Non-Sense and Over-Sensibility

Let us begin with a confession. A sincere, flagellating sort of preamble, the kind with hairshirt fibres still embedded in the gums. I have sinned, and by sin I mean: I have read — actually read — recklessly dangerous books without benefit of trigger warnings or a safety harness. I’ll bet you have, too.

And lived to tell the tale!

You know the ones. The Capital-C Canon books. The books you’re assigned in Intro to Western Lit and then pretend to read while secretly Googling “symbolism of the green light in Gatsby” and feeling mildly superior to anyone who actually reads these fossilized monuments to What Old White Guys Thought Was Deep™.

But imagine, if you will, a timeline in which those books were intercepted — pre-publication — by the shimmering avatar of the 21st century’s most paradoxical industry: the sensitivity reader. A term that sounds as if it were invented either by Orwell or by a Brooklyn-based AI startup run by two ex-Goop employees and one person with a very expensive M.F.A. These are the Readers Who Read So You Don’t Have To Be Offended™. And oh, what a world they would have saved us from.

But first, a little background on sensitivity readers, in case you’ve been beavering your way (can one still say that?) through The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby for the last decade or so and haven’t come up for a glass of sensitivity facilitation training.

This is from a piece by writer Adam Szetela in an essay that ran a few days ago in spiked, a libertarian-ish British internet magazine that focuses on politics, culture and society. Szetela is the author of That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing:

In the mid-2010s, people began to notice something strange happening on college campuses. In the past, wealthy donors tried to censor professors and students. But then the demands started coming from the students themselves. More interestingly, the demands were being expressed in the language of public safety. It was ‘dangerous’ for Bret Weinstein, a professor who criticised the tactics of an anti-racist protest, to teach at Evergreen State College. It was ‘harmful’ for Erika Christakis, a professor who questioned the wisdom of banning certain types of Halloween costumes, to retain her position at Yale University. It was ‘violence’ for Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, to give a talk at Middlebury College. The Great Awokening, as it would later come to be called, had transformed America’s colleges.

Something similar has been happening inside America’s publishers. One vice-president at a Big Five publisher, who did not want to be identified in this piece, told me that there have been ‘more changes in the past five years than the previous 20 to 25’. The changes have been fuelled by the rise of Bookstagram, BookTok and Twitterature (a portmanteau of Twitter and literature) — and, of course, by the Great Awokening. Today, anyone with an internet connection can accuse a book of racism, sexism or transphobia. Across the board, American publishers have reshaped their editing policies in response to social-media outrage.

Sensitivity readers, individuals who are hired to eradicate potentially offensive material from books, were largely unknown until 2016, the same year young adult (YA) author Justina Ireland built a database of sensitivity readers. Uncoincidentally, this was the same year Donald Trump was elected to the Oval Office. In less than a decade, sensitivity readers have become a routine part of the editing process. Whether it’s picture books or adult novels, and even the pages of Science magazine, the most extreme people on the ‘progressive’ left now have an important, and frankly unprecedented, role inside American publishers. Indeed, Ireland and other sensitivity readers’ attacks actually fuel the demand for their services.

‘We’re now using sensitivity readers a great deal’, one president at a Big Five publisher explained to me: ‘The sensitivity readers that we’re employing are at the very, very, very farthest edges of the cultural police. They are over vigilant to a large degree. It’s great to have the most extreme possible reaction to a book, which catches even the most apparently neutral points and casts a severe light on them.’

As a vice-president at a different major publisher put it to me: ‘We are very interested in trying to suss out what books might cause a problem on social media, which can come back in our faces in terms of sales. Nobody wants to publish a book that social media is going to cancel. It’s unpleasant, it can be hurtful, it’s upsetting and it’s not good for business.’

While publishers are focussed on their bottom line, many literary agents are more focussed on protecting their authors from edits. If you can imagine a National Book Award winner edited against their will by a 22-year-old sensitivity reader, who just graduated from a gender-studies programme at Yale, then you can imagine the frustration of the agents I talked to, many of whom have been selling books to the Big Five for decades.

As one literary agent told me: ‘Someone will say, “Oh, I’m a little concerned about this. This character’s misogynist.” And I say, “He’s misogynist. They exist. They existed at the time. They exist now.” It was set in 1920. That’s how they spoke. We’re not going to give them the vocabulary of 2022. It’s just not going to happen, and it shouldn’t happen.’

Another agent, who represents a veritable who’s who of contemporary authors as well as the estates of many deceased canonical authors, put it this way: ‘You can’t say Cormac McCarthy is a butcher because his main character is a murderer.’ But today, you really can. And the biggest publishers in the world will listen. As one Pulitzer Prize finalist lamented, ‘This is the silly season’.

The implications of this trend — this paralyzing blizzard by tender snowflakes — for the futures of fiction and non-fiction alike are terrifying. The expanding use of sensitivity readers to vet journalism is perhaps even more alarming than their encroachment into the heady Elysian Fields of literature. Safe speech (for whom?) is not free speech. But screw the future.

This increasingly entrenched climate of censorship within the publishing industry — which used to be driven by prudes and moralists on the right but is now largely the province of cultural censorship from the left — got me thinking about the literary morgue — sorry, museum — of what would have been had sensitivity readers been around for major literary events of the past.

Imagine a world in which Moby-Dick never reached print because Captain Ahab failed to attend a mandatory anti-whaling seminar led by a vegan adjunct lecturer from Sarah Lawrence, or where The Catcher in the Rye was reduced to a 14-page pamphlet titled Holden Caulfield Learns Emotional Regulation in a Peer-Supported Environment. I have assembled some humble examples:

Exhibit A: The Bible (various authors, ghostwritten by God)

Sensitivity Reader Notes:

• Potentially traumatizing depictions of fratricide, genocide, infanticide, patricide and locusts.

• Non-consensual divine insemination (see: Luke 1:35), needs reworking with clearer boundaries and agency.

• God repeatedly smites people for “reasons,” which may be triggering for readers with complex relationships to authority figures or authoritarian sky-fathers.

• Lot’s wife being turned into a literal salt lick for looking back could be interpreted as problematic for women with anxiety disorders or anyone with an interest in geography.

  
  

Revised Title: The Mindful Spiritual Journey of Diverse Middle Eastern Communities: A Nonlinear Narrative

Outcome: God is rewritten as a “non-binary cloud of possibility,” Jesus becomes a “progressive life coach with a TikTok presence,” and the entire Book of Job is restructured into a self-care manual titled When the Universe Ghosts You: A Trauma-Informed Guide to Suffering. The crucifixion scene becomes metaphorical, involving only a three-day silent retreat and some uncomfortable eye contact with Peter.

Exhibit B: Oedipus Rex (Sophocles, 429 BCE, before “trigger warnings” were invented or even possible)

Sensitivity Reader Notes:

• Incest.

• Eye trauma.

• Victim-blaming via prophecy.

• Fatalism not affirming for neurodiverse readers.

• Naming the play after the man when Jocasta clearly had the more emotionally nuanced arc.

• The Sphinx scene involves body shaming and gatekeeping riddles, both highly problematic.

  
  

Revised Title: Parenting Yourself: An Intergenerational Wound Healing Toolkit

Outcome: Oedipus no longer blinds himself but instead joins a support group for “Unintentionally Intimate Kinfolk.” Jocasta becomes a TEDx speaker on “Empowering Female Agency in Pre-Freudian Tragedy.” The Sphinx opens a Patreon. Tragedy is rebranded as “a growth opportunity.”

Exhibit C: King Lear (Shakespeare, 1606, or approximately 398 years before the term “emotional labour” was coined)

Sensitivity Reader Notes:

• Patriarchal trauma via inheritance-based affection.

• Goneril and Regan are portrayed without nuance, contributing to “evil woman” tropes.

• Blinding Gloucester: again with the eye trauma. What did these dead white males have against eyes, anyway?

• The Fool is neurodivergent-coded but treated as comic relief.

• Cordelia dies at the end?? No thank you.

  
  

Revised Title: Divesting from the Toxic Father: A Feminist Reimagining

Outcome: Lear attends family therapy. The Fool is promoted to a high-paid consulting role at Google. Cordelia starts a podcast called Silent No More. Edmund is revealed to be acting out due to unmet childhood needs and is granted tenure at Oxford. Goneril and Regan open a women’s co-op winery in Cornwall called “Gaslight No More.”

Exhibit D: Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922, notoriously unreadable even before the content became a problem)

Sensitivity Reader Notes:

• Dense prose creates access issues.

• Unfiltered bodily functions.

• Leopold Bloom’s interiority may contain cis-hetero presumptions.

• Molly Bloom’s monologue is sexually explicit and uncurated. (Her lips say yes, yes but is that no, no in her traumatized eyes?)

• Offensive use of stream-of-consciousness by an objectionably straight white man.

  
  

Revised Title: Thoughts & Feelings: A Neuroinclusive Day in the Life

Outcome: Joyce is politely asked to break up his prose with emoji and paragraph breaks. Bloom is rewritten as a nonbinary content creator exploring mindful walking. The “Penelope” chapter is reworked into a series of Instagram captions tagged #BodyPositivity and #YesICan. The new version is sold as a guided meditation app.

Exhibit E: Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H. Lawrence, 1928, banned before it was cool)

Sensitivity Reader Notes:

• Classism masked as eroticism.

• Gamekeeper character perpetuates outdated “man of the woods” tropes.

• Orgasm scenes lack informed consent language and trigger performance anxiety.

• Descriptions of the female body include “moist loins,” which if nothing else is a crime against metaphor.

  
  

Revised Title: EcoSensuality: A Consent-Based Encounter in the Midlands

Outcome: Connie leaves her husband not for a lower-class gamekeeper but for a nonbinary forest therapist named River who leads her on a journey of plant-based sensuality and restorative justice. The sex scenes are replaced with discussions about attachment styles. Penguin releases it in their “Inclusive Erotica” line with a scratch-and-sniff cover.

And like that.

It would be tempting to scorn all of this as postmodern farce, as some kind of humourless woke-ification of the sacred, but that would be too easy. The truth — if such a bloated, Kantian, dead white male European thing can be said to exist — is that literature has always been rewritten, censored, bowdlerized, translated, banned, burned and reborn. The Bible has more versions than Taylor Swift albums. Shakespeare has been adapted into everything from anime to West Side Story. Joyce might dig the chaos of his sentences being sliced into 280-character thought-bites.

No, what is truly funny — and sad, and tragicomic in the full dead white male Aristotelian sense — is that in our desperate attempt to avoid discomfort, we may be amputating the very nerves that make literature live. The jagged ones. The ones that hurt.

The real tension here is between empathy and erasure: when trying to correct for historical injustice, we sometimes end up producing prose so sanitary it could double as an N95 mask. Literature is not broccoli. You shouldn’t read it because it’s good for you. You should read it because it makes you feel — uncomfortable, angry, implicated, even complicit.

The sensitivity reader, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority agent of the literary world, clearly means well. But one begins to wonder how much art can survive after its belt, shoes and identity have been removed and scanned for sharp edges.

Heck. Maybe I’m beating a dead horse. A cis-male, white-passing, OK Boomer relic of an earlier literary priesthood, scribbling marginalia in the margins of culture as the whole thing is rewritten in real time, by committees, for compliance.

Still. I miss the salt. Even Lot’s wife. POSTSCRIPT A sensitivity reader reviewed this essay and asked that the phrase “problematic icon” be replaced with “evolving role model,” that Kafka’s The Metamorphosis be added to the list and reimagined as a positive narrative of insect identity, and that the phrase “beating a dead horse” be removed entirely due to equestrian trauma connotations. In response, the author has locked himself in a metaphorical attic with a copy of Tropic of Cancer and is refusing to come out until literature is dangerous again.

He’s still in there.