Contributed by Bill Arning / Museums and theaters are hard-pressed to introduce younger audiences to canonical works whose titles contain the word “rape.” Art history, drawn largely from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology, is filled with images far more disturbing than most contemporary films. Renaissance works, for example, depict the Massacre of the Innocents: screaming infants being slaughtered in sprawling spectacles. Such works were intended to bring scripture vividly to life for largely illiterate audiences while satisfying the appetite for grand drama before cinema. Today, however, the digital world censors language in ways that often flatten historical nuance. Social-media algorithms routinely block “rape,” making it increasingly difficult to illuminate works such as Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, which accords the heroine profound dignity and moral courage. Contemporary audiences are shielded not only from discomfiting language but also from the complicated history it describes.