Stealth Editing a Culture
Sensitivity readers and the future of censorship
I have a new piece out in Queer Majority. It’s my most personal essay to date for QM, and you might find it surprising. “Queer is Cool: What Was Once Stigmatized Has Become Aspirational.”
The chattering classes are beginning to wonder aloud whether we have reached “peak woke”; whether the cultural trend of left-led language-policing, online shaming, and anti-speech advocacy is finally fraying. Much depends, as always, on how one defines these trends, a project intentionally made all the more frustrating by leftists themselves, who simultaneously deny their existence while also wholeheartedly endorsing them. But the rumors of cancel culture’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. It might not be waning as much as evolving. The future of censorship isn’t in banning books — how passé — it’s in doctoring them after the fact to conform to the party line.
From Roald Dahl, to Agatha Christie, to Ian Fleming, to Ursula Le Guin, to R.L Stine, novels are now being “sensitivity edited” — either posthumously or without the author’s knowledge and consent — to make them more politically correct. Though seemingly part and parcel of a long trend of literary censorship, sensitivity editing crosses a line from garden-variety cultural authoritarianism into altogether more pernicious territory.
Almost all professional writing goes through an editorial process. Drafts are edited for length, clarity, strength of argument, grammar, quality of writing, and so forth. If an author writes something inflammatory, virtually every editor will suggest softening its edges by adding nuance and context. If a draft includes sections that are virtually guaranteed to cause a needless firestorm while adding nothing of real value, editors will cut them. I’ve been on both ends of this as a writer and editor. The final product is nearly always the better for it. News stories develop, facts change, and new information becomes available. That’s why non-fiction books commonly include updated material when they are republished in paperback. Fiction, however, is another animal entirely. Fiction is art. It often undergoes an editorial process during its creation, but once published, beyond correcting the odd typo, going back and changing things is highly unusual. And certainly not without the author’s consent.
Revising literature long after the fact is not without precedent, however. Isolated works here and there have been revisited and revised, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in 2011. Mark Twain’s Americana classic, we were then told, had to be altered to prevent censorship, which schools had been threatening over the language it contained. To no one’s surprise, the book ended up being banned from many schools regardless. Such pretenses have since been dropped. What began as a slow trickle has now become a steady flow, well on its way to a new norm.
There is nothing wrong, in principle, with sensitivity readers. If an author freely endeavors to have their prose scrubbed of all humanity and sanded down into an undifferentiated mass of barbiturate buzzwords, all to curry favor with unappeasable brats who hate them for the mere fact of their success — hey, God bless. Who am I to kink-shame your masochism? But subjecting a literary work to such desecration without the author’s buy-in — or after their death — is more problematic than anything that could ever be contained within its pages.
Post hoc sensitivity editing will not make society more tolerant or accepting. It’s cultural whitewashing, no different from the age-old efforts by conservatives to launder the unfortunate blemishes out of history and put a rosy spin on events; nor from the European Catholics who defaced Greco-Roman art to remove or obscure its nudity. Literature and fiction are not only an integral part of culture — they are cultural history. In a sense, they become something more than just intellectual property.
Roald Dahl was a raging anti-Semite. But his writing isn’t him. Artists create art as parents raise children. The child is not the parent. They are, for a time, under the parent’s care, but when they go out into the world they become an entity unto themselves. Dahl’s books were authored by him, yes, and the rights to distribute and sell them are legally owned by his estate and various publishing houses — but they don’t belong to him, not culturally. They belong to all of us. Executors, executives, and the editors they bring in may have a legal right to vandalize literature, but they have no moral right — and doing it regardless is the height of conceit.
The entire edifice of sensitivity editing distills everything that populists and blue-collar folks hate about the professional-managerial class into a chemically pure, “blue sky”-like essence. Parasites who lucked into jobs managing, overseeing, and degrading the creations of others, but who build nothing of their own nor contribute anything of social value — and who then lord over their petty fiefdoms with a sense of Brahman moral superiority. The very worst of middle managers, left-wing political activism, and subreddit moderators all rolled into one nauseating package and given cultural power that outstrips their wisdom by light years.
There’s a line from the appendix of a 1905 George Bernard Shaw play that took on a life of its own as a paraphrased aphorism: “Those who cannot do, teach.” 70 years later, Woody Allen joked in Annie Hall (1977) that “Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” Fast forward about 50 more iterations, past “those who cannot supervise an automated tollbooth”, “those who cannot finger paint”, and “those who cannot greet customers as they enter a Walmart”, and we arrive, at last, at “those who are sensitivity editors.”
Defenders of the practice have been quick to downplay the extent of the revisions taking place, or to point out that these editors are helpless freelancers paid only several hundred dollars per act of literary necrophilia. Or the ole reliable: smearing critics as reactionary bigots who derive evil pleasure from reading slurs. The irony, of course, is that many of the most influential anti-racist novels in American history, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to Huck Finn, to To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) pack the rhetorical punch they do because the stories ring authentically true. They depict racism in all its real-world ugliness in order to deal it a devastating blow. These books did what sensitivity readers will never do: they opened the hearts and minds of millions and actually made the world a more tolerant and inclusive place. And yet to picture our culture cops reading these classics conjures the image of Belloq’s head exploding from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Except unlike in Raiders, there is no seraphic cavalry coming to save us from the arrogance of phony high priests.
The implications of normalizing sensitivity editing are troubling. We kid ourselves to think it will ever stay contained in one medium. Once common in literature, there is every reason to expect that it will jump the barrier from the page to the screen. With CGI and emerging deepfake technology, old films, television, and also music will become putty in the hands of technicians. “Problematic” lines, scenes, or songs need not be cut — they can be completely and indistinguishably remade to suit any sensitivity. New words deemed more politically correct can be inserted into the mouths of performers, and no one would be the wiser, especially if it were the only version they had ever known. Future generations may live in a world where their conception of the past is tightly curated by the powers that be, to be fine-tuned or rewritten at any time. Even now, how many books have been changed that we have yet to hear about — that we may never hear about?
There is something insidious and chilling about stealth editing literary works that goes far beyond even banning them. A banned book can still be found, albeit with greater difficulty. A doctored book, however, mutates the novel into a kind of Stepford Wife, a philosophical zombie posing as a real person. Not only does it impose on the reader the burden of seeking out originals, but it consigns millions to unknowingly read the altered version, taking at face value the words of the most unreliable and corrupt of all narrators — our self-deputized Ministers of Truth.
Indeed, the dystopian or totalitarian parallels write themselves. Imagery of Winston Smith rewriting old documents to conform to the party line in 1984 (1949) or Soviet propagandists retouching archival photographs to erase enemies of the state from history arise unbidden to the mind. Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the tale of a society in which all books are burned, seems quaint by comparison. Reflecting back on his novel decades later, Ray Bradbury said in an interview, “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” What Bradbury never lived to see was that you don’t have to burn books or get people to stop reading to destroy a culture. Just stealth edit them all to say exactly what you want.
A line must be drawn in the sand. We must non-violently resist this trend with every fiber of our being. Never pass up an opportunity to speak out on this. Never purchase an edition that has been tampered with. With any luck, public outrage might slow the advance and prompt some backpedaling, but ultimately, the institutional publishing world may be doomed. The extent of ideological capture seems beyond reclamation. Hope lies in circumventing these institutions by leaning into self-publishing. The dead may have no say in how their work is posthumously defiled. The living, however, can choose to cut out the middleman. The greatest fear of a novelist should be that no one likes their work — or worse, that no one reads it. Not that millions read a bastardized version of it created by some bureaucrat or their third-rate lackey.
See also: “On Separating the Art From the Artist”
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Facts
>sensitivity editing crosses a line from garden-variety cultural authoritarianism into altogether more pernicious territory.<
1984. Persons hired to change the historical record.