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Posts Tagged ‘Banned Books Week’

Suppression

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2018| 4 Comments »

The name “Banned Books Week” is far too narrow to encompass everything we should be talking about, and a week is far too limited a time to be talking about it.  –  “The Censor-Moron”

As I’ve written several times over the past few years, top-down censorship had become very rare in the US; alas, in just the past year since the last Banned Books Week, it has returned with a vengeance.  The passage of FOSTA, a law which both authorizes direct federal censorship of the internet (by creating a new category of banned speech) and exerts a powerful chilling effect (by an unconstitutionally vague description of what might be included in that category), is the worst example, but it is by no means the only one.  Congress has also conducted an inquisition of Facebook and Twitter over paranoid fantasies and the idiotically-named non-category “fake news”, with several of the inquisitors hinting at the possibility of direct censorship (or as they prefer to call it, “regulation”); the EU has also threatened to censor the social media giants using the excuse of “hate speech”.  In the UK, a member of Parliament actually wants to ban any online discussion that the police cannot eavesdrop on, and in the US cops are demanding the power both to prosecute those who criticize them and to suppress books about police violence; in some prisons, the one area of society completely under police control, “drugs” are being used as an excuse to ban books entirely in favor of expensive e-book readers (that the state gets a cut of, natch) with a very limited library:

Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections is planning to ban free book donations to inmates by mail, claiming that this is a “primary avenue for drugs” to enter prisons.  But the move coincides with a renewed push to get prisoners buying into a pricey prison eBook system…the Prisoners Lit Project and others…said that Pennsylvania prisons’ libraries are underfunded and often inaccessible and [vowed to] challenge…the new policy…The tablet devices hawked by the DOC are bulky and low-end, with tiny low-definition color displays not intended for reading at length, rudimentary hardware and translucent materials to prevent them being used to hide contraband.  They cost $147 plus tax, about three times the price of the only extant consumer device, the $50 Amazon Fire, with similar specifications.  There is no repair service: any problems with the device and you have to buy a new one.  Then prisoners must pay a minimum of $3 each per eBook from the same state-contracted vendor, which offers a list of only 8,500 titles…other states are embarking on similar plans, and they’re likely to meet stiff court challenges…

If this all wasn’t bad enough, consider the UK, which wants to subject people to police violence for the “crime” of wrongthink:

…The latest Orwellian invitation to rat out offensive speakers was issued by the South Yorkshire Police…[who]…took to Twitter to remind people…”In addition to reporting hate crime, please report non-crime hate incidents…like offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing.”  It is chilling that cops, whose only business should be fighting crime, now want to hear about non-crime.  Anyone who has even a sliver of respect for the ideal of liberty, for the right of people to go about their lives without being watched or narked on, should be seriously concerned that cops would want to hear about non-criminal behavior, otherwise known as everyday behavior…This is Stasi territory.  Coppers asking citizens to file reports on things they have read or overheard really should have disappeared from Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Yet here it still is, this GDR-style instruction to eavesdrop and squeal, though now it’s happening on the other side of the old Iron Curtain…

Though lily-livered fools have been demanding they be “protected” from ideas they don’t like for several years now, it’s terrifying how quickly this terrible idea has moved from the lunatic fringe to the mainstream, and how eagerly jackbooted thugs have seized upon it as yet another way to control the thoughts of the entire population via threats of violence.

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Unwise Monkeys

Posted in Perception, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , on September 25, 2017| 1 Comment »

Every year the last week of September is designated as Banned Books Week, but as I wrote for the occasion last year:

…top-down state censorship…is very rare now in the United States…the majority of “challenges” now…originate not with state officials or other “authorities”, but with individuals seeking to “protect the children” from thoughts their parents don’t want them to have…demands that books be burned controlled are just as likely to come from soi-disant “progressives” as from cultural conservatives, and the reasons may include “racism”, “sexism”, “religious viewpoint”, “violence” and so on…the majority of censorship now is the result of morons trying to self-lobotomize our entire culture…and…the same “right-thinking” folks who would march in protest if a school library declined to stock And Tango Makes Three grow strangely silent when Twitter bans a member’s account for “hate speech”, and may even be willing to march in support of censoring escort ads on Backpage…

Over the last few years, my “self-lobotomization” metaphor has grown a bit more literal; the “children” people are seeking to “protect” from icky thoughts are now actually young adults at universities, and the ones demanding they be “protected” are now as often as not the students themselves.  People who, like me, received our university degrees in the last century (especially those whose younger professors were themselves university students in the radical ’60s), find it almost unfathomable that biological and legal adults are not merely accepting, but demanding they be shielded from ideas they find uncomfortable for one reason or another; they not only display an ovine passivity in the face of censorship, but actively run to the nanny-state to hide in her skirts lest they see or hear some idea or word, or see some image, that will cause some ripple in the placid lakes of their privileged lives and perhaps actually require them to think rather than merely consuming and regurgitating the dogma they’ve been spoon-fed.  Nor are sheltered young people in their late teens the only ones hiding their eyes from reality like children; even fully-fledged adults in their thirties and forties are belching up idiocy about “hate speech”, apparently wholly unable to comprehend…

…that someone else with very different ideas about what constitutes a menace will occupy the throne in a very short time, and [any]…weapon [given to the old boss] will still be available to [the new boss]…to use however he pleases.  Useful idiots are so convinced of their own righteousness, they’re unable to conceive of anyone branding them as evil.  It’s the result of a sheltered existence in which the force of the state has never been used against them, just against others they can feel good about standing up for…“hate crime” laws have already been extended to cops via so-called “blue lives matter” laws in several states…it’s only one more step to criminalizing speech that criticizes cops or politicians, and a package of laws going through Congress right now paves the way for paying for sex to be classified as a “hate crime” by defining it as “gender-based violence”.  And after that, it’s just one step…to defining speech about decriminalization as “hate speech” because it “promotes gender-based violence”…

The so-called “three wise monkeys” advise us to “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”.  That last directive might be good personal advice, but it becomes tyranny when “authorities” are the ones who get to decide what constitutes “evil” and enforce the diktat with violence.  But the first two directives, though perhaps intended in the same spirit as “ignorance is bliss”, are poor advice to any free adult; if one never allows himself to know what evil looks or sounds like, how will he recognize it when it slides up next to him…or installs itself as the censoring “authority” with the help of all the other unwise monkeys?

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The Censor-Moron

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , on September 26, 2016| 8 Comments »

Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness.  –  D.H. Lawrence

defend-the-1st-amendmentEvery year, the last week of September is designated as “Banned Books Week“; the name seems to imply the kind of top-down state censorship which was at one time very common even in the US, and is still common in many countries we generally think of as advanced ones with Western values.  But this kind of censorship is very rare now in the United States, and has been for decades; the majority of “challenges” now (despite the celebration’s name, it’s pretty rare that books are actually removed from public collections) originate not with state officials or other “authorities”, but with individuals seeking to “protect the children” from thoughts their parents don’t want them to have.  Nor are those thoughts only sexual ones any more, though obviously those are still the most common reason; nowadays, demands that books be burned controlled are just as likely to come from soi-disant “progressives” as from cultural conservatives, and the reasons may include “racism”, “sexism”, “religious viewpoint”, “violence” and so on.

In a way, the name “Banned Books Week” is far too narrow to encompass everything we should be talking about, and a week is far too limited a time to be talking about it.  As I wrote above, “banned” implies a top-down regime, while in reality the majority of censorship now is the result of morons trying to self-lobotomize our entire culture; the word also implies a governmental action, when in reality the rise of social media and mega-media corporations has resulted in a de facto delegation of the censorship authority to them.  And if you’re tempted to suggest that this isn’t as bad, I suggest you ask yourself how much distribution your book will get if Amazon & Wal-mart refuse to stock it and Google monkeys with your search results to make it difficult to find.  Furthermore, “books”, as much as I love them, are now only a tiny fraction of the ways information can be shared; people who would balk at the idea of censoring actual paper books suddenly feel very differently when the conversation turns to magazines, or movies, or pictures, or music, or video games, or public lectures, or articles, or blogs, or other social media postings, or (most especially) advertising.  The same “right-thinking” folks who would march in protest if a school library declined to stock And Tango Makes Three grow strangely silent when Twitter bans a member’s account for “hate speech”, and may even be willing to march in support of censoring escort ads on Backpage.  As I wrote last year,

We are living in the past of Fahrenheit 451, the early stages of a culture which values feelings above thought, the history of a world in which the solution to any troubling idea is to eradicate it.  Right now it’s going on in the universities, where sheltered young people who have been coddled by overprotective parents for two decades are declaring themselves to be “triggered” or “offended” or even “violated” by ideas – whether spoken or in print – that they haven’t encountered before, or that contradict their opinions, or that they find unpleasant, or that bear some superficial resemblance to any of the preceding.  Just as their parents “protected” them from these unpleasant thoughts by banning them from their homes with internet filters or “parental controls”, so they feel entitled to “protect” themselves – and every other person within their sphere of influence – from those bad, icky ideas by banning them…

The censor-morons are loose, and they’re coming after everyone who dares to disagree with them.  And the only way to stop them is to oppose every attempt to limit the free expression of ideas, even if you disagree with them or find them offensive.  Correction: especially if you find them offensive.  Because as always, tyranny starts with those nobody really wants to defend.think-for-yourself

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Moral Climate

Posted in Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , on September 28, 2015| 22 Comments »

You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred.  Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all?  People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo.  Burn it.  White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Burn it.  Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs?  The cigarette people are weeping?  Burn the book.  Serenity, Montag.  Peace, Montag.  Take your fight outside.  Better yet, to the incinerator.  –  Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

books cause thoughtThough Ray Bradbury was much more a fantasist than a writer of science fiction, in many ways his predictions about the society of the future have proven far more prescient than those of his contemporaries whose writings are more grounded in hard science.  One striking example is his depiction of future homes and cities as being constantly inundated by music, synthetic voices and fast-changing video images from huge screens and loud speakers in every conceivable location; the TV screens which start playing commercials when one passes them in a store are straight out of Bradbury, as are the video players we carry in our pockets and the earbuds and bluetooth sets in our ears.  Most science fiction writers depicted future people as being better-informed and more scientifically literate; Bradbury realized they would, if anything, be less so.  And while typical 20th-century literary dystopias featured top-down censorship by totalitarian governments who wanted to wanted to keep their citizens in the dark for political reasons, Bradbury alone understood that the censorship of the future would be lateral, grass-roots efforts pushed by ignorant citizens who wanted to remain ignorant and unchallenged by ideas which unsettled them.

We are living in the past of Fahrenheit 451, the early stages of a culture which values feelings above thought, the history of a world in which the solution to any troubling idea is to eradicate it.  Right now it’s going on in the universities, where sheltered young people who have been coddled by overprotective parents for two decades are declaring themselves to be “triggered” or “offended” or even “violated” by ideas – whether spoken or in print – that they haven’t encountered before, or that contradict their opinions, or that they find unpleasant, or that bear some superficial resemblance to any of the preceding.  Just as their parents “protected” them from these unpleasant thoughts by banning them from their homes with internet filters or “parental controls”, so they feel entitled to “protect” themselves – and every other person within their sphere of influence – from those bad, icky ideas by banning them.  And just as they may have been shamed as children for “bad” thoughts, so they seek to shame others who originate such thoughts; sometimes these censors go beyond mere shaming to the desire to punish the Bad People, and often that punishment can be career-destroying or even life-wrecking.

But it’s not completely limited to universities, nor to insular corners of social media; as I wrote in last year’s essay for Banned Books Week (which in case you hadn’t figured it out from the topic, starts today):

…the urge to censor actually is [not]…limited to those traditionally labeled “social conservatives”…nowadays, the most belligerent, aggressive and effective proponents of censorship are those who…describe their targets with words like “sexist”, “racist”, “homophobic”, “objectifying”, etc…promoters of this chic form of censorship very often don’t call for the direct government suppression of their targets; that would, after all, be censorship, and every thinking person knows censorship is bad.  So instead, they just “critique” the things they want banned and sling ad hominems like “misogynistic” at their targets’ creators, hoping to make them so radioactive in the public mind that risk-averse corporations will refuse to fund them…this isn’t technically censorship in the strictest traditional sense of the word, because it isn’t being forcibly executed by a political authority.  Neither is Operation Choke Point direct criminalization of the businesses it targets; that doesn’t change the fact that those businesses are as effectively suppressed as if they had been criminalized…while [such methods] lack the violence associated with actual criminalization of forbidden ideas, they are still very effective in creating an intellectual soil highly toxic to free expression…

It doesn’t matter whether the excuse is “sin” or “feelings”, or the injured party is conceived of as an individual or collective, or the suppression comes from above or below, or the method is violence or economics; the suppression of thought and speech is evil, tyrannical and socially self-lobotomizing.  As Ryan Holiday wrote in The Observer,

Your feelings are your problem, not mine—and vice versa.  Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens…as adults.  Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control.  On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended.  We have the ability to discern intent.  We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own.  This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals…

Up until recently, Western society was built upon the premise that citizens were self-owning adults capable of self-determination and self-regulation, but as citizenship has been expanded over the last century and a half, the rights associated with it have been dramatically curtailed.  As detailed exhaustively in this blog, modern governments believe they own citizens’ bodies and can control what we do with them to a terrifying degree; now our fellow citizens are trying to control what we can do with our minds.  That is a two-pronged recipe for cultural suicide, and though it may be much too late to avert that, I consider it the duty of every freethinking, self-owning individual to do his or her best to at least go down fighting.Fahrenheit 451 woman

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Censor Chic

Posted in Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 22, 2014| 15 Comments »

The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.  –  bell hooks

BBW posterThe last week of September is celebrated as “Banned Books Week”, a time not only to encourage the reading of books that busybodies (both official and otherwise) don’t want anyone to read, but also to remind people just how pervasive the urge to censor actually is.  Nor is it limited to those traditionally labeled “social conservatives”, who use words like “obscenity” and “immorality” to describe the things they want to censor; nowadays, the most belligerent, aggressive and effective proponents of censorship are those who consider themselves “progressive” or “feminist”, and who describe their targets with words like “sexist”, “racist”, “homophobic”, “objectifying”, etc, etc ad absurdum, ad nauseam.  You won’t see those excuses used as much in cries for the suppression of traditional un-illustrated print books, probably because the authorities these types follow have taught them that book-burning is something “conservatives” do.  But widen the scope to include comic books and graphic novels, music videos, movies and computer games and you will be absolutely inundated with them.  Furthermore, the promoters of this chic form of censorship very often don’t call for the direct government suppression of their targets; that would, after all, be censorship, and every thinking person knows censorship is bad.  So instead, they just “critique” the things they want banned and sling ad hominems like “misogynistic” at their targets’ creators, hoping to make them so radioactive in the public mind that risk-averse corporations will refuse to fund them.

Yes, I understand that this isn’t technically censorship in the strictest traditional sense of the word, because it isn’t being forcibly executed by a political authority.  Neither is Operation Choke Point direct criminalization of the businesses it targets; that doesn’t change the fact that those businesses are as effectively suppressed as if they had been criminalized.  In our present fascist system, government and big business are as intricately and symbiotically interconnected as the components of a lichen; to say that a cartel’s blocking of some sort of information isn’t really censorship is as specious as saying that a soccer player isn’t “handling” a ball because he’s moving it around with his feet, knees and head.  And if government, religion, academia or other respected “authority” figures spread lies in order to frighten even non-cartel businesses away from handling certain material, why that’s not censorship either.  These forms of “censorship lite” are very much in vogue right now; one might call them “censor chic” if one had a taste for puns.  And while they lack the violence associated with actual criminalization of forbidden ideas, they are still very effective in creating an intellectual soil highly toxic to free expression.

In last year’s essay for the occasion (which I republished yesterday in Cliterati), I wrote that…

…the desire to suppress knowledge and images of sex is so powerful that those afflicted with it are willing to devote tremendous amounts of money and manpower in a futile quest to that end; they are willing to deny millions of women income and freedom, to expose all women to much greater chances of rape, to risk the death of their children from disease, and to cripple the greatest tool of communication ever devised.  This is not rational behavior; it is a mental illness, and for sane people to give in to the censors merely exacerbates their condition and locks all of us up into a vast Bedlam with them.

Bradbury censorshipThinking people must not let themselves be intimidated by these self-appointed guardians of the public morality; we must speak out against all forms of censorship and speech suppression, whether advanced by guns, threats, intimidation or appeals to nebulous “harm” to women and children, and fight for everyone’s right to have his say…even if what he has to say is vile and offensive.  Bad ideas will eventually be shunned in the marketplace of ideas and die on their own; it is both unnecessary and wrong to try to keep others from hearing those ideas and making up their own minds about their quality.

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Crippling Thought

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 23, 2013| 100 Comments »

The danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing…representations is far greater than any real danger…from such representations.  –  George Bernard Shaw

broken wingsThe last week of September is Banned Books Week, an occasion which interests me as a librarian, as a sex worker and as a steadfast supporter of individual liberty.  The urge to ban books is the urge to control thought, and the only way to control thought is to cripple it, to stunt its growth, to break its wings so badly it can no longer fly free.  Furthermore, the belief that the state or collective has the right to do this is an abomination; it is nothing less than the dogma that the state owns every individual, body and soul, and has the right to torture or maim those individuals as it pleases.  In last year’s “Thought Control” (which I urge you to read if you haven’t yet), I wrote:

…the urge to censor is a mental illness…In earlier times…people imagined “evil” as some sort of tangible thing that could affect everyone around it…though that sort of booga-booga nonsense would be laughed out of the conversation now if expressed directly, it still sells quite well as long as it’s expressed  indirectly by referring to unproven “negative secondary effects” or burbling inane and incomprehensible neofeminist drivel about how all women are as mystically interconnected as a hydra’s heads.  And of course…anything (no matter how repressive and totalitarian) can be sold to the Great Unwashed if it’s depicted as being intended to “protect” children, with “protect” in this case…[meaning] “lock into a permanent passive and vegetative state”.  Young people, we are told, can somehow be “harmed” by encountering ideas and concepts that they are “not ready for”, like the protagonist of an H.P. Lovecraft story driven mad by the blasphemous cosmic truths he discovers in some forbidden eldritch tome…

The stupidest part of this whole moronic belief system is that these “forbidden ideas” aren’t cosmic truths about man’s utter insignificance and the impending awakening of horrific multidimensional entities which regard us as nothing more than troublesome insects to be exterminated; hell, even I might be convinced that keeping that sort of knowledge from the easily-panicked masses would be a good idea.  No, these supposed threats to sanity and spiritual health, these books (and movies, and websites) which are so horribly dangerous that the amelioration of the peril they present justifies abrogating civil rights and choking off the air of free thought, these cognitive gorgons which will surely petrify any child (or, often, woman) who has the bad luck to encounter them due to insufficient censorship by their Wise and Benevolent Rulers…are nearly always about sex.  You know, the thing every macroscopic organism on Earth (and even some of the microscopic ones) already knows about.  The reason every creature reading this even exists in the first place.  The process that excessive ignorance of is incredibly more dangerous than knowledge of.

In our sad, sick and twisted society, the desire to suppress knowledge and images of sex is so powerful that those afflicted with it are willing to devote tremendous amounts of money and manpower in a futile quest to that end; they are willing to deny millions of women income and freedom, to expose all women to much greater chances of rape, to risk the death of their children from disease, and to cripple the greatest tool of communication ever devised.  This is not rational behavior; it is a mental illness, and for sane people to give in to the censors merely exacerbates their condition and locks all of us up into a vast Bedlam with them. The Interior of Bedlam by William Hogarth (1763)

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Thought Control

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 1, 2012| 57 Comments »

The problem is really simple.  You either close down a house of prostitution or you leave it open.  You can’t satisfy both those who want it open and those who want it closed.  –  Fredric Wertham

Banned Books Week is usually the last week of September, but for some reason I’ve been unable to ascertain it is being held in the first week of October this year; it thus started yesterday and ends this coming Saturday.  And though, as I said in last year’s column on the subject, “I’m usually pretty skeptical of ‘Official Whatchamacallit Week’ type things…I find the idea of a week specifically dedicated to reading books which busybodies want to stop people from reading to be irresistibly subversive.”  Last year I specifically discussed book-banning and listed the most-challenged books of 2010; four of them (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Brave New World, The Hunger Games series and What My Mother Doesn’t Know) were back on 2011’s list, where they were joined by the Internet Girls series by Lauren Myracle, The Story of Life on the Golden Fields series by Kim Dong Hwa, My Mom’s Having a Baby by Dori Hillestad Butler, the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, the Gossip Girl series by Cecily Von Ziegesar and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  But this year, I’d rather talk briefly about the defective mind of the would-be censor, and how we as a culture have made it easier for him to get his way.

First of all, let’s make one thing clear:  the urge to censor is a mental illness.  No normal person wants to control what other people think, and no sane person could believe that he can control what anyone else thinks.  Only a psychotic believes that he can be directly affected by the thoughts inside another person’s brain, yet time and again would-be censors attempt to circumvent the principles of liberty and individual rights by claiming exactly that; somehow, we are asked to believe, what individuals see and think can magically affect others and is therefore subject to the same sort of restrictions as violent actions are.

In earlier times, it was enough to say that books, pictures or thoughts were “sinful”, because people imagined “evil” as some sort of tangible thing that could affect everyone around it (presumably via invisible “evil rays”).  And though that sort of booga-booga nonsense would be laughed out of the conversation now if expressed directly, it still sells quite well as long as it’s expressed indirectly by referring to unproven “negative secondary effects” or burbling inane and incomprehensible neofeminist drivel about how all women are as mystically interconnected as a hydra’s heads.  And of course, just about anything (no matter how repressive and totalitarian) can be sold to the Great Unwashed if it’s depicted as being intended to “protect” children, with “protect” in this case being interpreted to mean “lock into a permanent passive and vegetative state”.  Young people, we are told, can somehow be “harmed” by encountering ideas and concepts that they are “not ready for”, like the protagonist of an H.P. Lovecraft story driven mad by the blasphemous cosmic truths he discovers in some forbidden eldritch tome.  Foremost among these “dangerous” truths are supposed to be facts about the functions of their own bodies, but considering that many of our laws declare that they don’t actually own those bodies until they’re 18, I suppose it all makes a kind of twisted sense once one accepts the outlandish initial premise.

Of course, demands to censor some content don’t even need these sorts of perverse mental gymnastics; those who wish to ban criticism of any given group need only point to the actions of some violent psycho who attacked a member of that group, then pretend that he was “incited” to the violence by the criticism; minority groups are the biggest perpetrators of this odious censorship tactic, but more recently politicians and religious fanatics have adopted it as well and fearful Europeans and Americans are listening.  The problem with these people is that they fail to comprehend the principle of legal precedent; once one exception to free speech is made (whether for “obscenity”, “violent rhetoric”, “hate speech”, flag burning, Holocaust denial or whatever), it’s that much easier to make another exception, and another, and another…

The important thing to remember when listening to any demand for censorship is that no matter what excuse the censor presents to attain his goal, he is ultimately lying.  It’s not really about “public safety”, or the “children”, or “community standards”, or whatever else he may claim; it’s about the fact that his leaky mind is unable to keep unwelcome thoughts out, so he demands that society do it for him.  Fredric Wertham was a child psychiatrist who wrote Seduction of the Innocent, an attack on comic books in which he made the sort of claims which have since become de rigueur for anyone trying to censor music, movies, television, video games, the internet, etc:  namely, that the “bad” item harms children and/or adolescents by giving them “bad thoughts” they wouldn’t otherwise have in their “innocent” Rousseauian state.  Wertham’s book triggered the Kefauver Hearings which eventually resulted in over 15 years of stifling self-censorship under the repressive Comics Code, but this did not satisfy him; nothing less than a total ban on all comic books would have.  My epigram is from “It’s Still Murder: What Parents Still Don’t Know About Comics Books”, a rant published in the April 9th, 1955 Saturday Review of Books (and quoted in an excellent article on the subject recently published on the website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund);  I chose it because it reveals not only Wertham’s real thought processes, but those of any prohibitionist.  Set aside for a minute the absurdity of comparing comics to a brothel and recognize what he’s saying here:  to the prohibitionist, it doesn’t matter if a brothel has no negative effects on its neighborhood; it doesn’t matter how it’s run or whether its employees and customers are happy; and it doesn’t even matter if he never goes there, doesn’t know anyone else who goes there and never even sees it.  Just the very fact that it exists upsets him, and nothing short of its closure will satisfy him.  This is why it’s impossible to negotiate with censors or to cede even the most insignificant-seeming patch of ground to them:  they will view any compromise not as an end result, but as the first step toward their eventual goal of a total ban on whatever it is they don’t want to think about.

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Banned Books Week

Posted in Current Events, Miscellaneous, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on September 24, 2011| 68 Comments »

Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.  –  Phil Kerby

Every year, the last week of September is Banned Books Week, a celebration of intellectual freedom sponsored by the American Library Association.  Since I haven’t actually worked as a librarian since 1995 I have a tendency to forget about the event until just after it’s over, but since I didn’t exactly have a venue from which to speak about it in my stripping and escorting days it hardly mattered.  Last year I remembered just in time to mention it in “The Camel’s Nose”, published on the very last day of the observance, but this year I was fortunate enough to spot a press release a full week ahead of time, which gave me ample opportunity to write this.  I’m usually pretty skeptical of “Official Whatchamacallit Week” type things, but I find the idea of a week specifically dedicated to reading books which busybodies want to stop people from reading to be irresistibly subversive.

As this map indicates, we don’t really have a lot of censorship challenges in Louisiana; even though the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom estimates that only about 20% of all book challenges are reported, the dearth of Louisiana-based incidents is supported by my own experience.  Perhaps it’s the same laissez-faire French attitude which renders most South Louisianans unable to get worked up about nudity, or maybe it’s that other libraries there took the same practical approach we did.  If anyone came in with a complaint about a book, we simply asked them to fill out a form we had for just such an eventuality; it asked the complainant to fill in the page numbers on which the offending passages occurred, to explain what his complaints about those passages were, and to write a short essay explaining how he felt those passages were objectionable within the context of the book.  Only once in my library career did I have to issue such a form, to a group of “holy rollers” from the local fundamentalist church who had got the bright idea that they were going to challenge some book (I honestly can’t remember which).  Needless to say, neither form nor complainants ever came back.

Nowadays, the vast majority of censorship attempts are advanced under the “Think of the Children!” banner, and therefore the number of challenges to books in literature curricula and school libraries dwarfs those aimed at other types of libraries; once public libraries are added to that figure what remains is negligible.  Since ALA began keeping statistics in 1990, there have been a total of 4048 reported challenges to books assigned for classes, 3659 reported challenges to books in school libraries and 2679 to books in public libraries…and only 798 to all other institutions combined.  Here, too, Louisiana tends to be very tolerant; in high school I was assigned many of the books which are frequently challenged or banned, and remember that I was taught by nuns!

The images in this column represent many frequently-banned books; two of them are from ACLU posters which are here in PDF form.  The ten most often challenged books of last year, and the excuses would-be censors gave for demanding their banning, were as follows:

1)  And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson

This children’s book in which two male penguins adopt and hatch out an egg was challenged on grounds of homosexuality, religious viewpoint, and “unsuited to age group”, a clever dodge which allows censors to pretend that they wouldn’t object to the book if it were assigned to children who were older than theirs.  Of course, the fact that the excuse is used even in high school challenges exposes it for what it is.

2) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

This semiautobiographical novel about a young Indian who decides to transfer from the reservation school to an all-white high school was challenged on grounds of offensive language, racism, religious viewpoint, sex education, sexual explicitness, violence, and “unsuited to age group”.  One noteworthy point: though we tend to think of censorship as the province of so-called “social conservatives” (and indeed, “sexually explicit” and “offensive language” are still the two most frequent excuses), so-called “social liberal” excuses such as violence, racism, sexism and “insensitivity” have become gradually more popular in the last two decades.

3)  Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

This classic dystopian novel was challenged for reasons of “insensitivity”, offensive language, racism and sexual explicitness; a Missouri challenge from 1980 sniffed that “it makes promiscuous sex look like fun”  (your point being?) and in 1993 a California parents group objected that the sexual norms in the fictional culture contradicted the school’s “abstinence only” sex education course.

4)  Crank, by Ellen Hopkins

This semiautobiographical novel has been compared favorably to Go Ask Alice (another frequent target of the thought police); it depicts the narrator’s struggle with addiction to crystal methamphetamine and was challenged because of drugs, offensive language, racism and sexual explicitness.

5)  The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins

These novels of a dystopian future were challenged due to sexual explicitness, violence and “unsuited to age group”.

6)  Lush, by Natasha Friend

This story of a teenage girl coping with her father’s alcoholism was challenged for drugs, sexual explicitness, offensive language and “unsuited to age group” (because obviously young teenagers never have alcoholic parents).

7)  What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

This verse novel of teenage angst was challenged on grounds of sexism, sexual explicitness, and of course “unsuited to age group” because real teenage girls never think of sex until they turn 18; before that they’re innocent, virginal “children”.

8)  Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich

It’s rare that a nonfiction book makes it into the most-challenged list, but I guess Ehrenreich’s exploration of the plight of the working poor is just too uncomfortable to contemplate for people who think living hand-to-mouth as a waitress or Wal-Mart clerk is preferable to making a good living as a prostitute.  The official reasons for challenges were drugs, offensive language, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint and “inaccuracy” (because obviously the challengers were all economists).

9)  Revolutionary Voices, edited by Amy Sonnie

It’s a collection of stories by queer youth.  Need I say more?  Reasons: homosexuality, sexual explicitness.  Big surprise.

10)  Twilight (series), by Stephanie Meyer

Well, maybe the censors are right once in a while…just kidding!  The challenges weren’t based on lack of quality or sparking an inane fad, but because the books are sexually explicit, promote a religious viewpoint, feature violence and (all together now) are “unsuited to age group”.  I wonder if any of the censors would feel differently if they realized these books are actually abstinence propaganda?

I haven’t read any of these books except for Brave New World, and therefore can’t vouch for their quality.  But that never stops censors; few of them bother to read works before trying to ban them, which is why our little complaint form stopped them cold.  They just complain about the presence of certain “dirty” words or passages without making the least attempt to judge the work as a whole, and many of them don’t even go that far; they simply parrot the complaints of others in their club, church or other social group.

It’s bad enough when parents censor their own kids’ reading; though I have many complaints about my mother’s overprotectiveness I must give her credit for never, ever censoring our reading material.  When a public librarian once tried to stop me from taking out adult books (I was eleven if I recall correctly) my mother left standing instructions that I was to be allowed to read and borrow anything I liked, without restriction.  But far too many parents go in exactly the opposite direction; they not only want to restrict the intellectual freedom of their own children, but that of other people’s children as well.  And while I don’t think society should interfere in a parent’s child-rearing decisions (and censorship only encourages the kids to read the forbidden material anyhow), campaigning to restrict the personal rights of others to do as they like because it offends one’s own sense of morality or propriety is totally unacceptable in a free society.

One Year Ago Today

“Out of Control” discusses the dangers posed by unbridled male sexual impulses and points out that current American laws sabotage the mechanisms evolved by society to channel those impulses.

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The Camel’s Nose

Posted in Current Events, News, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 2, 2010| 5 Comments »

Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. –  Traditional saying

I find it terribly ironic that just as the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week” (which, incidentally, ends today) was getting underway, legislation innocuously referred to as the “Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act” was introduced into the US Congress by a  congresswhore in the employ of several big media conglomerates.  This bill is ostensibly intended to fight copyright violations (i.e. people posting pirated material online), but does so by giving Congress the power to create a blacklist of prohibited domains which internet service providers would be bound by law to filter, just as China and other oppressive regimes require ISPs operating within their borders to do.  Supposedly the only domains placed on the site would be those which “promoted” infringement, but of course judges and lawyers get to determine what constitutes “promotion” and how widespread it has to be.  For example, if some judge was paid by the RIAA to declare that too many YouTube postings violated the rights of their poor little multimillionaire “artists” the whole of YouTube could be shut down. This act gives the government far too much power; it is roughly equivalent to authorizing cops to use deadly force to stop speeders. And that isn’t even accounting for the “camel’s nose under the tent” effect; once Big Brother has the power to shut down big hunks of the internet for one specific purpose, does anyone honestly believe that he will only use that power for the stated purpose and no other?  Because if you do believe that, please PayPal $1000 to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net and I promise to perform a magical spell that will give you the power to see through girls’ clothes.  Honest, you can believe me!

Here’s a link to an article at The Huffington Post which explains the proposed legislation in more detail and includes a link to a petition.  It is written by Rhode Island State Representative David Segal, who incidentally was an opponent of the recriminalization of prostitution in Rhode Island last year as he discussed in this article.  Though a year old, the latter article is worth reading because it demonstrates that at least a few people in government recognize that the suppression of prostitutes is not only morally wrong, but that we actually form the best line of defense against real “human traffickers” (rather than the imaginary ones who can somehow be stopped by prohibiting adult women from earning a living).

Update to Out of Control (September 24th)

This item is paraphrased from an AP story released on September 30th:

Twenty-nine women have alleged that Toronto anesthesiologist Dr. George Doodnaught, 61, sexually assaulted them while they were unconscious, and there could be more victims.

Doodnaught was already facing three counts of sexual assault before police announced 26 more charges Thursday (September 30th); North York General Hospital said 25 of the new charges relate to assaults alleged to have occurred at the hospital during surgical procedures.

When Doodnaught was charged in March with the first three assaults, police released his photograph and asked other potential victims to contact them. “Twenty-six additional victims have come forward,” Toronto police Constable Tony Vella said Thursday. “Investigators believe that there could actually be many more victims in this case,” he added.

One of the alleged assaults took place in June 1992 and the rest between 2006 and this past February, when he was dismissed from the hospital, police said.  None of the allegations have been proven in court, and Doodnaught has not yet had the opportunity to defend himself from the charges.  Lawyer Adam Halioua, who represents the alleged victims in out-of-court civil negotiations with the hospital, said he could not comment on the new criminal charges because of the police investigation.  Doodnaught, who graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1974, has been an anesthesiologist since 1981 and worked at North York General for 28 years.

During an operation, a surgeon, surgical assistant, scrub nurse, circulating nurse and an anesthesiologist are usually in the room — but they can come and go, and there were no cameras in the operating rooms in the hospital.  The hospital’s chief of staff, Dr. David White, said in March it was possible for an anesthesiologist to be alone with a patient.  White had also said the police investigation would also examine whether the allegations are the result of vivid dreams that some patients experience as a result of the various medications and types of anesthesia.

I think we can safely discount the notion that 29 women all had dreams of being raped by the same anesthesiologist, so the question we are left with is “Why?”  Why on Earth would a respected doctor less than a decade away from retirement risk his liberty and reputation and violate both his patients’ trust and all of his medical ethics to do such a disgusting thing?  In my column of September 24th I discussed the bizarre, extreme and often criminal behaviors to which sexually frustrated men may resort, and it seems likely to me that something must have happened in 2006 to close off Doodnaught’s available means of sexual release.  So why didn’t this crazy bastard just hire whores instead of victimizing innocent women?  Even though doctors in Canada don’t make as much as their US counterparts, he certainly could’ve afforded streetwalkers (which are all he needed if an unconscious woman is enough to satisfy him).  And certainly the consequences of arrest for patronizing hookers can’t be nearly as great as the penalties for serial rape!  I guess some men just lose all decency and capacity for rational thought when they start “thinking with the wrong head.”

Here’s another example of the same thing, paraphrased from a Fox News release:

A man was arrested Tuesday (August 17th) in Fullerton, California for ejaculating twice into a female co-worker’s water bottle.  Police said that in January 2010, 31 year old Michael Kevin Lallana entered a female co-worker’s office at the Northwestern Mutual Mortgage Company in Newport Beach, California and ejaculated into a water bottle that was on her desk, leaving it there afterward.  The woman later returned and drank the contents of the water bottle, and claimed she felt ill afterward.  Approximately three months later (in April 2010), Lallana again ejaculated into another water bottle that the same woman left on her desk; again she returned to her office and drank from the bottle, but this time (after supposedly feeling ill again) the victim sent the remaining contents to a private lab to be tested.  The lab confirmed in June that the water bottle contained semen, and the victim reported the incidents to the Orange Police Department.

In early July, following further investigation by the police and the Orange County Crime Lab, Lallana was linked through DNA to the crimes and was arrested on August 17th outside of his home.  He was charged with two misdemeanor counts each of releasing an offensive material in a public place and assault, with special circumstances of committing a crime for sexual gratification.  If convicted, he faces a sentence of three months to three years in prison followed by mandatory sex offender registration.

Now, I personally find it difficult to believe the victim’s claim that she felt ill after ingesting semen; though it usually doesn’t taste all that great, it cannot make a woman sick after swallowing.  What I think much more likely is that she knew very well what the taste was, but felt too ashamed to admit it to anyone until the second incident, after which she invented the “illness” to avoid having to tell leering male cops that she knew what semen tastes like.  And thereby hangs the tale; who in his right mind could believe that an adult woman in 21st-century California would NOT know what semen tasted like?  Lalanna would have to be completely deranged to imagine he could sneak his seed into a woman’s mouth unnoticed!  The very idea exceeds all the bounds of rationality.  Once again, we have a man so sexually frustrated that all judgment and basic respect for others flies out the window, completely superseded by the need for sexual gratification through a perverse fantasy of sexually violating a woman unnoticed.  Perhaps if our work were not suppressed men like Lalanna and Doodnaught could gratify their urges safely and harmlessly before their brains degenerate to the point where they care about neither common human decency nor even their own safety.

Update to Advice for Clients (August 21st)

In my column of August 21st I gave advice for clients on how to treat their escorts; this video segment from the Sexplorations video series entitled “How To Treat a Sex Worker” is another examination of that same topic, based largely on the book Paying for It which I have already recommended on my bibliography page.  It doesn’t say anything very different from what I already covered in that column, but I think hearing the same advice from other women (and a gay escort as well) will serve to reinforce that these things are not mere pet peeves on my part.

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