Map: Pearl Clutchers in Hot Spring County

Is the film Night of the Living Dead too racy for daytime television? What about double entendres about "spotted dick" pudding? Or a travel documentary about Paris featuring burlesque dancers and a museum with nude paintings? These were just some of the federal obscenity complaints that made Hot Spring County, Arkansas, the most prudish place in America.

The most infamous job of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is to punish obscenity on the airwaves, and it's always relied on public feedback to do so. In the 1970s, a complaint about George Carlin's "seven dirty words you can't say on television" routine led to a Supreme Court ruling allowing the FCC to regulate "obscene, indecent, and profane" content on the airwaves.

New technologies have made this power less relevant, since cable news and online streaming fall outside the FCC's jurisdiction. They've also made it easier to see who's complaining. For a decade, the FCC has published the time stamp and ZIP code of each individual obscenity complaint online.

By far, Hot Spring County was the most complaint-dense place in the continental United States, with over 51 complaints per 10,000 residents over the past decade. The runner-up, Yankton County, South Dakota, had only 21 complaints per 10,000 residents. Rounding out the top three was Lake County, Indiana, just outside of Chicago, with six complaints per 10,000 residents.

Outside the mainland, Puerto Ricans also make a lot of complaints to the FCC. The capital city of San Juan sent 824 complaints over the past decade—an average of 25 complaints per 10,000 residents. Of Puerto Rico's 78 municipios, 29 had more than six complaints per 10,000 residents.

Places with fewer than 40 complaints are excluded from the calculation. Because the actual content of the complaints isn't available online, Reason filed a Freedom of Information Act request for Hot Spring County residents' messages to the FCC.

Many of the complaints were the expected gripes about cursing in rap songs and violent action movies. A few of them were stranger. Complainants were disgusted by an episode of The X-Files showing a psychiatric patient throwing "dookie," a documentary showing an animal dissection, and a razor commercial that showed women "behind tiny bushes trimming them into the runway/heart shapes that girls trim their pubic hair aka bushes into."

FCC officials may have gotten tired of hearing from the good people of Hot Spring County. At least, that's what the person complaining about the Paris travel show thought: "Yes this is a regular broadcast channel—NOT A CABLE CHANNEL—for the FCC reviewer that inevitably deems every channel cable so they don't have to deal with it! Ugh!"

Top 100 U.S. counties for FCC complaints per 100,000 residents:

Source: FCC Open Data; U.S. Census 2020

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