The death rattle of human culture
The prominence of "sensitivity readers" has taken censorship to terrifying new heights
You may have heard about “sensitivity readers,” a fairly new invention that’s become a mandatory step in the process of commercial publication. These readers are people from identity-first backgrounds who scan literary works-in-progress to make sure they are free of sin. Without gaining the sensitivity readers’ approval, publication cannot commence.
Like every other cultural development that’s occurred over the last decade or so, the rise of the sensitivity reader was undertaken with minimal cost-benefit analysis. Their work is presumed to be good because it simply is–-there’s no need to explain how or why, nor to attempt to assess its effects. Accordingly, the problematics of this phenomena have been discussed primarily in relatively fringe center-right publications, while much more supportive (yet still somewhat critical) discussions appeared in the mainstream press only very briefly, a half decade ago. Newer coverage would never dream of suggesting that maybe adding an extra layer of censorship could pose some problems.
But there’s a bigger, more foundational issue at play beyond our general aversion toward censorship (which itself is either dying or dead). The problem isn’t just that we’re gifting the ability to destroy works and careers to a cadre of semi-literates who understand all human communication as existing within a binary of either affirmation or trauma. That’s bad, sure. But the way their work is structured ensures that the realm of acceptable speech will shrink continually, and rapidly, until all art is as blank and sanitized as a kitchen counter in a detergent commercial.
The job of a sensitivity reader is to invent problems. They don’t just project their own neuroses onto entire populations in the name of protecting those populations from hypothetical harms (although that is a large part of their job). They also fabricate entirely new offenses, based solely on deliberate misreadings of both text and context, to justify their continued employment. If the sensitivity standards were ever set and/or made some kind of uniform sense, they could simply be adhered to by artists and editors and then the consultations would not longer be necessary. Because of this, every new sensitivity read creates new boundaries, new taboos.
To put it more bluntly: within cultural institutions, the job of the traditional censor is to anticipate and prevent public backlash. The job of the sensitivity reader is to fabricate backlash. This is like mandating that arsonists become fire inspectors.
The ascent of the sensitivity reader has already had a profound, negative affect on young adult and genre fiction, and is rapidly infesting the rest of publishing. It’s no exaggeration to say that the normalization of “sensitivity viewers” within film and television could bring about an unimaginable seachange in American culture.
There’s no proof this will yield any material benefits for any marginalized people, sure. But there doesn’t need to be. All the small little bits of culture that make life in this country relatively tolerable are about to be destroyed.