![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Oh I adore this blog post ....
Jun. 15th, 2013 12:06 pmFound this essay entitled A Closed Letter to Myself on Thievery, Heckling and Rape Jokes on my flist, and I adore it to pieces. As a result of it, I've become a fan of Patton Oswalt. If you click on the link, read it all, no skimming allowed. This is a great piece of writing.
Sometimes you come across a phrase or paragraph or bit of writing that perfectly states what you could not articulate yourself. Here it is below:
- Patton Oswalt, blog post.
The rest of the blog is important. This bit about censorship, alone, stands out:
Here's the problem with censorship complaints. People react to someone requesting they write or speak about a subject more carefully as "censorship". It is a knee-jerk defensive reaction. Our speech has consequences. You wouldn't shout fire in a crowded movie theater would you? There are extremes of course...we do get overly nit-picky about some topics.
But there's something to be said for being sensitive about a topic and how your speech or writing may or may not affect others views or actions.
Oswalt cuts to the core of the censorship complaint and explains the responsibility of an artist here:
What's there to add, when he says it all so perfectly for me?
Sometimes you come across a phrase or paragraph or bit of writing that perfectly states what you could not articulate yourself. Here it is below:
Just because you 100% believe that comedians don’t write their own jokes doesn’t make it so. And making the leap from your evidence-free belief to dismissing comedians who complain about joke theft is willful ignorance on your part, invoked for your own comfort. Same way with heckling. Just because you 100% feel that a show wherein a heckler disrupted the evening was better than one that didn’t have that disruption does not make it the truth. And to make the leap from your own personal memory to insisting that comedians feel the same way that you do is indefensible horseshit.
And just because I find rape disgusting, and have never had that impulse, doesn’t mean I can make a leap into the minds of women and dismiss how they feel day to day, moment to moment, in ways both blatant and subtle, from other men, and the way the media represents the world they live in, and from what they hear in songs, see in movies, and witness on stage in a comedy club.
- Patton Oswalt, blog post.
The rest of the blog is important. This bit about censorship, alone, stands out:
Let’s go backwards through those bullshit conclusions, shall we? First off: no one is trying to make rape, as a subject, off-limits. No one is talking about censorship. In this past week of re-reading the blogs, going through the comment threads, and re-scrolling the Twitter arguments, I haven’t once found a single statement, feminist or otherwise, saying that rape shouldn’t be joked under any circumstance, regardless of context. Not one example of this.
In fact, every viewpoint I’ve read on this, especially from feminists, is simply asking to kick upward, to think twice about who is the target of the punchline, and make sure it isn’t the victim.
Here's the problem with censorship complaints. People react to someone requesting they write or speak about a subject more carefully as "censorship". It is a knee-jerk defensive reaction. Our speech has consequences. You wouldn't shout fire in a crowded movie theater would you? There are extremes of course...we do get overly nit-picky about some topics.
But there's something to be said for being sensitive about a topic and how your speech or writing may or may not affect others views or actions.
Oswalt cuts to the core of the censorship complaint and explains the responsibility of an artist here:
Why, after all of my years of striving to write original material (and, at times, becoming annoyingly self-righteous about it) and struggling find new viewpoints or untried approaches to any subject, did I suddenly balk and protest when an articulate, intelligent and, at times, angry contingent of people were asking my to apply the same principles to the subject of rape? Any edgy or taboo subject can become just as hackneyed as an acceptable or non-controversial one if the exact same approach is made every time.
What's there to add, when he says it all so perfectly for me?