Also— holy shit. My creative writing class has been eye opening. The biggest eye opener is how fuckin PC our culture is.
It may just be the Bay Area, but my god. We spend half the class reading student workshop submissions
Everyone is so PC. “Those stereotypes are offensive and won’t work”
“You should consider sending it to a PC editor when you’ve completed it to ensure you’re not offending anyone and you’re respecting everyone’s cultural sensitivities.”
It’s like… tense.
The class is “turning personal narratives into fiction”
I’m like. Back off! It’s their story! Stop being so sensitive!
It’s crazy… I feel uncomfortable at how tense it can get when people point out things that they are offended by
“There’s too much gender stereotyping happening in this piece.”
I feel like such a douche, a white privileged enemy of the people, being lashed by their suspicious eyes as I try to provide a contrasting opinion, and tell the author that the stereotypes worked, that the humor relies on stereotypes, that you can leverage stereotypes to illustrate how inaccurate they are…
Haven’t been near a classroom in 5 years, and the last one I was in was in the Bible Belt as a fairly conservative school, when you compare to other schools on the west or northeast coasts
Has been eye opening. It’s ironic, because it leads to censorship. It’s weird. Bizarre.
You can’t say that.
You can’t think that.
That’s offensive.
It’s not okay.
No matter if it’s how you feel or what you think. Repress it and make it PC. Truth? We don’t want truth if it hurts, if it’s offensive. Make every word and thought and feeling conform to vanilla diarrhea so we can all enjoy it without convulsing in oversensitive horror.
And in some cases, we read a work of professional/ published fiction, and the author intentionally makes it a bit graphic and explicit, for effect. Maybe there is some hyper sexualization happening, maybe some aggressive characterizations about the female form, but it’s for literary effect! It’s not even… what’s the word… gratuitous. It’s artistic. I read the passage and I’m like.. ah. Yea. I feel that. Or I cringe. It makes me feel.
And then the other classmates are like… “omg. Next time you assign this reading I need a heads up, because I need a trigger warning. It made me sick, and it was very uncomfortable. I almost couldn’t get through it.”
And I’m just blank faced, slack jawed in awe that someone could personalize literature in this way, and feel trauma that could make them physically ill.
I’m super sympathetic, but my god people. Have you lived? Do you live under a rock? Is your life a padded room plastered with messages that simply reaffirm what you want to hear?
How dreadful.
Get uncomfortable. You ain’t living if you ain’t uncomfortable. Get used to it, then get over it.
William Dare 