seggs education

how a historic potty mouth helps us understand algorithmic censorship

In 1948, American author Norman Mailer fucked up.

Literally. His debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, contained so many instances of the word “fuck” that his publishers refused to print it.

Understandably, Norman was pissed. He knew he had to remove the obscenities, but didn’t want to give his editors the satisfaction, so he went through and replaced every “fuck” with the word “fug.” The book got published and became a national bestseller.

The picture used on the cover of Norman’s book, and how I like to imagine he felt when receiving editorial feedback.

While this might seem like a silly anecdote, the same story is playing out on social media every day. TikTok’s algorithm suppresses any posts with the keyword “sex,” since they’re more likely to contain controversial content. This means that users have had to come up with creative workarounds, like substituting the letter e in the words s*x and s3x.

But the most widely used solution appears to have done the same thing that Norman Mailer did three-quarters of a century ago. The word seggs, adopted by everyone from doctors to pornstars to sex educators, relies on the replacement of a /k/ sound with a /g/ sound—exactly the kind of voicing change we saw with the word fug. 

And not only is the phonetic process the same, but the semantic process is too. At its core, everybody knows what seggs means, just like everybody knew what fug meant. The ideas of sex and fuck are still being communicated, only in a less offensive way. I’ve always found that silly about minced oaths—it’s not actually the definition that offends us as much as it is the word itself. The spelling or pronunciation invariably shocks us more than the underlying idea.¹

Apparently, TikTok’s algorithm agrees, which is why creators have increasingly turned to using seggs. As I write this, over 39,000 posts have been made with the hashtag #seggseducation alone, and we even have medical professors saying the word out loud.

It’s easy to feel concerned about this. Whenever technology advances, there’s always a lot of hand-wringing that we’re doomed as a society, and I’ve come across plenty of discourse about how TikTok’s algorithm is irreparably changing our language.

But if you ignore the doomsayers, the Norman Mailer analogy is oddly comforting. It’s beautiful that we’re dodging media censorship in the same way we always have. Seggs and fug are both testaments to human resilience, teaching us that we’ll constantly find new ways to talk about naughty topics. I think that fucks.

1.  Rebecca Roache has a great discussion of this in her book For F*ck's Sake: Why Swearing is Shocking, Rude, and Fun. Highly recommend.