sp!) Chapel ceiling with all the private parts covered over in black ink. AT that time, bookstore employees didn’t realize that bookstores could sell back surplus copies. If they ever did, I wonder what the book buyers would think of this addition. My guess is that outsiders would realize how incredibly stupid things could be.

    During my first year, I was made to use a paperback copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in modern English. Because a student complained, I had to collect books from students so that a member of the library could sissor out the postlog to the Pardoner’s Tale and the entire Miller’s Tale. I believe that a sociology book had over 100 pages cut out.

    I’m trying to get ready to teach, and the very thought of all this is starting to turn my stomach.

    1. They did the same thing at HAC. Being a lover of books (even though I was raised fundy) it sickened me to see them ruin brand new perfectly good books like that. (And charge full price for them after they had done so) Another thing was that Jack Hyles would tell us to get scissors and cut the words “Quit” and “Compromise” out of our dictionaries. I happened to have a pretty nice dictionary that was the only one I had ever seen in our home (so I considered it not my personal dictionary, but the *family* property) so I didn’t do it. He said it all the time, and every time he said to do it I felt more and more that he was kindof stupid. (of course I also felt like I was being rebellious but there were many ways I was made to feel rebellious in those days.)

      1. It’s pretty easy to be rebel when all it takes is owning an intact dictionary.

        I had to work harder to rebel at my liberal-arts university.

        1. “Hyles would tell us to cut the words “quit” and “compromise” out of our dictionaries”

          Only an idiot would take this literally – Hyles certainly didn’t mean it that way. Though I’m sure some of the preacher boys had no idea he was speaking figuratively and probably literally cut up their dictionaries.

        2. Nathan, everyone did. If you didn’t, seriously, you were considered to be a rebel. As far as I know I am the only one who didn’t. (Of course there were others, but we were a quiet rebellion)

    2. A teacher at the Christian school at which I taught, after HAC, complained to the school librarian that C.S. Lewis uses the word “ass” in the Chronicles of Narnia. She threw a fit because the librarian refused to remove the word or the book. When I taught “MacBeth” to the seniors in high school there, she complained about Lady MacBeth’s use of the word “nipple” in an analogy she was drawing. Sigh. At that point in my life, I was already questioning the absurdities of this hyper-Puritanical regard of art.

      1. When I first started teaching at Maranatha, I was handed some of the handouts that the previous British Masterpieces teacher had made. She had a selection from MacBeth where I will never forget the line “Out. Out ___ Spot!” Talk about changing meanings of things.

        We had one faculty member who ran into trouble with the local Christian elementary school. The teacher read Chicken Lickin to the class, and the member got very upset that evolution was being taught to the class. After all, we all know that animals can’t talk.

        I learned how to give the deadpan look. I realized how stupid some of this stuff was back then, but I knew the penalties for expressing my dismay, even with the most minute of facial gesture. As I said a few days ago, it took me almost a year at Oklahoma State to get over this inclination to look around me to see who was observing me and taking notes to report me to the administration.

        2. Gee, since she doesn’t like the word “nipple”, I wonder what she calls those little pointy things on breasts? Or the ones on baby bottles? 😮 ❓

        3. My husband was a handyman for a while and he used to make me uncomfortable by talking about the male and female parts of things. Pipes or cords or other stuff. He would say it was the male part if it had the thing that went into it and the female part if it was the reciever of the thing that goes in. I thought he was just making it up to be crude, but evidently it is a thing. And also there are nipples. I don’t remember what they are, but he talks about them.

        4. Are you kiding, Sims? You thought he was making that up? “Male” and “female” are the standard hardware terms for distinguishing one kind of connector from the other kind. I assume they have been called that for centuries, if not longer.

        5. Now I’m wondering what else you could call them.
          “Boy” and “girl”?
          “Innie” and “outie”?
          “Convex” and “concave”?
          “Euphemism Number One” and “Euphemism Number Two”?

          Next time I go to the hardware store, maybe I’ll say, “Hello, I need a … you know … pipe connector with two X chromosomes. I brought the … uh … XY pipe connector to compare the sizes.”

        6. Big Gary is correct, Sims. I remember feeling the same way as you when my husband said the same thing. He was trying to fix something and having difficulty, so he went to the hardware store. Later on he is recounting the story to me and said he tried to tell the salesman that he needed the female part. I stopped him and said what??? Did that mean what I thought it meant? It did. I was disgusted. Then I wondered if they also refer to puzzles this way. I always called the piece an innie or an outie. Guess it works the same way but it’s quite hilarious when you think about it. :mrgreen:

        7. Add me to the list of those who’d never heard “male” and “female” used to refer to hardware until my husband said it, and I couldn’t believe that I’d made it into my 20s without ever hearing that before!

        8. I must say this particular thread about the male/female plumbing parts cracked me up.
          Hardware store trip on Saturday (after visitation hours):
          Brutha Doctah Whoppah:
          “uh, yeah, I need a 1/2″ male nipple”
          Local IFB college kid working at hardware store:
          “sir, I dont appreciate the lewd comments, I am going to have to get my manager involved.”
          Brutha Doctah Whoppah:
          “ok, how about a pointy thing screwed on the end and some pipe dope”
          Local IFB college kid working at hardware store:
          “this is getting out of hand, I am asking you to stop or I am going to get my manager. I don’t do drugs and am uncomfortable talking about private parts. And I dont remember reading anything about that in LaHaye’s books.”
          Brutha Doctah Whoppah:
          “Where is your gun department? I want to shoot my dang eye out…where’s the nearest Lowe’s…”

        9. As Ed Zotti comments in “The Barn House” (his memoir about rennovating an old house), “plumbing terminology isn’t for the easily embarrassed.” You have male ends, female ends, nipples, hermaphrodite fittings, couplings, flux, P-traps, sweating a pipe– the list goes on and on.

        10. Obviously C.S.Lewis is using the word “ass” to refer to a donkey so that’s not a problem; but I do take offense at the curse words he uses in the Chronicles of Narnia. In The Magician’s Nephew the uncle says “dem” a lot which is obviously dialect for “d*mn.” There are other cases as well.

        11. No, C.S. Lewis was NOT referring to a donkey; one of his character was referring to an idiot. This is another example of a simple cultural difference. “Ass” for idiot was not considered a vulgarity in C.S. Lewis’ circle.

      2. What does that teacher think about all the asses mentioned in the Bible?

        Should we cut out the part where Jesus rode an ass into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday?

        2. Hee hee, seems the fundies get themselves into a catch-22 situation over the ass situation. Modern translations render the word as donkey which is more acceptable to fundies. But you can’t use any version but the KJV so?? They’re stuck with ass.

          But that story of Balaam and the ass HAS to be read in the KJV because it’s so funny. Changing the word to donkey it sort of loses something… :mrgreen:

          “Am I not thine ass upon which thou hast ridden every day since I was thine?” always makes me LOL! :mrgreen:

        3. All of this reminds me of the old joke, “What stretches farther, rubber or skin? Skin. The Bible says that Balaam tied his ass to a tree and walked 30 miles.”

    3. Oh the memories this stuff brings back. One fundy pastor we had said when the catalogs come he has his wife go through it and rip out the pages with women’s underwear and bathing suits lest he and his two sons be tempted. I thought you have to be kidding! 😮

      As for ripping words out of the dictionary, our last fundy pastor who wanted to emulate Hyles in every way possible said this as well. 🙄

      And he was always telling you to mark up your Bible putting circles around some words and squares around others. I had just bought a new Bible to carry to church and there was no way I was gonna mark it up. Of course that made me rebellious. 🙄

      1. I knew people whose Bibles were so marked up you couldn’t even read the verses. They had underlined in colors and commented over the preceeding verse of the ones they were commenting on, etc. I didn’t do that either. I had one class (can’t remember which one it was) where it was required. We had various colored highlighters and were supposed to highlight different things in different colors to show what thing it was (promise, command, whatever) I just bought a paperback Bible for that class because I didn’t want to mess up my good one.

      2. “… lest he and his two sons be tempted.”

        Tempted to do what? Buy women’s underwear and bathing suits? 🙂

      3. Well, I do know that at Grandpa’s cabin the toilet paper in the outhouse was the Sear’s catalog, and the lingere section was always the last to go.

    4. lol, I attended Heritage Baptist College in In. and a rogue lit teacher had us using a literature book that contained Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. I don’t know if the college didn’t regularly read their professors’ texts or what, but wow … That was eye-opening! He also took us on a very in-depth review of the Song of Solomon … Fun class! lol.

  7. The SFL reader who found this should go back and use a marker to hide the nekkidness of the fish and the bird. They obviously have no modesty.

    1. As the great Sam the Eagle once said, “Why, did you know that underneath their clothing the entire population of the world is walking around completely naked? Is that disgusting? And it’s not just people, although goodness knows that’s bad enough. Animals too, even cute little doggies and @#!*% cats, can’t be trusted. Underneath their fur – absolutely naked!

      And it’s not just the quadrupeds either. Birds too – yes, beneath our fine feathers, birds wear nothing! Nothing at all. Abs… oh m… could someone, hand me a robe? … Mmmhmm. –” With that, congratulations to the Muppets for their Oscar last night. 😉

      1. Shame on our pets for going around naked. No wonder so many people put clothing on them and think it’s cute. The pet doesn’t think it’s cute. When I see pictures like that the pet’s face is wearing a “I’m gonna kill you!” expression. :mrgreen:

        2. I know someone who owns an aquarium shop. She put up a large sign that said “Live Nude Fish.” It got a lot of attention.

          It was perfectly true: The fish in her store did not wear clothes.

    2. Walt Disney must have been a fundy, because Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are always shown wearing pants.

      1. Actually Donald Duck doesn’t wear pants. Apparently for a while he was banned in Finland for that reason… I didn’t know Fundystan includedc Finland….

      2. Nope. Donald wears a shirt, but no pants. Neither does Daisy Duck! Oh, occasionally she’ll wear a long dress, but usually she’s as bare-bottomed as Donald–even when they’re together! And they get closer than six inches, even though they’re not married! Walt Disney couldn’t have been a Fundy. the mice wear proper (well, almost–that’s an awfully short skirt on Minnie) clothes, though.

        2. As I recall, back in the 30s, the Hays Office insisted that Disney draw its cows without udders and “it was strongly suggested that they find some form of appropriate clothing.”

        4. oops, my bad. It wouldn’t have killed me to google pictures of Mickey and Donald before I opened my mouth. 😳

      3. Before WWII Disney had an artist named David Swift. David did the art work for “The Reluctant Dragon”. With no thought given, Swift put a belly button on his Dragon. The Hays office said “No navels!” Swift had a heck of a time getting those belly buttons inked over in time to make the release date.

        During the war Swift became a fighter pilot, and had his Mustang outfitted with the typical nose art. He chose the Reluctant Dragon, and made absolutely sure that it included the belly button!

        Side note. Swift later directed Hayley Mills in two of my favorite films: “Pollyanna” and “The Parent Trap”.

      1. My first thought was “(women oppressed by) the Taliban”. But maybe there’s not much difference? 😉

  9. when i was at BJU, my then-gf and i were playing this board game Tribond in the student center, where you pick a card and have to guess the common link between the three things listed. but they had blacked out any references to pop culture or whatever, and there were some cards with only one thing remaining, which of course made the game impossible. such wankers!

  10. I will confess that the immodesty displayed in the original, un censored version is the sole reason I am the degenerate person I am today.

  11. It makes me think of The Stones’ “Paint it Black”, which causes me to be tempted to listen to worldly music.

    I am, therefore, offended at Darrell for causing this.

    1. :sings:

      I see a swimmer and I want it painted black.
      No colors anymore I want them to turn black.
      I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes;
      I have to use my pen until my darkness goes.

      1. That was the direction I was thinking, except I was going to change “my darkness” to temptation”.

  13. Is that Mom, coming out of the tent in her kilt, or Braveheart, about to use a skillet for a weapon? 😯

  16. a loooong time ago grandma handed me a Guinness book
    of records (forgot what year that was), to give to my son for Christmas, and I went through it with a marker and brought up the necklines, and down the hems, and covered up the gymnasts, etc. before wrapping and putting under the tree. No wonder kiddo’s at HAC now.
    I can’t believe that was me, I just can’t believe it. How do we get brainwashed like that?

  17. this is too funny…but not really. My niece has a Jesse doll from Toy Story that her grandma sowed on a denim skirt so she wouldn’t be in those evil jeans!!!

        1. This one was. It prevented flight by sheer weight alone. Poor little Tink is walking everywhere now. EVERYONE knows “Good” little fairies (and cheerleaders) keep their feet on the floor and their knees low.

    2. I remember reading a story in one of the fundy women magazines (It may have been Christian Womanhood) about a woman whose daughter had a birthday party and one of her little friends gave her a Barbie doll. The mother was displeased with it and told the daughter she couldn’t keep it unless they sewed modest clothing for Barbie. So they did. I think they place too much emphasis on all of this stuff which causes you to think even more about it. If they didn’t make such a big deal out of it it would be sort of out of sight out of mind. 😕

      1. I was the original Project Runway with my Barbie dolls and paper towels and tape. I had to make them all “decent” before they could go into the dream house and be the domestic goddesses. Of course Ken and his cousin Alan could only come over to visit together so they wouldn’t be there alone in the house, and there was always the little sisters, Skipper and Skooter (Also modestly dressed) there to keep an eye on them.

        4. 😳 I wasn’t raised fundy and I put Ken on top of Barbie one time while playing with my cousin and everyone told on me and I got in trouble… 😯

    3. Yes… I had a mermaid barbie that my mom ruined by taping electrical tap over her breasts and stomach. She couldn’t wear the seashell bra anymore… and then my mom made me dresses for her to wear over her fins… * sigh *

      1. And really, what is the point of having a mermaid Barbie if she has to wear a dress anyway? I mean, also, she can’t swim until the water has been cleared of all the male humans and fish creatures I guess. And wearing a dress while swimming is not only difficult but can be dangerous as well.

  18. wow; the fundy censor must live a very zen buddist existence. Much like a sniper in the Vietnam war living in the tree tops always looking at success as the number of bodies vs amount of ammo used. Lurking in the shadows with a pair of scissors or a magic marker. Ready to save the world from tempatation in true fundy form; even though we didnt ask to be saved from temptation. I salute you fundy censor. I drink a shot of Patron in your honor. Go you goofy bastard and do your best to turn the world into a cleansed duggar like utopia. sorry folks I got the writing bug today. 😈

  19. I remember in jr high track there was a girl from another school who was obviously fundy. she had to wear coulottes when she ran. It was all fun and games until her coulottes got tangled in the hurtles and she smacked the ground. Then it was hilarious. Her parents should have been forced to wear coulottes and run track. I have little patience and great disdain for fundy parents and church folk. thats why I am here today.

    1. Someone found a blog post about the immodesty of female figure skaters put up during the Olympics last time and linked it for mocking at a skate fan forum. The blogger was worried about men seeing girls skating in short skirts that showed their legs. The forum posters badly wanted to comment that it is all okay because only women and gay guys were watching, but rightly assumed their comments would not pass moderation! LOL.

      I’d like to see a figure skater do some of their spins and other positions in culottes without hurting themselves.

    2. My younger sister is a very good runner, and she has to wear culottes in all of her races 🙄 I think she could cut off a minute of her time if she was more streamlined 😛

  20. There is a church we drive past in our area that has a little “School” (Gathering of children of all ages in one room to do paces) connected to it. Once as we were driving past the little girls were out in the parking lot running laps. They were all wearing culottes that went to the bottom of their knees and oversized tee shirts. I immediately had pangs of sorrow for them and wanted to pull over and load them all into my mini-van and squire them away somewhere safe. I also wished I had some way to tell them that if they would just survive until they were grown that there was hope. And then I realized that by the time they would be grown the brainwashing would have been complete… oh, am I rambling? Hmmm… where’s my tea? 🙁

        1. That misplaced comment wasn’t George’s fault. He was sitting here sipping my tea while I clicked on the wrong comment to put it under. 🙄

  21. Is it still sunbathing if you’re wearing a burkha?

    The “swimmers” caption is obviously a typographical errror. It should say “drowners.”

    1. BG – Now I know you have been on SFL for quite a while. But here are some helpful instructions to help you navigate:

      1. Scroll up to the picture of “swimmers”
      2. Place cursor over said picture
      3. Wait 1 second
      4. Read the hover-text
      5. Facepalm for duplicate comment
      6. Realize that Scorpio is just having some fun with ya :mrgreen:

      1. Whoops! 😳 Thanks for the heads-up, Scorp.
        As usual, Dar-El is way ahead of me.

        I’d withdraw my redundant comment, except that removing a comment apparently scrambles all the comment threads.

  22. My fundie school did this regularly to National Geographic. Not only did topless natives get blacked out, any article about evolution or dinosaurs was ripped out.

    Yet this was never done to infamous parts of the Bible. Song of Solomon was always there. Erotica is okay is god writes it.

    1. When I was a kid, my grandma bought us a life-time subscription to National Geographic, but we were not allowed to look at them unless there was a check mark in the upper right hand corner of the cover. The check mark meant that my mom had censored the pictures and colored over or cut out all the naughty parts.

      (And I was VERY angry that Song of Solomon was in the Bible when I was 16, almost mad at God about it. Here my parents were trying to desperately to shelter me from anything salacious and yet the Bible itself was graphicly erotic.)

    3. Ahhh the old ripped up Nat Geos! I hated those. In my house, we were only allowed to read them after a parent had read them and approved them. The objectionable bits :mrgreen: were cut out. This wasnt too bad but generally ruined whatever story was on the other side of the page. I started a lot of Nat Geo articles on page two while I was growing up.

  23. I know I have told this before, but this is a good place to repeat myself…

    My nephew got a tattoo on his upper arm of a girl who was VERY undressed. While he was napping on the couch I drew clothes on her with a sharpie marker.

    Lets just say it is a good thing my nephew loves me a lot.
    🙄

  24. It’s sad, ironic, and creepy: the fundies want to keep their children so innocent, but by marking up a simple children’s picture book, they are actually making their children MORE aware of the potential for “evil” in situations than if they’d just left it alone. They’re destroying the very innocence they’re trying to defend.

    (This is how Jimmy Kimmell’s unnecessary censorship bit works: you’d never have thought something questionable UNTIL they blacked out something. THEN, of course, your mind fills in the details.)

    1. Spot on. In fundy elementary school, there were always black spots in our library books. We would all hold the book up to the light until we figured out what word or picture it was. Then we would just giggle and talk about it the rest of the day. If they would have left it alone, we probably would have never thought twice about it.

      1. There’s a hilarious website called Out of Context Animation, which does the same thing: it contains photos of scenes from TV and movie cartoons, isolated out of context. Oh, my goodness . . .

    3. This is it exactly. My kids have seen quite a bit of (in context) nudity in their lives. Museums, artwork, and yes, National Geographic specials, lol. They don’t really comment on it. I have never seen outrageous curiousity, giggling, or silliness like I see from other kids who aren’t regularly exposed to nudity. We don’t walk around naked, but I’d like to think they have a pretty healthy view of their own and other’s bodies — they aren’t things of shame.

  25. In the late 70s I was appalled when my 5th/6th grade students at a fundy school ran to me during recess exclaiming about the books in the dumpster out back. I followed the little dears into whom I had instilled a love of books and we rescued several copies of Tom Sawyer. I marched the books in to the principal’s office and was told they’d been dumped because Tom exhibited a rebellious spirit. Well, some must have rubbed off on me. I discovered a book on Australia in the school library that had obviously not been previewed and contained some lovely pictures of that country including a rather detailed photo of a nude beach. Nice closeups. I left it on the shelf. 😀

  26. Small priestly figure performs sprinkling baptism on adult figure? I’m surprised that didn’t get cut out entirely by the “Full Immersion Only” censor. Hmm, Matthew? Mark? Luke? I know it’s in here somewhere. Full immers….

  27. The fundy school I attended was in what was originally a Catholic building. There were a couple of gorgeous old paintings of Christ on the cross, Mary, etc. They were covered with sheets because they were Catholic! Or maybe it was because Jesus was showing too much skin, I don’t know.

    1. Your story reminds me of something that happened at the last fundy church I went to. We were going to have a candlelight service,and lo and behold, we had no candlesticks. Someone went up to the dollar store to get some candlesticks but of course they had to be religious-themed. Turned out the person brought back a couple of candlesticks in the shape of crucifixes. So what did the pastor do? He ordered my husband to use 3/8 inch white ribbon and wrap the candlesticks so the figure of Jesus couldn’t be seen! Never mind that they were clear glass and if they had just been turned away from the congregation no one would have ever noticed.

      And I agree with a lot of comments on here–how many people would have thought twice about stuff if the pastor hadn’t brought it to their attention?
      The band-aid rule comes to mind . . .

      1. LOL, even Catholic-shaped wax is of the devil! What about Rick Santorum? He says he’s a Christian, but is he REALLY? I mean, if he was truly born-again, the Holy Spirit would have led him out of Catholicism. So who do the fundies vote for to get evil Obama out of office?

  28. That compromiser: that freakishly large bird is flyin’ round nekkid in front of Gawd and evverbody. And, it looks like the skillet wielder in the first picture crammed her cumbersome skirt into her drawers when she went tinkle in the dark at 4:00 a.m. Them thangs is dangerous, and they can be embarrassin’.

  29. On the “drowners” page… is the one on the right leaving Bite-sized Baby Ruths in the water as he/she goes? 😯

    1. Its a reactive propulsion system – she is expelling gas in the opposite direction of her line of travel – this is necessary when swimming in proper fundy “holy attire” since the human body is unable to generate enough thrust to push 5 yards of denim through the water

  31. I think whoever is standing in front of the tent is about to use the skillet to cook the bear her wrap/skirt is made from.

    1. To show the world, their kids and everyone how *mainstream* they can be while still maintaining their standards.

  33. What other way to teach kiddies that swimming in heavy black burlap is safe and enjoyable? Modesty really has nothing to do with it.

    Ok, gotta go put on my black wool robe and hop in the shower now. Like they taught me in Sunday School: Water and skin don’t mix. That’s why Jesus walked on it.

  34. New here, looking through stuff. This is crazy but…… my sister cut out little skirts with ankles and feet beneath them and put them over top of pictures of girls wearing pants in any photos she took.

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