This is my author blog. It’s 100% public. I do my best not to post offensive things here, but I am a woman with strong convictions, especially about the rights of women. I was also, at one time, a journalism major, though I eventually segued into literature and writing. This past week’s violent attack on one of the greatest tenets of Western society, Freedom of Speech, has been especially depressing to me.
Most of my author friends and I write books that some sneeringly call mommy porn. The label diminishes and insults a large category of books, a few of which are remarkably well-written–better than 99% of what gets published under the category illustriously called literary fiction. Mostly, these books we write, which focus on love, intimate relationships and sex, are written by women for women. Some people might claim that what we do, in writing and publishing these stories, is radical, offensive, disgusting, and objectionable enough to attack and even stop. Maybe even with violence. In certain communities across the world, we would likely be stoned to death for even reading such stories, much less writing and publishing them–in fact, many of these communities don’t even allow women to read at all.
My point here, for readers and writers:
Annually, some group of morally-driven people call for a boycott against retailers like Amazon or Kobo for selling books that contain explicit sex scenes. Consequently, romance and erotica authors have been censored, had their books removed or hidden from general searches because of a few words in a book description or a particularly provocative cover. This action is unequivocally a form of censorship. Before the boycott, the book was easily searchable and purchased. After the boycott, hidden and/or now made unavailable. Not so different from the way the French terrorists have now made the wit and challenging ideas of Charlie Hebdo disappear in an act so heinous as to curdle one’s soul.
It must be understood that anyone who attempts to censor and destroy what other people write and read is working on the same side as the terrorists in this regard. The terrorists are against Freedom of Speech. They killed cartoonists who published ideas they didn’t like. They have been extreme in their actions, but their ideas about controlling what people say and do are not so different from the actions of those who work to make all “smutty” books disappear from the shelves of book stores everywhere. Stifled. Muzzled. Shut up. Attempting to curb Freedom of Speech in any way is to support the underlying principles motivating these terrorists’ actions.
Either one supports Freedom of Speech, or one doesn’t. Not agreeing with someone’s ideas, not liking certain kinds of stories, not buying them–that’s an individual’s prerogative. But taking that dislike/hatred a step further to try to stop others from accessing the work or stopping the work from reaching other readers–that’s pure and simple censorship. Whether wielding a gun or bullying the local bookstore into pulling a book from its shelves–in the end, the results are the same. A strike against Freedom of Speech. And silence.