Iâve seen this before. Iâve seen this all before.Â
Letâs go back to my time in an elite boarding school in Britain. I went there as an exchange student, after my senior year of high school. I was in the Upper Sixth form, and the girls in lower forms wore uniforms, but L6 and U6 didnât have uniforms. We were expected, instead, to adhere to a dress code.
It said âprofessional attireâ, and said ânothing too casualâ, and was very clearly open to interpretation. When in doubt, they said, go to oneâs house warden, and present yourself, and she would decide whether your outfit was suitable.
Thatâs all well and good if youâre wealthy, but I was not particularly wealthy, and had come with a very small baggage allowance. I bought myself a pair of trousers, which were quite expensive and that I thought looked quite smart, only to find that the house warden considered them unsuitable. I could not return them, and was stuck with a pair of trousers I could not wear, and no funds or opportunity to replace them.
I loaned them to a friend, who was thinner than I was. (I was and am quite fat.) On her, they were looser. On her, they passed muster; she could wear them to classes. She even asked specifically, and the house warden approved them.
The problem was not the trousers. The problem was my body. But the problem was mine, either way. I saw similar issues with the very few non-white girls at the school; they were held to much higher standards of dress than the white girls. The fat girls, the brown girls, the gender non-conforming girls, all of us together had to spend extra time and money on our appearances not to get caught up in the subjective enforcement of the dress code that got us harassed by the various authority figures. I spent most of that year in an ugly blazer and a midcalf skirt I hated but that teachers didnât look at. (And, oh yes, when I started having an affair with another female student, the scrutiny intensified, and I was almost expelled. Fat, foreign, and queer wasnât a good combo for getting left alone.)
Before you think, this old granny is ranting, understand that I am talking about censorship. This is how censorship works. It suppresses deviance. And it may seem straightforward what deviance is, but anytime itâs subjective, it is not straightforward. And the very idea that all content has to pass through some filter before it is presented, thatâs censorship. That everything must be subject to controlling decisions? thatâs censorship.
âI know it when I see it,â the censor says. And then where does he look? He looks at the outspoken. He looks at the nonconforming. He looks at the âtroublemakersâ. He looks at the outliers. He looks at the ones that donât look like him, and donât talk like him, and donât think like him.
The ones who are like him, he lets slide. âThey donât mean it like that,â he says. âThey mean well.â
No graphic depictions, it says. Nothing hard. Nothing too dirty. What does that mean? What does it ever mean?
It means, nothing I donât like. It means itâs not up to you. It means Only things I think acceptable. It means accept control. It means conform and be nice to us, and weâll let you do what you want, provided you stay Acceptable.
It means I donât participate in any exchanges or events with subjective content limits. It means if itâs not for everybody itâs not for me.
It means, yeah, probably I could be acceptable, probably my stuff wouldnât trip their subjective filters because I have Acceptable tastes, but I know what itâs like to be marginalized and Iâm not going to trade on my passability to leave my marginalized compatriots in the cold.
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