“Step aside, Ma’am. Sorry, Person. We didn’t mean to insinuate sexist stereotypes, infer marital status or impose anatomical tyranny upon you. But step aside anyway. We’re the sensitivity readers.”
Sensitivity readers are the world’s diversity and inclusion heroes who may or may not wear capes, although black capes are bad (I’ll explain later).
Sensitivity readers busy themselves with red pens in hand, scanning manuscripts and often published works, scouring over millions of words searching for offensive words, meanings, phrases, sentences and sub-texts.
Body shaming is out, the Panatone colour chart is fraught with racism, women are shapeless, and industrious fictional dwarves are actually a metaphor for the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonial oppression everywhere.
Who knew?
Well, sensitivity readers did. They are the all-seeing, all-knowing arbiters who, with a flick of the wrist, dispatch ethnic stereotypes, gendered language, and cultural misrepresentation to hell. Hooray!
Sensitivity readers have been summoned en masse to review the works of Roald Dahl, the author of children’s books with more than 250 million sales around the world. Not many of us have not read at least one of Dahl’s children’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the BFG, and James and the Giant Peach.
Dahl, who died in 1990, also wrote adult fiction and the screenplay for You Only Live Twice, the 1967 James Bond film that saw Sean Connery as 007 navigate his way through Japan with a bevy of bikini clad girls before the predictable denouement with a hideously scarred Donald Pleasance as Henry Blofeld, stroking a fluffy white cat.
“Well,” one police officer says to his counterpart while viewing Bond’s (undead) corpse in bed. “At least he died on the job.”
We all thought that was a funny line from the mind of Roald Dahl, a bit of the old double entendre, but sensitivity readers, after inhaling deeply from smelling salts, would have rewritten it with Bond actually dying from cardiac arrest and the police officer saying, “Well, that’s what happens to white male misogynists in an inclusive culturally appropriate world.”
And scene. Roll credits.
It turns out the sensitivity readers have already been hard at work flipping through Dahl’s back catalogue. The um, big-boned German kiddy in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, Augustus Gloop, is no longer enormously fat, he is merely enormous. The BFG’s, big, friendly and 24-feet-tall giant still wears a cloak, but it is no longer black. In the BFG, the Queen’s maid, Mary, doesn’t go “as white as a sheet” when she takes fright but becomes as “still as a statue”.
Black denotes evil and white is purity. Or something. Who knows? That’s for sensitivity readers to decide and who you gonna call?
Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books (an imprint of Penguin books) have determined another review is necessary. Changes made already have been approved by the Roald Dahl Story Company who manage the copyrights and trademarks of Dahl’s works.
Sensitivity readers are now having another crack at homogeneity where people aren’t fat or thin, black, white or orange and properly gender balanced. Phew, that was close.
Naturally, the decision from the publisher to review Dahl’s works has created a tectonic eruption in the culture wars with even the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak probably glad of a distraction, any distraction, weighing in, declaring works of literary fiction should be “preserved and not airbrushed”.
“When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the prime minister agrees with the BFG that we shouldn’t gobblefunk around with words,” Sunak said via a spokesperson (it was a bloke, but we can’t be too careful these days).
Dahl’s works aside, sensitivity readers have taken on a role where just a few short years ago, there was none. Back in my publishing days, we engaged readers, assessors and freelance desk editors to pour through copy, analyse and, as part of the production process, amend grammatical errors and collaborate with authors to refine meaning. These are important roles but the effort was always made in the name of clarity not culture.
As a writer, I recall submitting a manuscript and being asked to remove a simple four-letter profanity from dialogue, despite it being the way some people, men from the criminal fraternity especially, speak. I did so and the book was published with the offending word removed and replaced with another four-letter, less offensive profanity.
It was censorship of a kind where, it was explained, readers may be so offended that they will read no further or worse, write up bad reviews. From a writer’s point of view, it seemed an odd thing, an assumption that a character like a venally corrupt cop or a murderous crook may pause in speech, not wanting to offend, before spluttering out another form of less obtrusive words.
Perhaps I should have hired a sensitivity reader. Although, according to one purveyor of this growing trade, it’s all care and no responsibility.
“Hiring a sensitivity reader doesn’t excuse you of the obligation to do your research, nor is it insurance against criticism,” one sensitivity reader mused recently.
Meanwhile, the culture wars go around and around, where the business of deleting words that may cause offence in turn creates offence. Lost in the brouhaha is the fact that language is fluid. Words come and go, driven by the idiomatic, the colloquial and the vernacular.
At its heart, the business of cultural sensitivity and those who tut-tut about it, take readers for granted, play them as mugs unable to make their own value judgments, like gormless cultural zombies incapable of independent thought.
What can’t be permitted and must always be fought against is the view that causing offence is the worst thing we can do. Offence, like beauty in this respect and this respect alone, is in the eye of the beholder.
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