Censorship is a beast with many heads. One of the more insidious kinds is moral muzzling, embodied in that recent arrival on the literary scene, the “sensitivity reader”. Commercial firms will supply their sniffing services for a fee (currently around £200, one is told).
These inspectors undertake to “ouch-proof” as yet unpublished and unperformed work lest it bruise or awaken buried trauma in susceptible consumers. The sensitivity reader’s purpose in life? “Safetyism” or — as critics have more bluntly put it — “the coddling of the human mind”.
In early March this year the national press reported that Ladybird Books had hired “sensitivity” and “inclusivity” readers to review their catalogue of fairy tales for “offensive content”. Classics such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were to be re-examined after being branded “outdated or harmful” for a lack of “inclusivity” and “problematic tropes”.
Highly outdated was a “lack of diversity among blonde-haired and blue-eyed protagonists”. Other “offensive tropes” were “ageism, fatism and ‘presumptions of gender pronouns’”. And wolves with big teeth eating little girls in red riding hoods, it goes without saying. The firm Inclusive Minds, in business since 2013, offers to supply “inclusivity ambassadors” to producers of children’s books. These ambassadors (some, reportedly, as young as eight) have “many different lived experiences and are willing to share their insight”. Let there be safetyism at bedtime.
Is a 10-year-old who has caught glimpses of porn going to be traumatised by Augustus Gloop being “fat”?
More insidious than the in-person sensitivity reader is a universal culture of cautiousness — the new orthodoxy. The author, the institution, the editor anticipates and sidesteps what “might” hurt or offend “someone”. Sensitivity is the parrot on the shoulder cawing “Safetyism! Safetyism!”.
In 2021 a Globe Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet — in which the young lovers embrace in orgasmic suicide — carried in its programme the phone number of the Samaritans. Shakespeare’s theatre had to compete for custom in his day with the nearby bull and bear baiting ring. He rose to the challenge. Recall the “out vile jelly” deoculation scene in King Lear?
Neil Gaiman — one of the great writers of our time — confronts the sensitivity issue in his short story collection provocatively entitled Trigger Warning. Should literature like his, Gaiman asks, be a “safe place”? On the contrary. His fiction aims to loose “the monsters in our cupboards and our minds”. His business is to shock.
Good for Neil. But shocking is one thing, hurting is something else. I, like others I’ve spoken to, am in favour that in Disney’s next Snow White movie the seven “dwarfs” are fully-grown men. As someone who was routinely nicknamed “Dopey” and “Big Ears” at junior school I can still remember how hurtful the original 1939 movie was in my early life. I can only imagine how wounding it is for those genuinely suffering from restricted growth.
A little boy’s tears can be brushed away and soothed but there is a larger question. Just how sensitive as a nation of readers and viewers are we? Or, put another way, are we making ourselves?
On January 31 this year a report presented by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, informed us that one in 10 children have watched pornography by the time they are nine. It swells to a quarter by the time the kids leave primary school. By the age of 18, four out of five of those surveyed had seen pornography involving violence. And “nearly half” of the male 16-to-21-year-olds who took part in the survey assumed girls either “expect” or “enjoy” sex which involves physical aggression.
The Online Safety Bill has stumbled its way through Parliament. It’s 20 years too late. We’ve already desensitised generations of the young who are now, many of them, adult readers and viewers.
Is a 10-year-old who has caught glimpses of hardcore really going to be traumatised by the fact that Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is “fat” (a detail the publisher’s hired sensitivity readers wanted suppressed); or a 19-year-old who thinks erotic aggression is okay likely to be harrowed by the occasional casual racism in Fleming’s James Bond series (which again the publisher’s sensitivity readers wanted scrubbed out)?
The absurdities of sensitivity reading we’ve been tickled by recently are rightly pooh-poohed. But sensitivity, and desensitisation, in a larger way, are issues which we, as a culture and its consumers, should have a long hard think about. Starting now.
