The Anti-Autonomy Device: The Hays Code, Tits, and Le$bean Poetry

By Chimera Mohammadi

Imagine you’re a film censor, dedicated to protecting the morality of American cinema from such threats as “sexual perversion.” Which of the following would you flag as objectionable?

1. A man is chased through the streets by a group of homeless boys he has sexually assaulted and is cannibalized by them
2. A cop hunting a gay serial killer turns gay and begins to murder gay men himself
3. Two adults pursue a Queer romantic relationship

According to the Motion Picture Production Code—A.K.A. the Hays Code—the answer is C. 

Now, imagine you’re a content reviewer, working hard to clean smut off social media. Which of the following do you find disturbing and/or sexual enough to warrant erasure?

1. A person breastfeeding a child
2. A highly sexualized photo of a woman’s breasts
3. Anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech and harassment

Quite frequently, the answer is A.

Do these answers seem similar? While the Hays Code [officially] ended in 1968, it still maintains a powerful grip on the media we’re allowed to consume. Censorship, from the Hays Code to social media guidelines, is an anti-autonomy tool that strips women and Queer people of their own stories, replacing them with narratives that perpetuate their objectification and vilification. Queer trauma porn and horror continue to be celebrated in mainstream media, while authentic Queer stories, art, and poetry are erased. Depictions of women’s* bodies dominate art, advertising, and the visual landscape of our culture, but women’s bodies on social media are harshly policed. The seemingly paradoxical and arbitrary facets of modern censorship faced by Queer and women artists can be explained by its use as a tool of oppression.

In 1934, the American film industry established a set of censorship guidelines: the Hays Code. The list—which included “white slavery” and “ridicule of the clergy”—listed number four as “any inference of sex perversion.” This vague phrase served as a catch-all for Queerness, reducing it to any deviation from the norm and an active threat to any viewers who recognize it. 

In the decades that followed, Queerness was exhibited near-exclusively as a symptom of villainy. Answer A comes from the 1959 film Suddenly, Last Summer, a box office hit that grossed $9 million despite being a “preposterous and monotonous potpourri of incest, homosexuality, psychiatry, and, so help me, cannibalism” (—the New Yorker). Answer B is the plot of Cruising (dir. Friedkin 1980), which—despite protests by gay activists horrified by its representation of Queerness as a contagious and fatal disease of the mind—saw a box office total of $19.8 million. Movies such as Psycho (1960), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Insidious: Chapter 2 (2013), and even Tár (2022) are only a few highlights in a long line of films that frame Queer people as the main perpetrators of sexual violence.

For the decades (if not centuries) that Queer people have been the cultural scapegoats of sexual aggression, our voices and creative output have been silenced or hidden. Following his repeated removal from Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, Queer artist Gio Black Peter hosted a private exhibition with 15 other censored Queer and female artists in 2018. The majority of the suppressed works displayed Queer/female intimacy and bodies in playful, lighthearted photography. Even non-sexual Queer self-expression is policed; Instagram and Tiktok have repeatedly erased Zoe Leonard’s politically-charged poem, “I want a dyke for president.”

The same myth that equates Queer people with sexual predators equates women with sexual prey. In most of the films listed above, women are the helpless victims of Queer sexual violence.  The camera uses female nudity as a way to reduce women to their bodies, and their bodies to manifestations of desire/temptation—think of a dead Marion Crane lying on the shower floor and the body parts littering Buffalo Bill’s hideout. This is acceptable when the art produced is used to amplify the sexual subjugation of women, but not when it threatens the dominant understanding.When the body of a woman is shown for any purpose aside from heterosexual male gratification or the promotion of unrealistic beauty standards, it becomes objectionable. 

Victoria’s Secret boasts 76.3 million followers on Instagram and 3,816 posts, the vast majority of which depict models in lingerie. According to digital watchdog collective Salty, VS even has a hand in shaping Instagram’s female nudity guidelines. But while VS is allowed to display and profit from women’s bodies, artist Clarity Haynes is not. Haynes’s oil paintings of trans and female torsos are not sexualized, but tender, thorough, realistic, and human. Instagram constantly blocks and flags their work, and their account (@/alesbiangaze) has been repeatedly threatened with deactivation. From Mammography 2 by Alix Marie to the Venus of Willendorf (for crying out loud!), non-sexual depictions of women’s bodies are restricted due to their “sexual nature” by Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. But as creators find ways to get around AI policing on social media, could these censorship guidelines be backfiring?

The Hays Code necessitated the practice of queercoding, the reduction of Queer representation to a subtextual wink at stereotypes, such as a swishy walk, a slight lisp, or the gardenia-scented handkerchief in The Maltese Falcon (1941). We can find similar practices on social media today. Algospeak is the most literal example, a mutated online dialect that obscures ban-worthy words from AI censors with bizarre spelling variations, like “le$bean” for lesbian, “corn” for porn, “leg booty” for LGBT, and “cornucopia” for homophobia. Women post photos under “#fakebody” in an eerie attempt to trick AI into classifying their bodies as objects to get around nudity guidelines. Artist Joanne Leah (@/twofacedkitten on Instagram) is inventing a new eroticism incomprehensible to AI by painting her models in outlandish palettes and decontextualizing their body parts. 

We learn more about the true purpose of censorship from what is allowed than from what isn’t. When the Hays code banned Queer protagonists and allowed Queer villains, it told audiences that Queerness and Queer people were evil, perverted, and malevolent. Today, our contradictory social media guidelines tell women that their bodies are not their own, but sexual objects for the consumption of the masses and the exploitation of private companies. However, the anti-autonomy device of censorship is ultimately incapable of true erasure. Just as the Hays Code birthed underground Queer symbology, algorithmic censorship is birthing a new taboo absurdism, often more provocative than what it was initially intended to hide.

*As an AFAB, non-binary person, I know that referring to a quintessential “woman’s body” is reductive. Some non-binary and trans bodies may be perceived as female, and some women’s bodies may not. I’ve opted to use language that reflects the binary ideology under which non-male bodies are policed.

This feature is from our third print issue with the theme of Censorship. To purchase a copy, please visit our online shop.