Proof that Bluesky is primmer than the Victorians

I'm close to completing that Book Challenge meme:

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

You can see my choices so far on Twitter and Bluesky.

One of them is Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet. Not only is it beautifully written, it also reinforced a view I had come to not long before I encountered it: namely, that the Victorians were far less Victorian that we imagine. 

The caricatured view we have formed of them serves a way of congratulating ourselves for not being like that. Notably, while the Victorians were horribly repressed when it came to sex, we are wonderfully liberated.

In reality the idea of covering table legs for the sake of decency, for instance, was a joke that 19th-century Britons told at the expense of the straitlaced Americans.

So I was amused that the cover of Inventing the Victorians, which features a chaste Victorian nude, was flagged on Bluesky as 'Adult Content'. Users of the platform have to click on this warning to view the naughty image.

I've no quarrel with Bluesky doing this: you can override the setting if you wish and many people have signed up with them because they want a more civilised place to hang out than Twitter is now.

But this flag does tend to support the thesis of the book it is worried about.