Finally! There’s an app out there that people can buy
to take out all of the profanity in books or change the language (ex. “bitch”
to “witch”) so as not to offend people who don’t want to read curse words or
racial slurs. AND it only kind of
skates on copyright infringement!
Welcome to Clean Reader http://www.cleanreaderapp.com/, an
app that gives you all of the book with none of the swear words. No, seriously.
Their tagline is “Read books. Not profanity.”
At this point, I pray that you all know that I’m being
sarcastic, and that this idea offends almost as much as Memories Pizza, projections
that 3D printers will be able to print out a human heart before women receive
equal pay, or anything Ted Cruz. So where do I begin here?
First off, in an e-mail correspondence by author
Joanna Harris, http://joannechocolat.tumblr.com/post/114572318791/an-e-mail-from-clean-reader,
representatives from the app address a blog post written by Harris about the
product. Their words are eloquent and carefully written, but it is still clear
that they’ve missed the point. Harris points out that, artistically, writers
choose certain words to convey a meaning. Yes, there are some authors out there,
like Mark Henshaw, who is featured on the Clean Reader blog which states: “Mark
writes well enough that he doesn’t need to include profanity in his writing.”
Dude, get off your high horse. I should say, “Get off
your fucking high horse,” but I have better use for the ‘F’ word in the next
paragraph. The point it, Henshaw choosing to not use profanity doesn’t make him
better than authors that do.
Yes, there are those that do overuse profanity and
thus it may lose meaning. However, most of us—especially writers—use our
language very carefully and very effectively. For example, in one of my novels
I only use “fuck” once, but because I chose to use “fuck” and not “darn” or
whatever the Clean Reader equivalent to “fuck” is, that passage conveys a lot
more power. When I did a search for the word in my book, it only came up once
and I knew exactly where, because the use of the word in that scene made it
that much more memorable. I also use the word “whore” early on in a story to
express how one character feels about his interaction with another character. It’s
powerful, and it’s the last word in that passage. By people having the ability
to take away those words or alter them, they are taking less from the stories
that we write and are even sometimes missing vital points.
Let’s think about some of the most notable texts and
passages of all time and see how they’d be altered. If you take out racially
uncomfortable themes and slurs, you might as well not even bother reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Ma Joad won’t be
breastfeeding a man in The Grapes of
Wrath (would the Clean Reader alternative be her giving him a chicken
breast? Would they take out the last chapter altogether?), and—I’m sorry, but
who didn’t go “ohhhhh shit” when Viserys Targaryen tells his sister Daenerys in
her first POV chapter, “I would
let his [Khal Drogo] whole tribe fuck you - all forty thousand men - and their
horses too if that's what it took.” He says that to his little sister. Damn,
that’s cold! What’s the Clean Reader equivalent? It certain wouldn’t leave you
feeling the same anger towards him and pity for her, much less the visual!
Funny enough, on the Clean Reader Blog page, there’s an advertisement for their
version of Game of Thrones. Who would
want to read that?! The whole 5 book series would have to be shaved down to
about 300 pages, and 200 of them would be say nothing but “Hodor.”
Harris also points out the
“moral” wrong of this app. Given the word choices it makes, it appears to give
books a Christian bias, which is offensive to non-Christians. If you change “bitch”
to “witch” you go from insulting people who don’t want to see the word “bitch”
to insulting pagans with regards to the negatively connotation of the word “witch.”
Also, to jump back to my first point, I sometimes write fantasy. If the words “bitch”
and “witch” are switched, there are going to be some potentially confused readers
out there!
Lastly, Harris mentions
the “pedagogical” wrongs with the app. For further understanding, here’s the
story behind the app. The creators stated that, “One day our oldest child came home from school and she was
a little sad. We asked her what was wrong and she said she had been
reading a book during library time and it had a few swear words in it.
She really liked the book but not the swear words.”
Okay, I understand
that. It seems like the initial concept behind the app are comparable to
parental control settings on TV or the internet. This doesn’t mean that the
same child won’t hear these words at school, or in music, potentially every
other facet of media and social media.
Harris’ response to
this is as follows: “I believe the toxic message it carries (that body parts are shameful and
must not be mentioned by name; that sex is dirty and shameful) is likely to be
extremely harmful to impressionable young people, and may result in serious
psychological damage, with all the social consequences that may entail.”
We can shelter our children
all we want, but I’ve always been one to believe that when my hypothetical
child approaches me after hearing something at school, or seeing or reading
something that confuses them, it would be my obligation as a parent to be as honest
as I can be with them. It is only with knowledge that children will understand
and grow.
Chuck Wendig, another
author with the popular blog http://terribleminds.com/,
says that “Education isn’t about
concealment of information. It isn’t about the eradication or modification of
offensive language, or ideas, or information. It’s about presenting truth when
a child or an adult are ready to hear it, and then talking about it. Anything
else is how you get Jesus riding dinosaurs, or a loss of climate change, or the
eradication of women or people of color from the pages of history, all because
it doesn’t line up with preconceived notions and pre-existing comfort levels… Authors write the books they want to write, and
you read them as they are written.” I personally couldn’t agree more.
We are brought up reading
about contentious issues from a very young age. Some of them make us uncomfortable,
but they also cause us to think. Yes, not every work will use racial themes as
well as “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Huckleberry Finn,” or provide the same
graphically effective profanity as Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, but an
author—every author—should have the right for their works to not be altered by
an app for people who don’t want to read anything because it might offend them.
And if this is a “Christian-bias” app, then the creators should have their
children read the Bible. There’s no sex or violence AT ALL in that!
