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Censure vs. Censor: A Blog Carnival

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Megan Purdy hosted a Blog Carnival on Censure vs. Censor over at Women Write About Comics. I thought I’d mirror the organizational post here with links and such (as you’ll see, Kim O’Connor and I both contributed here at HU.)

The mirrored post is below.
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by Megan Purdy

Welcome back to WWAC’s irregular blog carnival! It’s been awhile. This time we teamed up with Hooded Utilitarian, Paper Droids, Panels, Comics Spire, and Deadshirt to talk about censorship. Here’s the question I put to our brave writers:

Censors and censures: What’s the difference? What is the social utility, if any, of them? What to do about the strange reaction to criticism of comics, where it’s all perceived as threatening, even post-Code, with Frederic Wertham invoked at every turn? Why are so many people so defensive, so Team Comics, about a medium that’s enjoying a creative renaissance?

Throughout the day, our partners have been publishing their responses. Here now, are all of them collected:

The Effect of Living Backwards, by Kim O’Connor at Hooded Utilitarian

And yet, censorship is an accusation frequently hurled at “politically correct” liberal-leaning members of the comics community. The accusers are, like, Tinfoil Hat Bulbasaur, sometimes even using words like self-censorship and thought police to describe what most of us would call a conscience. We’re through the looking glass, where the people with the most power and the loudest voices are the ones who worry most about being silenced. Potent industry figures like Gary Groth are waging an imaginary war against opponents (“opponents”) who have no actual interest in stripping artists of their freedom of speech. So let me say it once, loud and clear for all the turkeys in the back: Expressing an opinion—even a harsh one—is not equivalent to arguing for censorship. It’s not even close.

Censoring the World: The Fight to Protect the Innocence of Children, by KM Bezner at Women Write About Comics

Parents want to protect their children. This isn’t a groundbreaking revelation or a new development, and of course is completely understandable. But it’s impossible to censor the world. Restricting their access to books can not only suppress a love of reading, it can also discourage them from seeking out answers to the questions they will inevitably have about sex, racism, religion, and violence. It’s important to remember that challenging a book is a decision that will impact children other than your own.

Diversity: There’s Plenty of Room in the Sandbox, by Swapna Krishna at Panels

It’s a great time to be a comics fan. The industry is enjoying such an amazing renaissance, with diverse titles releasing left and right. More people are getting into comics, are interested in exploring and trying the medium for the first time. With an increasing emphasis on diversity comes increased sales and a larger audience. This should be a good thing. Why, then, are so many people defensive about the way things were? Why are so many fans resistant to these changes?

A Superstitious and Cowardly Lot: Sexism, “Free Speech,” and Comics Fandom, by Joe Stando at Deadshirt

Among these tricks are clothing their harassment in progressive buzzwords. Free speech is good, right? And censorship is bad. This is America, after all. So even the most sexist remarks by creators, the most offensive artwork and the most prolonged harassment must be good, since they’re “free speech.” Similarly, anytime someone criticizes said speech, it must be censorship, because that’s the opposite, right?

My Problematic Faves: On Censureship and Self-Censorship in Comics, by Allison O’Toole, at Paper Droids.

 We all enjoy stories that unintentionally do things wrong at times, but everyone has a different threshold for the kind of problematic content they can overlook. Personally, I think mine has something to do with other redeeming qualities in a comic. I believe it’s possible to point out that any story–comic, novel, movie, TV show, etc.–is deeply problematic while acknowledging that it has other strengths, and it’s up to each reader to decide whether they want to engage with that particular work or not.

The Morality of Free Speech, or Lack Thereof, by Noah Berlatsky at Hooded Utilitarian

For many who identify as comics fans, or as art fans, or as libertarians, or as some intersection of all those things, this may seem like heresy. Supporting free speech is often touted as a kind of iconic sign of open-mindedness; a stand against the philistines. Alternately, or in addition, to be against free speech is seen as supporting tyranny and that mighty argument-quashing shibboleth, Big Brother.

The Fightin’ Fans Vs. the Censorious Critics, by Steve Morris at The Spire

‘Mainstream’ comics, as they’re called for some reason, have been trained to react defensively to any new challenge – since Wertham managed to restrict the medium, fans and authors have wanted to prove that nothing will ever hold them back again. This led to some comics which went way over the line in their approach, and it also led to some of the strongest work in the medium. Right now, though, the comics themselves are being overshadowed by the people who’re buying them.

The Morality of Free Speech, Or Lack Thereof

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This is a belated response to the Blog Carnival at Censor vs. Censure, hosted by Women Write About Comics.
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Free speech isn’t a moral good.

By that I don’t mean that free speech is evil. I just mean that, in itself, free speech isn’t an ideal to strive for; supporting free speech, as an end in itself, doesn’t make you a better person.

For many who identify as comics fans, or as art fans, or as libertarians, or as some intersection of all those things, this may seem like heresy. Supporting free speech is often touted as a kind of iconic sign of open-mindedness; a stand against the philistines. Alternately, or in addition, to be against free speech is seen as supporting tyranny and that mighty argument-quashing shibboleth, Big Brother.

There’s no doubt that Orwell and his speech that was free could fling a vicious slogan, thereby making all around him shut up. But putting aside the well-worn phrases, what does or doesn’t free speech actually do? “Free speech” is not a guide for how to treat your neighbor; it doesn’t tell you how to do unto others, or how to behave with kindness, or decency. It isn’t equality or love or “do not murder”. It is a subset of freedom perhaps — but even there the ground gets murky very quickly. If freedom means freedom to speak, it surely means, to the same degree, freedom not to listen; freedom to shout in the public square must, by its nature, impinge on other people’s freedom to go about their business in peace. Why should freedom of speech trump these other kinds of freedoms? What gives it extra special moral status, so that it takes precedence over other kinds of freedoms, or over kindness, or what have you?

The answer is that there is no special moral status. What there is, is a special political status. Free speech is not a moral good, but the argument is that, in the modern community and the modern state, free speech is an invaluable tool for arriving at moral goods like equity, freedom, and happiness for all. Free speech creates a marketplace of ideas in which, the theory goes, the good ideas will gain traction and the bad will winnow away. Free speech is actually then allied as a moral good most closely not with freedom, but with truth.

This is a grand and appealing faith — but it is, still, just a faith. There’s no empirical evidence that free speech leads to truth, nor that it leads to more truth over time, nor that it creates happiness and freedom and equality, necessarily. The Bill of Rights was enshrined in a country built on slavery. The first amendment didn’t make slavery wither away either; on the contrary, slavery became if anything more entrenched over time. It was done away with not by argument, but by force of arms.

Force of arms isn’t a good in itself either, obviously. Lots of people, including me, think it’s an evil. And that’s really the best argument for freedom of speech; not that it is a good in itself, but that to stop it, you have to escalate violence. Speech can do harm, but the harm is generally less than the physical violence — such as restraining someone, or arresting them — you need to engage in to stop people from talking.

Speech can absolutely do good things, or lead to good. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t bother writing. Speech didn’t get rid of slavery, but it did help set the ground for people to believe that getting rid of slavery was a worthwhile goal. It also, though, led to people being willing to defend slavery in the 1860s, and racism in the 1860s and on up to today. The goodness or value of speech can’t be separated from the content of speech. This is why the much brooted dictum “I disagree with what you say, but defend to your death the right to say it!” is largely incoherent. If content doesn’t matter, if you’re not even listening to what is said before you defend it, in what sense can you be said to actually disagree?

You could certainly argue that the state shouldn’t police speech, because using state power against people is cruel, violence is bad, and the people most likely to be stomped by the state are those with the least institutional power. You can argue that the government should not be able to censor speech, because that opens the door inevitably to government censoring criticism of itself, which vitiates the transparency necessary for a democracy to function. Those are reasonable arguments. But they’re not really an argument for free speech as a moral good in itself.

In fact, in practice, the call of “free speech” seems like it’s often a way, not to take a moral stance, but to avoid taking one. If you support free speech as a moral ideal in itself, you don’t have to think about the content of speech at all. The nature of the speech — what it’s saying — is beside the point. Oddly, the call of “free speech” tends to end discussion. Once you’ve praised the speech for being free, what’s left to say? It doesn’t matter what you mean, it only matters that you mean something. Whether it’s Hitler or Ghandhi talking, it’s speech. Defend it!

But if free speech isn’t a moral good in itself, it becomes, not an ideal, but a tool, which, like any tool, can be used for good or ill. That doesn’t mean that we should lock in prison people who say things we don’t like, not least because locking people in prison is an evil as well, and often a worse one than the wrongs it purports to punish. But it does mean that if you defend vile shit, you’re just defending vile shit — though what is and isn’t vile shit can, of course, be up for vigorous debate. That debate seems like it should be on the merits of the speech itself, though, and not on the grounds that everyone should be able to say whatever they want in every venue. Still less should it be on the grounds that vile speech is especially valuable because of its very vileness. You don’t become a better person by championing revenge porn.

Again, morality isn’t legality, and for many of the reasons I’ve discussed here I think making speech illegal is in most circumstances a bad idea. But expression in itself isn’t a good, or a guarantor of virtue. Morality inheres in what you say, not in having said it.

The Effect of Living Backwards

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This is part of a Blog Carnival organized by Women Write About Comics.The entire round table on Censure vs. Censor is here
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Cold open on the Oxford English Dictionary: two words that kinda sorta look alike. Part of me wants to drop them at the top like a 10th-grade English essay. I could ask a whole high school to write about the difference between censor and censure and see nothing half so stupid as the conflation of the two we see in comics discourse today. You’d think the solution would be so simple as to point out the mistake—to say this isn’t that. What I’ve come to understand over the last year or so is that trying to talk to people about freedom of speech in comics is like trying to reason with your drunk uncle about racism: appeals to logic simply aren’t going to work.
 

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‘I know what you’re thinking about,’ said Tweedledum: ‘but it isn’t so, nohow.’ ‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t it ain’t. That’s logic.’

 
The last person here at HU who explicitly addressed the difference between censure and censorship was Jacob Canfield, who pointed to an inversion of logic: people defended Charlie Hebdo’s right to free speech by (falsely, absurdly) deriding its critics as proponents of censorship and even murder. The post went viral in mainstream media, garnering Jacob a lot of racist blowback—not just from people who disagreed with his ideas about racism, but also from racists who disapproved of him personally. One of the most amazing “critiques” he received along these lines was from a right-wing troll with a super silly avatar: a Bulbasaur with a Confederate flag superimposed on its face.

“The meat of the article was focused on the disgustingness of me as a not-quite-white-person,” Jacob wrote. “It was funny to read the stereotypical ‘get out of my country’ shit directed at me, coming from Confederate Bulbasaur.”

bulbasaur

Man oh man. Months later, Confederate Bulbasaur is *still* cracking me up. Much like this guy I wrote about at Comics & Cola, he has made my Internet a happier place. Now all racist commenters, including outspoken atheist Patton Oswalt, are Confederate Bulbasaur to me. Jacob’s anecdote resonates because writing about racism and sexism on the Internet can be as funny and absurd as it is depressing. Confederate Bulbasaur is emblematic of the particular maddening and comical experience that is writing about those issues in comics. A rich symbol, he also represents futility. There’s really no use in arguing with a guy like that; if he can’t see what makes him ridiculous, there’s no way that anyone is going to be able to explain it to him.

In lieu of definitions, let me tell you something that might not be immediately obvious given how many people keep quacking about it: Censorship in American comics is a dead moral question. Yes, yes, I know CBLDF is out there fighting the good fight against conservatives who want to ban books from libraries and so forth, and kudos to them for that important work. I’m not talking about anything that involves the actual law. I’m talking about the fact that no one speaking from within comics today is a proponent of censorship, de facto or otherwise; it is unanimously decried by all of us. The pro-censorship side of the argument simply does not exist.

And yet, censorship is an accusation frequently hurled at “politically correct” liberal-leaning members of the comics community. The accusers are, like, Tinfoil Hat Bulbasaur, sometimes even using words like self-censorship and thought police to describe what most of us would call a conscience. We’re through the looking glass, where the people with the most power and the loudest voices are the ones who worry most about being silenced. Potent industry figures like Gary Groth are waging an imaginary war against opponents (“opponents”) who have no actual interest in stripping artists of their freedom of speech. So let me say it once, loud and clear for all the turkeys in the back: Expressing an opinion—even a harsh one—is not equivalent to arguing for censorship. It’s not even close.

So why does a dead moral question carry so much weight in comics discourse today? First and foremost, cries of “Censorship!” are an effective way to quell uncomfortable conversations about sexist racist garbage comics. (Anti-censorship is an easy position to defend because it doesn’t need defending; everyone already agrees with it. If someone were to explicitly defend bigotry, well, that’s a tougher sell.) This agenda dovetails nicely with the values of people for whom the most real and salient moment in comics history is not now, but decades ago, in the underground’s resistance to the Comics Code Authority. And finally there’s the lived experience of older white men (and, occasionally, older white women), who are so accustomed to speaking freely, and so unaccustomed to having people challenge their views, that they’re fundamentally incapable of understanding the difference between being forcibly silenced and being called an asshole.

Here at HU, I sometimes write about people when they act like assholes, not out of personal animosity, or even hope that I’ll change their minds, but because the live issues I perceive in comics discourse pertain to forms of silence other than censorship. Some are borne of power differentials I can name, like the phenomenon of punching down, or refusing to listen. Some stem from cowardice, like the unnatural quiet that descends across prominent platforms when someone important behaves badly. Many others are more difficult to articulate. How can I effectively describe the silence of someone who’s been rendered mute by anger or frustration? Or the silence of people who are just too tired of this stuff to bother speaking up? What is the word for the kind of silence that comes from disgust, or out of the fear of being treated poorly?

By definition, silence is not something I can present to you as evidence, but these people are not hypothetical; they’re real, and they are effectively rendered invisible. Their voices are profound in their lack. Some are lost and some are lurking and some are just plain gone. Some never even existed, quelled before they could be found. Some are mermaids, singing each to each in the vast and mysterious ocean that is Tumblr. Obviously I can’t speak on behalf of these missing persons. I find it hard to even speak about them since they’re so abstract. Instead I focus on my anger, which is huge, and the comedy of it all, which is not inconsiderable. I write about the voices I hear and the things I see, and I’m blown away by how much of it is total fucking nonsense.

Censorship, though—for this we have a word with a meaning. Look it up and write it in your notebooks, friends, because its constant misuse has real-world ramifications. From comics to comedy to videogames, people who invoke this dead moral question to demonize political correctness are either straight-up stupid, or acting in service of something else (usually nostalgia, fandom, white male supremacy, or some combination thereof). No one in American comics today—no creator, no fan, no publisher, no marketer, or critic—is actually arguing about censorship. The next time you see someone sling that word around, ask yourself what, in fact, he or she is fighting for.