Owning Our Words

Texas Governor Rick Perry's recent revelation that he was never bothered by the idea of an innocent person being executed hit me hard this week. It's astonishing to me that anyone would think that way but even more astonishing that they would publicly admit it. What on earth does that say about the moral conscience of the person who would say such a thing? It's frightening.

As a writer this is something that I think about a lot, how much responsibility do we bear for the words and the ideas that we put out into the world? I know that there are twisted people who can manipulate anything into an excuse to justify terrible behavior but a writer has to bear some sensibilities around the power of their words or am I hopelessly old-fashioned about that? I've written here on a number of occasions about the “forced romance” (i.e. rape) novels that seem to be growing in popularity. I had thought they peaked in the Seventies and were in decline but with the growth of electronic publishing a lot of unsavory writing is on the rise. Why? Because there is a BIG market for it. Readers are now spared the embarrassment of buying porn in bookstores and can read it on their e-readers anywhere. If anyone asks what they are reading they can say “War and Peace” and no one will ever know. But why is there such an appetite for this stuff – not the porn, I know why people love porn, I mean the “forced romance”, the “kidnap and torture porn”, and the most despicable of all, the “girl taken by a pedophile” genre which seems to be adding new titles every day.

The scariest part is that when anyone tries to discuss this, the consumers, mostly women, get furious – they descend like a flock of harpies screaming that they have a right to read whatever they want and who am I (or whoever) to judge. Don't take away my kidnap-and-rape “romance”! It scares me. Even more frightening is the denial of some of the writers of this stuff. Some claim their writing is “cathartic” for all the abused women out there who need an outlet for what happened to them. There is an outlet – it's called therapy. And some say they are exposing crimes that many people are unaware of – such humanitarians they are describing these crimes in intimate, lurid detail, over and over and over.

Not long ago I posted about my reaction to Anne Rice's “Beauty” books – three books that she published under a pseudonym some years back that are little more than endless descriptions of the sexual abuse and humiliation of a young woman who learns to love her captor. When I read the first book (I only got through about half of it) I was sick to my stomach but I was surprised by the number of women who kept praising the books. All I could think was, how would Ms. Rice feel if some guy read her books, thought “so that's what women want!”, and proceeded to enact the scenes on women who protested just as the girl in the books did? By today's standards those books are mild.

I recently downloaded half a dozen samples of the very popular Living-Dead-Girl-type books on my Kindle. I couldn't get through ANY of them without thinking “this stuff is sick” and deleting them. There is one writer, who writes under a pseudonym (good thing), who has recently released an e-book (I'm not going to mention the name because I don't want to promote it) that is so graphic in its descriptions of rape, sexual torture and humiliation that Amazon refused to carry it. It is on Nook and has a page full of 1-star reviews by people saying how repulsive it is and crying for its removal. Yet on Goodreads there are a number of 5-star reviews from (all) women who talk about how “powerful” and “exciting” it is. The author continues to promote the book by challenging potential readers to explore the “limits” of what “turns them on”. Never mind the “turns their stomach” factor. This cavalier attitude about promoting violence as sexy and thrilling scares me and I shudder at how it could be interpreted in certain hands.

The great John Gardner said, “True art is moral. It seeks to edify, not to debase.” I wonder if some of these writers even know what those words mean. Or do they even care. And worse still is the market that laps this stuff up. What has become of us? Do we, like Rick Perry, never give a thought to who will be damaged by what we do in the world? I don't think I want to know the answer.

Thanks for reading.