Reading the subtitles

I was surfing Astro and stopped on 8TV the other night. It was a programme called "Rodger Dodger". It was in English with BM subtitles.

A group of yuppies were discussing the role of men and women, and whether they needed each other. Or something to that effect. The talk moved on to sex and whether women really needed men or not in this act. As I watched the conversation unfold, whenever the protagonist mentioned "vagina" or "clitoris", the words would be bleeped out of oblivion. So you'd see the characters mouths moving but you wouldn't hear the word uttered. Sigh...nothing new since we all know how taboo it is in this day and age in this country to talk about sex and genitalia or anything related to either.

What the censors at Astro failed to do was bleep out the subtitles as well. So while the characters are "air-talking" about vaginas and clitorises (is that the plural?), any viewer with brains the size of a peanut could figure out for themselves what they were saying by reading the subtitles. In the BM version, of course, which worked out to be "vagina" and "klitoris" since knowing how taboo we all are about sex, I doubt if we could find the equivalent of the female anatomy translated in BM. We're talking about proper BM and not slang or coarse words.

I digress. If the censor's job is to censor what they or the government think is taboo, how did bleeping out the uttered word but leaving the subtitles intact serve as doing their job?

So I suppose, if there were any other reason at all to drive our literacy rate up, it would be to tell our kids, "Hey, even if they censor it on the TV, if you're literate, you can understand what they say by reading the subtitles. So go finish conjugating those vowels."