Mind your [CENSORED] language!

That’s the last [censored] warning you’ll get.

I’m not sure I have a consistent view of censorship. For the most part, I prefer to think that I should determine what I watch or read, but I recognise that different people find different things acceptable so that an official censor may be a necessary evil in order to impose some consistency. Some aspects of censorship may annoy me such as the rather prurient attitude towards porn in the UK, which needs to be relaxed. It’s the [censored] 21st century for [censored]’s sake. Time the nation grew up and started to behave like the rest of Europe.

Censorship, it seems, is a matter of morality rather than ethics. As I said, the UK’s attitude to porn is rather puerile and immature compared with other European nations. On the other hand, the more liberal attitude in the US seems odd for a theocratic nation, but ends up being a constitutional quirk. The inGlorious Motherland is also a little odd, but for another reason. Although porn is undoutedly officially illegal, there’s a plethora of pirated Japanese AV in the DVD shops openly on sale.

Of course, porn is perhaps the most obvious area where censorship is applied, but not the only one. I accept that censorship may be done for the public good, even if I think it’s rather too restrictive myself. But censorship, which is done for the benefit of a government (and I think you can probably guess which government I have in mind; or there may be more than one) and doesn’t genuinely pertain to matters of national security, but is detrimental to the people because it seeks to keep them in ignorance, can never be right. At least, I don’t think it can. We might see in the next set of ethical dilemmas whether this view survives.

Maurice the Censor has been given the job of deciding what the public can or cannot read. In a magazine, he finds a rather graphic description of a servant being brutally tortured. The question is whether this might encourage others to do the same or whether it’s harmless fiction.

The dilemma doesn’t actually contextualise the passage. It’s in a tatty magazine. Since it’s talking about pressing, which I believe was a common torture in 17th century England, I’m going to guess that this is from some pamphlet published some time during that century and was probably considered to be unexceptional reading material at the time. (All right. The discussion at the back of the book reveals that it’s from a 19th century magazine called a “blood”, which was a more extreme version of the infamous and better known penny dreadfuls which followed them.)

Whether I’d censor this particular publication would depend on the aim of the publication. If this was low-brow pulp fiction aimed at a teen market, I’d probably slap a 15 rating on it and know that it’d mainly be read by 13-year-olds. If I was a hysterical old woman who believed that adolescents are innately impressionable and unable to read anything without imitating what was being described, I’d give it an 18 rating (and naively believe that no 15-year-old would ever read it) or ban it altogether. I might take the latter option if censorship could also be applied on the rather subjective grounds of literary worth, but I admit I’d be on shaky ground. (In truth, though, I’m role playing; if I were Maurice, I’d refrain from censorship on the basis of the alleged literary value of a piece of writing. That kind of decision isn’t part of my job.)

This kind of hysteria about writing for teens is still prevalent today. If you believed the goverment of the inGlorious Motherland, teenagers are a bunch of weak-willed, soggy-brained, gullible idiots. Death Note, for example, got banned because, apparently (and also believably) kids were doing the same, even although the whole thing is an utter fantasy.[1] There was the hysteria at home all those years ago about video nasties, especially after the murder of Jamie Bulger.

However, I note that no one ever seems to mind adventures such as Indiana Jones. How is that any less likely to have an effect on the impressionable minds of today’s youth? Why isn’t anyone worrying that it’s encouraging people to become treasure-hunting archaeologists equipped with whips who go running around in remote areas of Third World countries, plundering ancient sites? Dear God! Think of the children!

But is seems that I’ve got a little ahead of myself because tomorrow’s dilemma is about the effects of low-brow art on the young.
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Notes
1. Oddly enough I might ban Death Note not because of the idea but because it’s so badly executed. It’s actually rather boring, being filled with dull monologues as the main character reasons his way through a problem thus: “I know the shinigami knows that I know that he knows that I know that he knows if I know, then I should do the thing he knows that I know because he’ll think that I know that he knows and won’t do what he knows that I know.” Of course, as I said, I’d refrain from censoring something on the grounds of its (lack of) literary quality.

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