Article on the pitfalls of Sensitivity Readers.

[Swank]

Honestly, as I read her article I could see why her homophobia was flagged.

Just from her saying that the rapid spread of AIDS among gay men in 1992 made her worry for her gay friend's safety? Or that the club scene related to the epidemic?

I remember 1992. My professor died shortly after exams. I wonder how I would be allowed to discuss what that felt like at the time.

 

[Swank]

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

If you are traffic cop, you had better find some speeders to ticket. If you are an detective, you had better find a suspect. And if a publisher pays you to find insensitive things, you're going to need to produce something.

The act of looking for sensitivity must produce some insensitive results. Because of that, the publisher needs to evaluate those results and decide which, if any, are truly applicable and necessary. What I don't get from the article is the sense that the publisher agreed with the sensitivity readers at all, and would have asked for any changes.

I am much more offended by results than process, and the article is about process.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

Just from her saying that the rapid spread of AIDS among gay men in 1992 made her worry for her gay friend's safety? Or that the club scene related to the epidemic?

I remember 1992. My professor died shortly after exams. I wonder how I would be allowed to discuss what that felt like at the time.

No that wasn't why I flagged it. It was the way she spoke about Liam. I know she wasn't intending homophobia but it drips from those paragraphs.

My best friend in the 90s was gay - I didn't know I was homophobic. I mean I accepted and supported him right from the start despite having religious beliefs at the time. But I now know there were many ways I was and how much my homophobia has affected my friend.

Back in the 90s I may have written those paragraphs but after listening to those who are gay I now know that they display homophobia. This is where listening comes in and why sensitivity readers have their place. And there are times when the sensitive thing to do is to allow someone from the community to tell the story and to take a step back.

 

[Montero]

I totally agree with doing research and getting it right from the point of view of a long time re-enactor who gets fed up with easy misrepresentations of history and society I get quite exasperated, especially if I am told that it is fiction so what is my problem, or fantasy so what is my problem. (There are economic realities, and some fantasy in particular grabs a handful of colourful facts and lobs them at the worldbuilding, without any joined up plausibility.)

Over the last 20 years I've been seeing an increasing number of LGBTQ characters in fantasy and sf, and increasing criticism of authors who do not include non-hetero characters in their fantasy or sf, but what I don't recall seeing - and maybe it is there and I've missed it - is people saying that the non-hetero characters in the sf or fantasy are unrealistic. Is this because there is no one right way of portraying a person when writing sff? As opposed to there being a right way, or consensus way, when writing contemporary novels or poetry?

ETA it occurs to me that there are relatively few disabled characters in SFF - Miles Vorkosigan is one, The Ship Who Sang is another, then there is the computer geek in the Mindstar book by Peter Hamilton. With the benefit of a lot of hindsight, I can wonder whether the physically disabled super hacker is a stereotype, though in its day, I suspect it was innovative. Fantasy disabled characters are rarer, probably because of the tougher environment, but there is a blind steerswoman in Rosemary Kirstein's series who travels with her husband.
This brings me to the point of how books are criticised for not being to modern standards, when they may in fact be one of the steps in the path that led to modern standards and in their day were helpful. Having a foreword that says this might be one route to go when re-publishing. Certainly don't want to present a dated attitude as being current, but equally some history of the evolution of society also seems a good idea as part of education. I remember a lot of the school text books coming with a lot of footnotes explaining what older words meant and the context of an attitude. For example, in Pamela, she falls off the saddle of her horse and is hanging upside down with her dress around her ears, which is amusing to a modern audience, but scandalous to the contemporary one - because in their day Pamela wasn't wearing underwear. Likewise a throwaway remark in one of Dorothy Sayers novels about Wimsy having flown back from America - we think nothing of it, but in the 1930s that was a BIG wow moment.

 

[Swank]

No that wasn't why I flagged it. It was the way she spoke about Liam. I know she wasn't intending homophobia but it drips from those paragraphs.

My best friend in the 90s was gay - I didn't know I was homophobic. I mean I accepted and supported him right from the start despite having religious beliefs at the time. But I now know there were many ways I was and how much my homophobia has affected my friend.

Back in the 90s I may have written those paragraphs but after listening to those who are gay I now know that they display homophobia. This is where listening comes in and why sensitivity readers have their place. And there are times when the sensitive thing to do is to allow someone from the community to tell the story and to take a step back.

"It drips" is not something I can frankly understand. Either the words are identifiable as offensive or their intent are. Bigotry should be clear enough that one intelligent person can articulate the precise problem with a 60 word paragraph to another intelligent person without requiring the assistance of a third party translator.

If we have truly reached a barrier in our shared understanding of English where an impression of the general feel is more important than the actual words, I'm at a loss how we proceed.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

Well, I am having trouble making my mind up on this one. When you read the entirety of a work like this you get an insight into the heart of the writer. But when you pick at sentences or short passages, then you might find something problematic. Something that won't play well on, say, Twitter - a platform that is inherently superficial. It does appear obvious to me that the sensitivity readers are part of the writer's and publisher's team. They are not there as adversaries. Maybe it would have been better if they had been involved at an earlier stage.

 

[Toby Frost]

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

Very true, especially if you're being paid for it!

Well, I am having trouble making my mind up on this one.

I think so much of this is a matter of style, nuance and degree. You have to be flexible when reading what people write, just as you have to be flexible when dealing with people in real life. That's not a cop-out, although some might want to see it as such. That flexibility seems to me to be a sign of a grown-up outlook.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

"It drips" is not something I can frankly understand. Either the words are identifiable as offensive or their intent are. Bigotry should be clear enough that one intelligent person can articulate the precise problem with a 60 word paragraph to another intelligent person without requiring the assistance of a third party translator.

If we have truly reached a barrier in our shared understanding of English where an impression of the general feel is more important than the actual words, I'm at a loss how we proceed.

When I was writing my thesis on propaganda of the Chinese Cultural revolution, one of the papers was written by a professor who'd lived through the times. She wrote how the red guard would pore over artworks and literature for evidence of counter revolutionary sentiment. They'd always find it, not in any overt expression, but through a general feeling about the text. A sheaf of wheat that looked rebellious, the chairman's face was not sufficiently red and sun-like, brushstrokes that looked like a character that could be interpreted in any way that the interpreter chose. They were incentivised to find problems and problems they found, and the artists and the writers would inevitably end up pilloried or in the stocks or subject to denunciation or worse.

"with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent..." - Françoise Bertaut de Motteville attr. Cardinal Richelieu

 

[Phyrebrat]

Hey all, as an often-asked sensitivity reader, I thought I'd share my own experiences regarding being a minority, and writing outside of our own cultural capital:

My take on all this is the root of it is self-knowledge. If one is not aware of the niche one occupies (your own socio-political niche, that is) then you'll forever struggle with authentic representation, let alone before you even drift into offensive territory.

I say this as a minority (I'm neuro-atypical and gay, what a combo!), and when I speak to (let's call them) the majority, it's clear how much majority-privilege blinds them. However, as a man I have that privilege of living in a patriarchal society, so there's intersectionality for me. Also, I can choose to hide my fabulousness if I want (away with the boas and sequins), where -- for example, race or disability cannot be hidden as easy.

So, when someone makes assertions about gays, or how they should be represented, I get antsy; I'm not defined by my sexuality, and how I handle it is very different -- partly due to the social circle in which I move, and partly my job which is saturated with cultural toxic-masculinity. I notice that my sexualilty has often become a badge to some people who want to know 'what the gays think.' : I don't know!
Personally, I hate the stereotypical gay cliches (hi-nrg, Abba, pill culture, etc etc -- although I think Madonna is outstanding, so I'm type-cast there ) and bristle when people (usually straight white girls) call me their GBF. I'm no one's GBF. I might be their BF, but my sexuality has no bearing on my friendship.

I apply this to writing about othered people. Be aware of their otherness and how it may compromise the taken-for-granted lifestyle white straight men (for example) have, but doesn't define them. That is cultural sensitivity. But it goes both ways; there are just as many sensitive and 'evolved' neurotypical straight white men as there are 'unevolved ones', but in the world (i.e in a world-building sense), they just have a privilege the rest of othered (and women, who I include as a minority) tend not to. Which is why we have to do a little extra work when writing the other.

All my 'books' have characters and behaviour that would be troubling. On purpose. That's because there are two things in life that make me see red so they are always in my books. These are the kind of thing that would get me wrist-slapped if not a cancel on Twitter et al, but it's something I look forward to because it leads to a dialogue, and I can explain why I've made those choices.

What's as bad is majority-authors who are 'a bit worthy' or trying to be a saviour to one kind of othered culture.

One thing that seems to have been missed as far as the original article goes, is that the sensitivity reader's mandate for a memoir is more broad, and perhaps allowed to be more brutal because it is a real person's memories/biography, not a character created like, say Jack Torrance. Characters can be homophobes, racist, misogynistic, ableist apostates, real people/autobiographers can't (or mustn't!).

Just from her saying that the rapid spread of AIDS among gay men in 1992 made her worry for her gay friend's safety? Or that the club scene related to the epidemic?

I might think your posts about the Force in SW are a bit dodgy , but this is such an important point and I think you're right to question it. To write, or talk, about the gay scene from the 80s -- mid-noughties without mentioning AIDS is inauthentic and a whitewash. (The thing that has changed is we tend to refer to it as HIV, not AIDS nowadays.) In those decades AIDS was to us as the Cold War fear was to kids growing up in the 70s and 80s. It saturated everything. If she had not mentioned it, then she'd be blind, and for the sensitivity reader to claim this was homophobic was, quite frankly, ignorant of their own history. And gay life in small seaside towns is experienced differently than big cities like Manchester and London who have a far more diverse gay scene, so how many gays did she get as sensitivity readers?

Another note, on intersectionality and representation: My late friend worked in DC in HIV/AIDS related science and told me in 2004 that the highest increase in HIV in the last year (in the US) had been in straight, married, African-American women. Amongst African-Americans, homosexuality is still anathema and so gay African-American men were getting married as their society dictated, having unprotected sex on the down-low, and bringing HIV back. This illustrates how much you need to know writing a character outside of your own cultural capital.

To that end, it's a safer bet (IMO) that if you want to include minority/ies in your work, make sure you don't give them a POV unless you're ready to spend countless hours refining their thoughts as per sensitivity readers.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

This x2. When you sub for a crit, people are looking for problems. Your judgement is what you need to listen to as well as feedback. It's something I have only learnt within the last two years.

 

[Montero]

I am wondering whether the author of the original article could have included some of the crits as footnotes/comments/chapter level intros and put a foreword on herself. Though she would have needed to have permission from the critters.

Wandering sideways (and hopefully not starting something argumentative) I have long been fed up with the whole masculine/feminine debate from people being expected to conform to a certain gender based behaviour and criticised if not. "A man in pink! How girlie." But interestingly, a woman seen to be dressing in a masculine way, is not told she is being blokeish, but would get a "butch" comment - so a sort of fake-man comment. I'd like to make a strong statement based on my preferences about hey, lets all be people and stuff the stereotypes - but I know people who take great pains with and pleasure from their appearance and want to project masculine or feminine, and to say they have to tone it down would upset them. I guess it comes down to chill and don't criticise.

And finally, regarding the nightclub scene, a lot of it came over to me as an adult who doesn't understand a teens culture, fussing a bit and trying to make sure they are safe in a parental type way. In the same way as an old lady in the street might say to you "oh, you should have a brolly, get your hair wet and you'll die of pneumonia" or a parent checking an adult offspring has a hanky, has change, has a phone number, knows the route, has checked their oil, water and tyre pressure and will take lots of breaks on the journey, when said adult offspring is about to drive away after a visit.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

"It drips" is not something I can frankly understand. Either the words are identifiable as offensive or their intent are. Bigotry should be clear enough that one intelligent person can articulate the precise problem with a 60 word paragraph to another intelligent person without requiring the assistance of a third party translator.

If we have truly reached a barrier in our shared understanding of English where an impression of the general feel is more important than the actual words, I'm at a loss how we proceed.

It's not individual words - it's societal context. We have, in the UK, a society geared up over centuries to massage the ego of the straight cis white wealthy London-centric male. A lot of what we do to continue to massage that ego is subsconcious and ingrained. It's how the market and media in general portray people. The only way we change that is to lose our opinions on what life is like to be someone that doesn't have the individual privileges we all have.

I'm not gay - I am almost certain that I have friends that could tell you the exact problem with the paragraph, for me it is just a general egad woman you could have said that better and a big need to tell the kid that things get better. That people in the future won't see him as a walking talking AIDS machine. And I wonder why she wouldn't listen to the sensitivity readers about it. It then makes me wonder how many of her other sensitivity readers might have had a point.

When I wrote my first gay character I asked my friends for books with gay people in them. Every single one of them had the gay die, or they were about being gay or they were erotic fiction aimed at straight women or... the homophobia wasn't in single words and the individual characters weren't homophobic - it's the way gay people were portrayed again and again that was homophobic. And sometimes even if it is our experience it's the best thing for us straight folk not to tell that story. It needs to come from those that know what they are talking about.

In the last decade I have been introduced to the importance of representation courtesy of Ryan, Dr Who companion with dyspraxia and Neville, Inspector on Death in Paradise. Ryan was the best representation a disabled person could ask for. He conveyed the condition through his acting and he wasn't there to educate people. He was just a dyspraxic going about his life. It was disheartening that the complaints about the character seemed to revolve around the fact the Tosin Cole did dyspraxia so well. When I brought him up in class all the neurodiverse folk thought he was bloody amazing. I wonder how long we will wait for the next character on the BBC that makes disabled and neurodiverse folk feel that good.

Now Neville Parker I have mixed feelings about. Death in Paradise is a show that handles diversity really badly despite having a mostly black cast. For example mixed race relationships are frowned upon. Neville has a mast cell condition, that is clearly poorly treated by the NHS (a pretty normal situation for most of us). Ralf Little did a pretty good job of acting someone with the condition. However, most of the reasons people don't like him is because of his condition and once the condition was no longer the butt of the jokes in the show it has been mostly forgotten. I won't be talking about Neville with the affection I have for Ryan. Because Death in Paradise made a life threatening condition a joke.

If you really are interested I recommend Hannah Gadsby's autobiography. I am only half way through it but think it should be on our creative writing syllabus.

Whether or not you choose to listen to sensitivity readers is up to you. Personally, if I write a person from a group I don't belong to I would rather not do that group harm. I have a major character that is intersex and one that has DID in my story. I'm consulting people with those conditions and doing my best to make them understandable, which isn't easy in a world that thinks intersex doesn't exist and DID is a dangerous mental health condition.

 

[Swank]

It's not individual words - it's societal context. We have, in the UK, a society geared up over centuries to massage the ego of the straight cis white wealthy male. A lot of what we do to continue to massage that ego is subsconcious and ingrained. It's how the market and media in general portray people. The only way we change that is to lose our opinions on what life is like to be someone that doesn't have the individual privileges we all have.

I'm not gay - I am almost certain that I have friends that could tell you the exact problem with the paragraph, for me it is just a general egad woman you could have said that better and a big need to tell the kid that things get better. And I wonder why she wouldn't listen to the sensitivity readers about it. It then makes me wonder how many of her other sensitivity readers might have had a point.

When I wrote my first gay character I asked my friends for books with gay people in them. Every single one of them had the gay die, or they were about being gay or they were erotic fiction aimed at straight women or... the homophobia wasn't in single words and the individual characters weren't homophobic - it's the way gay people were portrayed.

In the last decade I have been introduced to the importance of representation courtesy of Ryan, Dr Who companion with dyspraxia and Neville, Inspector on Death in Paradise. Ryan was the best representation a disabled person could ask for. He conveyed the condition through his acting and he wasn't there to educate people. He was just a dyspraxic going about his life. It was disheartening that the complaints about the character seemed to revolve around the fact the Tosin Cole did dyspraxia so well. When I brought him up in class all the neurodiverse folk thought he was bloody amazing. I wonder how long we will wait for the next character on the BBC that makes disabled and neurodiverse folk feel that good.

Now Neville Parker I have mixed feelings about. Death in Paradise is a show that handles diversity really badly despite having a mostly black cast. For example mixed race relationships are frowned upon. Neville has a mast cell condition, that is clearly poorly treated by the NHS (a pretty normal situation for most of us). Ralf Little did a pretty good job of acting someone with the condition. However, most of the reasons people don't like him is because of his condition and once the condition was no longer the butt of the jokes in the show it has been mostly forgotten.

If you really are interested I recommend Hannah Gadsby's autobiography. I am only half way through it but think it should be on our creative writing syllabus.

Whether or not you choose to listen to sensitivity readers is up to you. Personally, if I write a person from a group I don't belong to I would rather not do that group harm. I have a major character that is intersex and one that has DID in my story. I'm consulting people with those conditions and doing my best to make them understandable, which isn't easy in a world that thinks intersex doesn't exist and DID is a dangerous mental health condition.

I understand and agree with this post. Unfortunately, it gives me nothing to decode your previous criticism. There has to be something concrete about what gets one called a bigot.

 

[JS Wiig]

…increasing criticism of authors who do not include non-hetero characters in their fantasy or sf…

This seems like a bit of a catch-22 here. If someone is not knowledgeable or experienced enough (write what you know!) to produce an accurate portrayal of something they don’t understand, but are being pressured by market forces to do so, it could be a driver of propagating potentially negative stereotypes, as that may be the extent of their knowledge on the subject, and they may not even know they are negative or inaccurate portrayals.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I understand and agree with this post. Unfortunately, it gives me nothing to decode your previous criticism. There has to be something concrete about what gets one called a bigot.

It's not my place to give you the concrete. I'm not gay.

HOWEVER,

What I can do is put myself Liam's shoes based on the minority issues I do have.

She appears to be white, appears to be straight, appears to be cis, appears to be non disabled and appears to be middle class. That's a lot of privilege.

"What would happen to Liam among all those strong bodies? What would happen to his body? He was too young to understand you only got one."

If Liam had been a straight kid he would have been two years past the age of consent and he was old enough to get into G.A.Y. And he was probably hoping to have sex at some point. And was there any reason that the men in the nightclub were more threatening than the men would be in any other nightclub?

"Fortunately, it was only twenty minutes or so before he came back out of the crowd and grasped his beer."

And clearly he is a sensible kid.

‘Liam,’ I said, ‘I love you. You have to promise me to always use a condom and never get AIDS.’

I get at the time AIDS was the worry but she could have put a full stop after condom and it would have worked - instead of portraying the walking talking AIDS machine that my friends were made to feel like.

I am cis white straight and middle class - that gives me a shed load of privilege to be aware of and makes me a bigot. My issues with that paragraph may be totally the wrong ones. It made me uncomfortable..

 

[Swank]

I am cis white straight and middle class - that... .... makes me a bigot.

This may be a bridge too far.

 

[Montero]

This seems like a bit of a catch-22 here. If someone is not knowledgeable or experienced enough (write what you know!) to produce an accurate portrayal of something they don’t understand, but are being pressured by market forces to do so, it could be a driver of propagating potentially negative stereotypes, as that may be the extent of their knowledge on the subject, and they may not even know they are negative or inaccurate portrayals.

Yes. And it worries me in my writing. I am not writing anything directly contemporary, and I generally write people who are getting on with things and so just make sure that non-hetero are included by mentioning same sex couples, in the sense of his husband/her wife offered me tea/kissed his/her spouse, just the general run of life and always have a society where that is normal and not worth remark by the cast, so there is no bias in my book based on that. Or at least none that I am seeing but I might be getting that wrong.

 

[Dan Jones]

I understand and agree with this post. Unfortunately, it gives me nothing to decode your previous criticism. There has to be something concrete about what gets one called a bigot.

Bigot does has a very specific definition, and it means a person who is intolerant of opposing opinions. There is no political stripe or colour to the bigot, they can be left, right, black, white, up, down, strange, charmed, or whatever. The great irony is that bigotry is almost never accompanied by self awareness.

 

[Danny McG]

Anyways, if any of you decide to write about an old fat bloke with a baldy head then I strongly advise you to run it by me first

 

[Swank]

Bigot does has a very specific definition, and it means a person who is intolerant of opposing opinions. There is no political stripe or colour to the bigot, they can be left, right, black, white, up, down, strange, charmed, or whatever. The great irony is that bigotry is almost never accompanied by self awareness.

I don't believe that's accurate. It usually means someone that inflexibly believes something intolerant of others. Like "homophobia". But please read my post as "homophobe" to prevent any confusion.

 

[Swank]

Anyways, if any of you decide to write about an old fat bloke with a baldy head then I strongly advise you to run it by me first

Did Churchill's biographers?