About the latest installment of censorship
The most underrated damage from the censoring of things like rape, incest, paedophilia, snuff and so on from literature is erasure.
What isn’t held up as a thing that happens (that is wrong), gets normalised by the victim. Thing not mentioned get ignored by bystanders (bystander effect amplifies. there’s a good reason antiviolence organizations tell people about how to help, where to report, how to define, what is violence, etc.). It also gets parodied, joked about, gets misinterpreted (and then you get shit like Lolita the movie, as one example for paedophilia).
So the thing to throw back as censors is “You’re helping evil by hiding it”
Also, real quick, when it comes to books: quit underestimating kids. If they pick up a book ‘not intended for their age,’ let them. If they get it, if they get sucked in, if they can empathise with the victims, they were mature enough. If they didn’t, they’ll get bored with the thing they don’t understand and put it down. If they do, that was a concept that may squick them out, but dammit, out of all the ways to become aware off all the shitty things they are going to have to face about the world, books are a lot less traumatising than a film or even a talk can be.
