The rise of sensitivity readers: Are we censoring our culture into silence?

The rise of sensitivity readers: Are we censoring our culture into silence?

Explores how sensitivity readers and cancel culture impact free speech, literature, and artistic expression in modern society.
Published on

Key topics:

  • Sensitivity readers are criticised as modern-day censors.

  • Classic books are being altered or banned for perceived offensiveness.

  • Cancel culture threatens free speech and open debate in democratic societies

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By Athalie Russell Besseling*

“I’ll offend you when I like but you dare not offend me.” This seems increasingly to be the mantra in developed countries, where freedom of speech is no longer a given, and vociferous minorities are bullying the (often silent) majority. It’s an age-old trend, diametrically opposed to freedom of thought and lively debate, both of which indicate the health of a society.

Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of individual freedom and a basic right as part of democratic systems. Many great books and films and works of art have contributed massively to the adoption of freedom of speech and the belief in it. But, as usual, there are those who are deeply offended by the opinions of others – so much so that we have a new term for it, which is ‘cancel culture’.

If some people don’t like what you say, they won’t defend to the death your right to say it (as liberal philosophers suggested we do), but will do their utmost to prevent you from being heard. Young students are booing speakers off campuses without letting them express views the kids don’t like, even at the world’s most venerable universities, including Oxford and Cambridge.

Sometimes this ‘cancel’ strategy is also supposedly used to prevent young, impressionable minds from being tainted or corrupted.

Just for context: powers-that-be in an American state school system have recently fired a headmistress for showing art students pictures of Michelangelo’s sublime statue of David, one of the greatest artworks in the world, presumably because he’s not wearing underpants. Heaven forfend that young people should realise we/they have genitalia. Even now, in the 21st century, there are way too many societies with no freedom of speech, where it is penalised by torture and death. And to those who have had the privilege of reading great literature – learnt from it, shed tears over the oppression it has exposed or the human truths it has revealed and the wrongs and evils it has highlighted – this censorship is anathema.

Consider the new job description in the publishing world. Wikipedia explains it succinctly. “A sensitivity reader is someone who reads a literary work, looking for perceived offensive content, stereotypes and bias, creating a report for an author or publisher with suggested changes.”

The key words here are ‘looking’, i.e. actively seeking out offence, as well as ‘perceived’. In whose perception is content offensive? ‘Ay, there’s the rub,’ as Shakespeare might have said.

Which takes us to the Bard’s comedy “Twelfth Night, a favourite with Shakespearean audiences. Part of what makes Shakespeare so popular is his themes, which have evergreen relevance. However, his works have been banned everywhere from Asia to America at various points. With its joyous approach to cross-dressing characters, Twelfth Night was banned in the school system in Merrimack, New Hampshire, for ‘encouraging homosexuality.’”

The sensitivity reader. The very title is incongruous. Whose sensitivities are we dealing with here? Who decides which content is sensitive and which is suitable and for whom? It’s rather like the old conundrums, ‘Who polices the police?’ and ‘Who judges the judges?’.

In fact, ‘sensitive’ souls have been rummaging through great art and literature since the beginning of history as we know it. Take George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. This extraordinary, visionary book was published in 1949 and tells us that ‘Big Brother’ is watching us, which is pretty relevant to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as well as to authoritarian political systems. Orwell visualised a dreadful, uniform society in which freedom of thought led to torture and brainwashing by the ‘Thought Police’.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has been banned countless times, from the Soviet Union to China to Texas. In Texas, anyone can buy countless guns without a licence or any kind of scrutiny. It turns out that oppressive communist regimes and the hat -‘n’-boot-wearing state of Texas thought that Orwell was referring to, well, oppressive communist regimes – and Texas. In fact, Orwell was imagining the future of a dystopian Britain. His story could, and does, and no doubt always will, apply to thousands of places and situations.

A sensitivity reader is a just a censor. Censorship is as old as so-called civilisation and experts at it were the apartheid Censor Board. Some readers of this article may be too youthful to remember them. Oh, what a bunch they were. Sourfaced bigots in ill-fitting suits (no flashy designer gear for them) who with their pens and magnifying glasses swept through literature as well as films and art that might criticise the prevailing system.

Movie buffs know The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the first film ever to reach South Africa that included a ‘sweet transvestite’ in the form of legendary actor Tim Curry as Dr Frank N.Furter, in fishnet tights and red lipstick. As well as a beautiful golden boy whom the good doctor had created in his lab. Various macabre singing/dancing personalities and a naïve young American couple whose stereotypical natures were forever changed by encountering these aliens (on a stormy night in a horror-movie castle) completed the picture.

Astonishingly the bemused censors, never having seen anything remotely like it, let it through (having removed the parts directly involving sex, including a beautiful song by a young Susan Sarandon, called Touch Me). Those censors must have had strange dreams ever after.

But back to current sensitivity readers. The books their pens are slashing at are, for example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the deepest South of America in 1935. The many themes of the book are bigotry, racism, small town small-mindedness, oppression, fear and persecution of anyone who is “other” (the unforgettable recluse Boo Radley), and more

All marvellously told from the point of view of Scout, an eight-year-old tomboy who is just trying to come to grips with all the above, doesn’t understand any of it and who is guided by her father Atticus Finch, the lawyer who is the epitome of goodness and fairness

It’s a book worth re-reading every five years or so. Set in 1935 it naturally includes racially derogatory words used by some characters and various other aspects of everyday reality at the time.

By changing those the book is ruined, its message despoiled. Indeed, how does one rewrite the story without its key factors? But even worse, acceding to the whims of censors who are using today’s norms or prejudices (which were not yesterday’s and will not be tomorrow’s) the reader is deprived of the real experience of the story in its place and time. The hatred and bigotry spewed from the mouth of a dear old spinster who bakes cakes for children and praises the lord at every turn is a shock that makes the reader think. What will she say when the censor’s pen denudes her dialogue? The meaning will be gone as will the power of her words.

So, dear reader, let us resist the censors who would tell us what to say, how to say it and whether we may say it at all. Like bad smells they will always be with us. And whether they like it or not, most of humanity will always long for freedom, without dictatorship as to what we may see, or read, or write, or even think.

Let’s defend each other’s right to express ourselves, as long as – and this is key – we do no one else any harm.

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