Erasing Words, Erasing Reality: Why Personal Emotions and Editing Don't Mix
Fat activists and the woke mob are trying to reclaim words like “fat” and “ugly” and impose gender-neutral language on children. Sanity has left the building, or the publishing industry.
From The Guardian
I grew up on books by Roald Dahl and R.L. Stine in the ‘90s, like a lot of people did. I was also regularly called ugly in my teens, or it was implied that I was, though such insults largely came from people who were themselves ugly (ugliness is subjective). Quite a few were also fat (this is not subjective). Was a confusing time. You couldn’t really take offense, but it was expected of you, and you had to see these people every day so going along with their poor manners, insecurities, and low self-esteem was the best if only, option.
No doubt, being around abusive people who use certain words with malicious intent will leave a few cracks in you as time goes on. Because you’re not a machine. And you’re young and still figuring things out, about yourself, about other people. While haters are trying to see how receptive you are to their abuse, by chipping away at who you are as your own individual person and using you as a receptacle for their insecurities and self-loathing, you’re coming to understand how resilient and strong-minded you can be.
But everyone’s different. Some people take their own lives. Some folks reach a breaking point early on and go on a killing rampage. Others do that later on in life. Some folks turn to creative expression. Many people become bullies themselves.
A number of them now call themselves “sensitivity readers,” because that sounds non-threatening. They’re given the privilege in an industry that deals with what they fear the most—words—to alter other people’s creative works. Sensitivity readers determine and control what they—in their under-30 years of life experience—find inappropriate or inaccurate in a writer’s narrative and point of view. In other words, they’re on a power trip.
It’s the strange contradictory rationale on which unstable people collectively operate today, to show complete disregard for boundaries in a branch of creative arts and brazen disrespect for an author’s original work, but then employ limitations on how a story can be told by erasing words you feel are offensive and thus should be offensive to everyone. It’s this “sameness” drivel that many far-left types like to champion, taking the fantasy to a rabid level of intolerance for differing opinions or practical knowledge processes. They want you to think they’re for diversity and inclusion, but only if it’s on their terms.
It probably hurts them inside that they can’t put their names on other people’s work they think they’ve enhanced.
Bullies take the do-gooder approach to act on their abusive tendencies. It’s a good front. Everything is done deceptively, to confuse you and muddy the meaning of things. Everything that they consider to be hurtful, because they see themselves in those words, or is enjoyable as it is in its popular original form must be altered. That doesn’t benefit anyone but sensitivity readers, a job description that really just translates to “thin-skinned loser.”
A “loser,” as described by Collins Dictionary, is “an ineffectual person who habitually fails or is easily victimized.” The woke mob is trying to groom other people’s kids to be exactly that. And since it’s always been a popular, cutting term, it might also be marked for deletion. From the Guardian article:
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text – and some passages not written by Dahl have been added…In The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with the new line: “There are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.”
Most likely there’s a sense of self-satisfaction one gets from taking liberties with and imposing themselves on other people’s work, especially ones who aren’t alive to defend their fictional creations—ridiculous if they were written 20-30 years ago.
People who do this presumptuously, by looking for any opportunity to dumb everything and everyone down, insisting that things be spelled out for others because the natural processes of growing up and learning truths through individual lived experience will produce diverse thinkers, especially those who aren’t aligned with the insular ideologies and limited life experience are tyrannical, emotional bullies who emphasize sameness. They feel easily threatened and try to impose control over others under the guise of good intentions.
In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the Centipede sings: “Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that,” and, “Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire / And dry as a bone, only drier.”
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places – where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas were “small men”, they are now “small people”. The Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People.
I don’t know what the sensitivity readers and the rest of the woke mob think is gonna happen to kids today—many might grow up to be rational and strong-minded and physically fit—but altering the works of established authors to be more suited for modern readers betrays an insolent need for control by, unsurprisingly, overgrown children. Writers from a different time dared to use words that make you feel uncomfortable in your present-day existence. They expected you to understand point of view, tone, setting, individual experiences, and overall, context.
Even worse is that there are people who can find a path to confront difficult questions of identity and will readily embark on an internal journey in an effort to evolve as well-adjusted individuals in the confusing, corruptible globalized age. Globalization has seen the breaking down of boundaries and in its place the rapid spread of the disease of competitive individualism. As a result, it’s given birth to more frauds all around the world who’re terrified of feeling inadequate and boring.
You’re tired of those who manage to cross the threshold into adulthood. It’s a constant reminder of your incapability to do so yourself. You’re a sensitive person and everything needs to be changed to accommodate that.
Look, words like “fat” and “ugly” are necessary to story-telling, anyway. It conveys different types of information to the reader. A character who uses those words is revealed to maybe be unsophisticated or indelicate. He or she doesn’t care for political correctness. “Show, don’t tell” is a basic tenet of great writing, after all.
I read this line many years ago on someone’s blog: “…we watched as a fat security guard ran after him uselessly.”
The line evokes hilarious imagery and different information and emotions. In our head, we see an overweight security guard making a futile effort to chase after a wrongdoer, even though he knows, everyone knows, that he’s not cut out for the job. Because he’s not physically fit. Certain jobs should have certain requirements—another truth rooted in logic and efficiency that the far-left reject because now it’s discrimination. Everyone has the right to be a victim if they want to.
We feel for the security guard, though. The scenario is just awkward because we know he’s not gonna catch the culprit. Using “large” or “heavy” in place of “fat” doesn’t work. The line becomes boring. “Fat” says a lot in a quick, solid punch, in the same way that “ugly” does.
Kids need to understand context and along with that, critical thinking. It’s why some of us grew up knowing it was cruel to say to someone’s face that they’re ugly or to even imply it, especially if we’re saying it with malice. And as adults, when we do see someone who has the physical attributes of, say, a hideous witch, “ugly” isn’t the word we’d use to describe her.
It comes from a place of empathy and self-censorship. And we have a better vocabulary as adults. Though “ugly” has some underlying funniness to it, like when some guy says insouciantly to a girl who rejected him, “You’re ugly anyway.”
It’s funny because he’s mad and trying to casually hurt her back by using the meanest word he can think of while making you wonder why he was hitting on someone he found ugly in the first place. The important thing is that we know he’s a petty and juvenile douchebag. And possibly had shitty parents who never taught him manners. Also quite possible that she thought he was ugly.
The woke authoritarians of the world think by controlling language and how other individuals express themselves, or if they’re permitted to even express themselves, whether in their personal opinions or creative works, is going to stamp out some of the ugliness in human behavior.
Nobody will ever be able to call them fat ever again, because the word doesn’t exist. It can’t exist because it’s also associated with concepts of health, self-discipline, and exercise. In simpler terms, it’s associated with truth. So it’s been erased from children’s novels. How do you resist adults and well-adjusted people? You use children to fight your battles. You groom them!
People will just find new words and new ways to offend. And the snowflakes will continuously take offense to anything that threatens their fragility so everyone must be forced, harassed, and intimidated into silence unless our words go through unstable power-hungry whippersnappers masquerading as maternally-disposed sensitivity readers who will approve or disapprove of them.
