Fiction doesn’t manifest brand new experiences out of thin air, fiction doesn’t infect people with never before thought about evil ideas. When we say ‘fiction affects reality’ we’re coming at it like those things never existed before that we interacted with ficiton. Assault, murder, death, queer romance, kink, whatever, and all other commonly censored topics existed before fiction had the audacity to immortalize them.
Fiction amplifies reality. Jaws didn’t manifest a never before seen fear of sharks, it played on existing misconceptions and existing fears, and amplified them. The fear of sharks already existed. With or without Jaws we feared sharks, then a scary movie came out and those fears became amplified.
But amplification isn’t exclusively bad.
- Nabokov’s Lolita, aka the most famous pedophilic story of all time and heavily censored for being “pornographic”, amplified our understanding of pedophilia, the kinds of people who commit it (charming, well educated, attractive people), and brought that conversation from hushed rooms to national attention.
- Fifty Shades of Gray should have caused an uptick of relationship abuse and misuse of BDSM (and maybe it did), but it also caused a nationwide conversation on abuse, stalking, cult behavior, controlling relationships, and healthy BDSM.
- A lot of young girls first encountered female masturbation through Judy Blume’s Deenie (one of the ALA’s top 100 banned books of all time and a 40 year old woman writing about teen masturbation, a big tumblr no-no). Deenie’s impact was so important that it’s often cited as an invaluable validation for women and queer women who felt that their exploration was somehow immoral. There’s an entire book full of letters from readers to Blume about how important that book was to them.
Take a scroll through some ‘top banned books’ lists and count to yourself how many of them were banned for specifically exploring sexual content in a liberating way. Or how many were banned for questioning the system.
Every single censorship movement and every single banned book has an army of people insisting that “fiction [only negatively] affects reality”. Books like Perks of Being a Wallflower for daring to talk about child sexual assault by a woman and depiction of a gay teenager. Or Speak for exploring the sexual assault and suicide attempts of a teenage girl.
In reality, these books amplified reality and gave voices to the voiceless–those who felt purposefully stifled by society. Visually represented by this comic.
Tl;dr: Fiction doesn’t change reality, fiction takes what’s already there and has the possibility of amplifying it–and of course you can pretend “bad fiction” only has “bad results”, but you have to be willing to silence the silenced while you support the people who aim to make fiction 1950s idyllic, oppressive silence.
I remember being a young teen and watching The Famous Jett Jackson. There was an episode about Farenheit 451 being banned and the fight to be allowed to read it.
I also remember my church talking about how “that’s why it’s banned! It teaches rebellion! It teaches you to question authority!” I nodded along and assumed that those were bad things.
And then I read the book. I read it and I realised something.
The thing that that book taught me the most? Was to wonder WHY a book had been banned. Because once I read it I realized it wasn’t JUST about questioning authority, it was about questioning a system that enforces ignorance and conformity. Something that requires censorship to begin, control, and spread.
I’ve had moments in my life where I saw a piece of media and cringed. Where I was sick just knowing it exists. There are books and shows that I feel strongly against and have had passing thoughts about how they should be banned.
And then I remember reading Farenheit 451. And I remember to ask, “why do I want to ban it?” and “Who does banning this benefit and who does it harm?” as well as “If this is banned, what comes next? What else can be classified this way but is vital to society and the vulnerable people in it?”
Because fiction? Is an important exploration of humanity, good and bad. And it might amplify what’s already there in a bad way sometimes, but it also shines a light on the dark places that we can actually do something about. And if you take away that light, it doesn’t make the bad things go away, it just makes bad people able to hide in the dark.
There are any number of “objectionable” works that have changed society for the better. And we always need to ask ourselves, “is it banning this book I don’t like worth risking preventing someone else taking future generations to a better place because of it?” We don’t get to decide which piece of fiction does that because that isn’t how it works.
Thank you so much, I could not, for the life of me, find the original source.
