I don’t know why I’m just now seeing this article of yours, but I really liked it and wholeheartedly agree with you. I, too, tend to write stories set in time periods where the very idea of retroactively projecting contemporary cultural sensitivities would be ludicrous and anachronistic. Following the logic (if you can call it that) of those who want to cancel challenging works would mean adding nearly every work predating c.1995 to the index expurgatorius. It would mean banning theater productions as well: many of Shakespeare’s characters would be unrepresentable on the stage: Othello, Shylock, etc. --Or how about “Guys and ***Dolls***”? Or non-Latino actors and actresses playing Puerto Ricans in “West Side Story”?
Even mainstream works are full of representations of women, for example, that are incompatible with some of the rabid ideologues who probably haven’t called for them to be cancelled yet, because they haven’t read them. Last year I read through Ian Flemming’s Bond novels and was shocked by some of the stuff I came across. In fact, some of the stuff is/was so shocking, that I can’t even objectively bring these issues up here. But if your curiosity is piqued, read the chapters that give the biography of the character Ali Karim Bey in the novel “From Russia with Love,” who kidnaps and chains a woman to his desk, routinely beats her and abuses her, who tells Bond that this is the way women like to be treated, and who the reader is supposed to find kind of cute and endearing.
I’m going to conclude my comment on this topic here, because I get so upset about these things that I just end up citing one example after another (“What about X written by Y?...What about the famous movie A directed in 19-- by B?) and just hoping that it’ll all just die down as yet another temporary fad.
“I am an author, not an activist. Art shouldn’t be made to serve sociopolitical aims, and I reject the call for artists, including authors, to bend their words and works in service of any cause. I’m not willing to be a conscript in anyone else’s crusade. My work is my own.”
I don’t know why I’m just now seeing this article of yours, but I really liked it and wholeheartedly agree with you. I, too, tend to write stories set in time periods where the very idea of retroactively projecting contemporary cultural sensitivities would be ludicrous and anachronistic. Following the logic (if you can call it that) of those who want to cancel challenging works would mean adding nearly every work predating c.1995 to the index expurgatorius. It would mean banning theater productions as well: many of Shakespeare’s characters would be unrepresentable on the stage: Othello, Shylock, etc. --Or how about “Guys and ***Dolls***”? Or non-Latino actors and actresses playing Puerto Ricans in “West Side Story”?
Even mainstream works are full of representations of women, for example, that are incompatible with some of the rabid ideologues who probably haven’t called for them to be cancelled yet, because they haven’t read them. Last year I read through Ian Flemming’s Bond novels and was shocked by some of the stuff I came across. In fact, some of the stuff is/was so shocking, that I can’t even objectively bring these issues up here. But if your curiosity is piqued, read the chapters that give the biography of the character Ali Karim Bey in the novel “From Russia with Love,” who kidnaps and chains a woman to his desk, routinely beats her and abuses her, who tells Bond that this is the way women like to be treated, and who the reader is supposed to find kind of cute and endearing.
I’m going to conclude my comment on this topic here, because I get so upset about these things that I just end up citing one example after another (“What about X written by Y?...What about the famous movie A directed in 19-- by B?) and just hoping that it’ll all just die down as yet another temporary fad.
“I am an author, not an activist. Art shouldn’t be made to serve sociopolitical aims, and I reject the call for artists, including authors, to bend their words and works in service of any cause. I’m not willing to be a conscript in anyone else’s crusade. My work is my own.”
Amen 🙏