The Censorship Post
Dec. 29th, 2003 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
przedOnline discussion with several people on LJ has led me to consider my position on censorship. So, I'm going to take a break from the usual quiz spam and fanfic to air my own musings on the topic.
The event that most seriously crystallized my thinking about censorship occurred in the early 90s, when I was in graduate school, studying film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was taking a film production course in the company of about 10 other grad students and 100 undergrads. One of the projects was to produce a five minute 8 mm film, which produced the usual mixed bag of bad to mediocre film student excesses. There were, however, a few exceptions, including a quite lovely experimental film reflecting on human sexuality, a film that happened to include full frontal male and female nudity. I thought nothing of the screening of this film in class, but a vocal group of undergrads, exhibiting the same hypocrisy evident in American mainstream film, found the male nudity too much and launched a protest aimed at the filmmaker and the professor. In a low water mark for undergrad behaviour, one young woman-and I use that noun advisedly-had her mother call the Dean of Arts and Science to complain.
I found it astounding that a group of young adults who had chosen to study a creative art form at a respected school failed to want to explore new viewpoints and experiences, and instead expected to be protected from that art. I was appalled that people of the same age I was when signing petitions denouncing the Victorian views of the Ontario Censor Board were calling on the films of their fellow students to be censored.
At the same time that this academic brouhaha was taking place, two more things happened. First, Canada Customs started systematically harassing shipments to two gay and lesbian bookstores, Little Sisters in B.C. and Glad Day in Ontario, on the grounds that the customs officers considered books of homoerotica obscene. Second, I stumbled into fandom and the world of slash. For me, censorship issues became even less academic and more something that could affect me directly with cross-border shipping of zines. I think it's worth noting that as slash writers and readers, we have a hobby that, if it was more in the mainstream, would no doubt come under intense pressure for censorship. We are saved from having to fight that battle by the low profile of our pursuit.
In spite of the fact that the fight against censorship means also defending a glut of gratuitous nudity and violence in cinema and the double standards for male and female sexuality that permeate North American society, I think it's a stand worth taking. Laugh at a producer's insistence that a T&A shot is integral to a movie's narrative if you wish, but recognize that an increase in censorship on such grounds will result in a chipping away of your own rights. I'm not advocating the removal of a rating system, but a rethinking of the current system. There needs to be a recognition that the MPAA's ratings often have far more to do with the economic clout of the major studios than with a real desire to protect the public. And finally, it's important that the debate continue, that individuals and groups, like the Little Sisters book store in Canada and the ACLU in the U.S. continue to launch constitutional appeals against censors to ensure that the small minority who would take away all freedoms to protect us from perceived evils do not prevail.
The event that most seriously crystallized my thinking about censorship occurred in the early 90s, when I was in graduate school, studying film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was taking a film production course in the company of about 10 other grad students and 100 undergrads. One of the projects was to produce a five minute 8 mm film, which produced the usual mixed bag of bad to mediocre film student excesses. There were, however, a few exceptions, including a quite lovely experimental film reflecting on human sexuality, a film that happened to include full frontal male and female nudity. I thought nothing of the screening of this film in class, but a vocal group of undergrads, exhibiting the same hypocrisy evident in American mainstream film, found the male nudity too much and launched a protest aimed at the filmmaker and the professor. In a low water mark for undergrad behaviour, one young woman-and I use that noun advisedly-had her mother call the Dean of Arts and Science to complain.
I found it astounding that a group of young adults who had chosen to study a creative art form at a respected school failed to want to explore new viewpoints and experiences, and instead expected to be protected from that art. I was appalled that people of the same age I was when signing petitions denouncing the Victorian views of the Ontario Censor Board were calling on the films of their fellow students to be censored.
At the same time that this academic brouhaha was taking place, two more things happened. First, Canada Customs started systematically harassing shipments to two gay and lesbian bookstores, Little Sisters in B.C. and Glad Day in Ontario, on the grounds that the customs officers considered books of homoerotica obscene. Second, I stumbled into fandom and the world of slash. For me, censorship issues became even less academic and more something that could affect me directly with cross-border shipping of zines. I think it's worth noting that as slash writers and readers, we have a hobby that, if it was more in the mainstream, would no doubt come under intense pressure for censorship. We are saved from having to fight that battle by the low profile of our pursuit.
In spite of the fact that the fight against censorship means also defending a glut of gratuitous nudity and violence in cinema and the double standards for male and female sexuality that permeate North American society, I think it's a stand worth taking. Laugh at a producer's insistence that a T&A shot is integral to a movie's narrative if you wish, but recognize that an increase in censorship on such grounds will result in a chipping away of your own rights. I'm not advocating the removal of a rating system, but a rethinking of the current system. There needs to be a recognition that the MPAA's ratings often have far more to do with the economic clout of the major studios than with a real desire to protect the public. And finally, it's important that the debate continue, that individuals and groups, like the Little Sisters book store in Canada and the ACLU in the U.S. continue to launch constitutional appeals against censors to ensure that the small minority who would take away all freedoms to protect us from perceived evils do not prevail.
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no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 04:14 pm (UTC)I hate fundamentalists of all persuasions, but you don't see me trying to disallow their existence (except in occasional drunken moments when I wish I could nuke em till they all glow) but they sure try to disallow me. I find it especially offensive when Americans do it as America is supposed to be the land of the 1st Amendment and Freedom...
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 04:45 pm (UTC)I know...
Date: 2003-12-29 06:34 pm (UTC)I just want to do like Bill Engvall does and hand them their sign... ::growls::
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 04:26 pm (UTC)I think most intelligent filmgoers are well aware of this, whether they're in favor of abolishing ratings altogether or making the PG-13 rating more stringent to keep violence and gratuitous sex out of films that have been deemed appropriate for children.
I am also very, very tired of being told, as a parent, that wanting honesty in disclosure of the contents of a motion picture is tantamount to supporting censorship.
I too took filmmaking courses. We had a running joke about how you could tell the serious film students from the ones who were only there to provoke by which ones made a film involving naked people in the first month. Having one's mother call an institution of higher learning is a bit ridiculous, but there was definitely an atmosphere that bordered on harrassment in some of the film courses, where professors gleefully expounded in theoretical terms on the gaze while showing image after image of naked female bodies.
Again, disclosure in the course contents of the fact that much of the material would focus on sex and sexuality would have avoided much of the problem, but again, since such disclosure would by its very nature be arbitrary -- some people would find, say, An Officer and a Gentleman in need of a warning label for erotic content while other people wouldn't need to be warned about anything less explicit than Debbie Does Dallas -- perhaps this too would be decried as censorious.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-29 04:40 pm (UTC)I understand and completely support this point of view. In fact, I'm frequently appalled at the parents in theatres who seem to utterly ignore the rating systems and bring young children to wholly inappropriate films.
there was definitely an atmosphere that bordered on harrassment in some of the film courses, where professors gleefully expounded in theoretical terms on the gaze while showing image after image of naked female bodies.
That would have been equally irksome, but very much not the case in my experience. In fact, quite the opposite. The undergrads who protested the film proceeded to make life difficult and unpleasant for the prof and those of us who supported the filmmaker (an undergrad, BTW) for the rest of the term.