The gross trend of sanitizing fiction is ever-growing thanks to this plague of wokeness that seems to have spread to every aspect of our lives. I’m talking about sensitive readers and editors. PUKE. Has there ever been a greater threat to creativity? Maybe Fascist Europe or Mao-era Communism? You know the old idea of purification and purging society of bad ideas, bad people, and apparently bad books…etc….
Wokeness and by extension, this disgusting trend of sensitivity readers/editors, claim that it is somehow making things better, removing ‘offensive’ or ‘triggering’ material. Yet maybe the solution isn’t sanitizing a book but letting a reader take the responsibility of deciding whether or not to read a book.
I don’t want publishers telling me what I can and cannot handle. I don’t want to be warned about what is inside it. I bought the damn book so let me decide
I understand people go through a lot of things in their life. I knew a lady who refused to watch horror movies because she was the victim of a home invasion and just couldn’t handle the buildup of fear and anxiety even a simple scary movie stirred up inside of her. But she didn’t insist all horror movies be removed. She simply made the adult decision not to watch them. If by chance she flipped on a movie and it turned out to be a horror or thriller, she just turned the channel. Yeah, it really is that simple. Turn the channel, stop reading the book. Don’t expect the world to conform to you as you’ll be disappointed and really tired in the end.
How anyone can support the idea of sensitivity readers/editors is beyond me. If you’re not familiar with these terms you should be, because in case you didn’t notice indie and mainstream fiction these days is bland, underwhelming, and extremely cookie-cutter. Coincidence? I think not.
Whether it's published by a major house or a single person, writing these days lacks anything exciting or controversial. There is no pleasure in stumbling upon forbidden fruit when a book is first subtitled ‘an extreme horror novel’ and then starts out with several content warnings that lay out exactly what you’ll find in the book. Why are authors putting these labels on their work?!
It’s like everyone forgot about those stupid Parental Advisory stickers they came up with in the 1980s for music. Everyone hated those! Oh, everyone but Tipper and the conservatives who thought it was just brilliant!That they were saving the children, blah blah blah…. But now the left has transformed into the new conservatives with all its warnings, labels, cancellation, and fucking sensitivity nonsense that just will not end. And it’s scary to see how many people have taken the Kool-Aid and jumped right on board without even questioning what is at stake. Just what the hell is going on?!! And why are authors, artists, and readers saying it's okay??
In case you’re not familiar with the term sensitivity reader/editor, it's a reader (or editor) who is hired by a publishing house or can even be freelanced by an indie author, to read through a book before publishing. They review the book and make note of any potentially damaging material that could possibly offend a minority, a certain group of people, culture, etc by using certain language, stereotypes, and whatever else fuckery people deem ‘insensitive’ these days which is basically everything considering even the likes of classic children’s authors like Roald Dahl are having their books raped.
Books new and old are being scrubbed clean for a number of reasons, profit, political agenda, timidness, you name it, it's gross.
It seems gone are days when you could pick up a book and be surprised by the content. Readers don’t like to be surprised anymore. Apparently, everyone needs to ‘prepare’ themselves with a warning rather than having the brain to simply close the book and stop reading. Do you know what people used to do back in the day (the 90s) when they started reading a book they hated or made them upset? They threw it against a wall. They used it as a doorstop. They gave it away or left it on a park bench in the rain. They lit it on fire. They didn’t keep reading and then cry about how it made them feel bad or how it’s offensive to 0.000001% of a culture that died out 1 million years ago.
People all the time rant about how censorship is bad and yet they censor THEMSELVES in the name of political correctness so that others don’t get ‘triggered’ by an off-hand remark a FICTIONAL character makes in a FICTIONAL book.
So let me get this straight, censorship is bad but hiring someone to tell us what to remove from our writing is…. good?
Whatever….. I, for one, am all in when it comes to censorship because without it it means we have to accept everything. That bottom-of-the-barrel racist propaganda like The Turner Diaries is on equal footing with Noam Chomsky. And we all know that isn’t right. I think people like to say they are against censorship because to say you believe some things should be censored is harder. You have to have a reasonable opinion to argue why certain things should be censored or not. And personal opinions are ‘toxic’ these days unless they are first validated by a large group of others who believe the exact same thing, then apparently it's ‘brave’ to stand for something. Hm.
People hate censorship yet they fear it so much they would rather censor themselves than risk being ‘canceled’ by some idiots on the internet. WEAK. Just don’t go on the internet and you’ll be fine.
If society doesn’t stop embracing this weird, manufactured, sugar-coated genteel outlook then AI will have no problem taking over while people become the robots. You see it now, people who are unable to form an actual opinion or a genuine reaction to something outside of their sanitized bubble. They turn to their phones to ask how they should respond, what should they do or say.
Is this happening because uncomfortable situations, unpopular views, etc. are being scrubbed out from books and movies? After all, now if you even get the slight hint that something might make you even a little uncomfortable you don’t have to confront it head-on, you can simply avoid it without ever having to actually deal with it. And now with sensitivity readers, it's edited out before you even know it's there. Grow a spine snowflake.
I think writers should reject the idea of sensitivity writers/editors, as well as any type of warnings for their books. Maybe that would help revive the literary corpse that we all just seem to be kicking around hoping something will happen, but we know it won’t because writing and the arts are very, very fucking dead. Wokeness will continue to corrode the arts and by extension our society if we let it.
