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These inspectors undertake to “ouch-proof” as yet unpublished and unperformed work lest it bruise or awaken buried trauma in susceptible consumers.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”.
