Warning the Following Entry Contains Language that May Offend Some Readers

[muccamukk]

It's also rambly and long, so I'm cutting:

I admit to prudishness when it comes to profanity in a lot of cases. Casual swearing, especially of a sexually violent nature makes me very uncomfortable. If the situation is stressful, that's one thing, but I really wish that some would choose to use a little more creativity or restraint or something than to express dislike with the comment "Fuck him and everyone that looks like him." I feel that words lead to, if not action, than at least an unfortunate mindset and quite a bit of bad karma.

I think I must have picked this sensibility up on my own, because while my folks don't swear a lot, there's too many ships and workers around for it to be a profanity free zone. I learned most of my vocabulary and use there of from a wonderful keeper's wife a few lights up the way, who had a blatant disregard for proper use of the airwaves. This was different than the above, because she was sort of the Jon Stewart of the coast, and usually had a good reason to be on a tear, and though she did once suggest that a certain technocrat take his proposed twenty foot mettle replacement tower and stick it where the sun didn't shine, she generally wasn't violent. (and if you ever get a chance to see the National Film Board Documentary about her called Leaving the Lights, definitely check it out).

I guess what I'm saying is that everything has it's place, which brings me to...

So I'm reading this story, which isn't spectacular, but has a couple of my kinks in it, so it's worth finishing, and there's a fair amount of non-explicit sex, some of it violent, and moderately-explicit violence, enough for a solid PG-13, if not an R. One scene deals with a group of teens harassing a black character, in the course of which, they called said character a "nigger." I understand that this is a hugely offensive word to most people, as it is to me. I do not think that it quite merited huge bold warnings on either side of it, so that people who had just made it through an attempted rape and several severe injuries wouldn't be offended.

Similarly, why would someone who's writing reasonably hardcore slash worry about taking the Lord's Name in vain and consequently deliberately misspell "God" every time? What's the logic? People are having graphic anal sex all over the place, but at least their not going to Hell for violating the Third Commandment, because that would just be wrong (this is not to say that I have a negative opinion of anal sex, but if the author's really that religious, one would think...)

So I've heard of washing kid's mouths out with soap, and other such things, but is clean language so strictly enforced that young authors will go to any lengths to maintain it regardless of the context?

Am I being unnecessarily negative of late?

Comments

[linaelyn.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I think that certain words, in certain contexts, have immense power, and that sometimes in written correspondence (be it fanfic or anything else) the writer has a very different interpretation of the "weight" of a word from the reader.

Once, when I was in elementary school, where I was the only non-Jew in my grade, and most of my schoolmates' parents were survivors of the Holocaust, I heard Howard Schenk call David Hoffmann a word I didn't recognize, but it was a word that made David hold Howard's head under the drinking fountain and pound on him.

I do not remember exactly what the word was, but the look of shock and horror on my teacher's face when I later asked her what the word meant was enough to tell me what her words filled in, a moment later: It was a derogatory word for a Jew, used by German guards in concentration camps.

The word meant nothing to me. No shock or horror accompanied it. But it was the worst profanity that could be spoken by my peers. By contrast, most of them said "God damn" and "Jesus Christ" with conversational regularity. These words made me flinch in pain, every single time. As a Born-Again Christian (we had the bumper sticker) I felt they were calling for *my* personal deity to bring actual damnation upon the subject, and did so with callous abandon, because it was just another word for emphasis, no more serious than "dyn-o-miiiiite" or "right on!" (yeah, it was the 1970's.)

The author you are reading comes from a culture where the words that are being used carry a heavier weight than they do in your own culture. As a child, my parents said that it was rude for me to use words like shit or fuck or cunt... but it was a SIN to say God's name in anything but reverent prayer. Perhaps the author comes from a background such as this, or lives in a culture where the misuse of God's name is a far more serious offense than simple buggery.

Then again, maybe they're just writing sloppily and strangely. ;-D

[muccamukk]

Ha, I'm taking this as another example of I'm horribly sheltered and therefore ask stupid questions.

I like that explanation (though I suspect the sloppily and strangly may be more true in this case). The Second example is not actually from the same fic, just something I run across fairly often and puzzles me everytime. or lives in a culture where the misuse of God's name is a far more serious offense than simple buggery. and I can't for the life of me figure out what that culture would be.

I guess I just feel that if you are writing a scene wherein a character is suffering violence and bigotry, than isn't that horrific and offensive in it's own right? The same kid later got the shit beat out of him, and she didn't put a BOLD warning around that.

I would never in a million years call someone that, and wouldn't keep a friend who did (at least not without making it very clear that I did not want such things said around me), but if I were writing something about an issue as serious as racial violence, I doubt I would hesitate to use every word available to convey just how unacceptable the situation was (and post a BOLD warning at the beginning. -shrugs-

I think I'm going to say "dyn-o-miiiiite" quite a lot.

[seascribe.livejournal.com]

That is weird to me, because nowadays people pepper their language with profanities and "God's-Name-in-Vain"s with mindnumbing regularity. At least the ones I observe in daily life.
So I can't see the logic either, especially not with thehard-core variations that you described.

[muccamukk]

That's what I thought, I'm usually the most restrained person in whatever group I'm in, everyone else is swearing a blue streak.

So is there hoards of prim puritan girls writing porn out there somewhere, or what?

[culurien.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That word was in a book (don't remember which, now) that we were reading aloud in English class one day in high school. The unfortunate classmate who got that passage hesitated before she could say it - and I'm glad it wasn't me, because I don't think I could have said it at all.

For me, and I think for many other people, calling people that is just Not Done. Swearing is fine, in its place, but that one, just No. I've never heard it actually used except by black people - which strangely enough doesn't bother me; I guess it's that they're taking a derogatory term and making it their own.

(Example - in one episode, House threatened Foreman with dropping "the N-bomb." But even House would never say it, I think, even if they weren't on network television and could.;))

As to why it's worse than the violence, well, I don't know. I guess it's a sad case of us deluding ourselves - racism is over because we don't say the N-word anymore, never mind all the violence. In addition we see violence every day at the movies and on TV, so it's not as upsetting. That said, I don't think there should have been warnings around it in the middle of a story - if your story requires it to make a point, and you're going to use it, use it - don't yank the reader out of the story to avoid injuring anyone's delicate sensibility. (Or to make it absolutely clear that the author doesn't mean it? Could be that more than anything.)

Taking God's name in vain - many people think nothing of it. Others - the Jews are not allowed by their religion to write or speak God's name - they'll read "the Lord" when it says "Yahweh" in the Torah, and write G-d instead of God. Maybe this is just orthodox Jews, maybe it's everyone, I claim no knowledge.:D But I'd guess your author was brought up in, if not a culture, then at least a household where taking God's name in vain was seen as Very Very Bad and she held onto that even after she started writing about gay sex. It happens. People have strange priorities - this is why children can see violence on TV waaay before they can see sex.

[muccamukk]

I think that one reason that this gave me so much pause was that although I know the history and problems with the term. My dad read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn unedited, and explained the problems of the time when we were young, but that was pretty much the extent of it. It is also Just Not Done here, but it's not exactly a huge issue in my area. There's probably under five hundred black people in the city of 70,000 I live in, and a near majority of those are actually from Africa (which is a different category, to some extent). So black/white racism has always fallen into "things that happen to other people, most of who are American."

But even if it was a group that I'm more familiar with, such as some form of Asian or First Nations, I think I still would have been somewhat puzzled. I think it's another case of the MPAA (or whatever) striking again.

If she was so upset about the word, she shouldn't have used it. It's like watching Star Trek movies when the actors are now allowed to swear, but they always seem very self conscious about it, really breaks the mood.

The whole hardcore religous thing is also something I had zero contact with growing up. I'm not saying I disagree with it, only that I would probably make more sense of people from Mars.

[culurien.livejournal.com]

Racism here is more an institutionalized/invisible racism, these days. No one wants to be accused of it - but St. Louis is one of the most segregated cities in the nation, and there are appaling dichotomies between the amount of funding that the city schools and those in the suburbs get (not just in St. Louis. There's also a highly disproportionate number of black people in prison, on death row, getting pulled over while driving just because they "look suspicious"...But no one wants to admit it's happening. And personally, you know, no one is racist. (But why were all my friends in high school white? Why were there no black kids in the advanced classes I took? We don't consciously choose to segregate ourselves, but the system is still in place.)

Asians and First Nations, on the other hand...There were three Asians at my high school while I was there, and the only person I've met with enough First Nations blood to actually have anything to do with the culture, I met online.

If she was so upset about the word, she shouldn't have used it.

Agreed. And I can't think of how someone could write porn but be uncomfortable taking God's name in vain - just a suggestion as to how it might come about.:D Should've left that part out, too, if it's that big a problem.

[muccamukk]

Canada and the US actually have very similar problems, though they are a little worse there I think, they are still huge, huge issues up here, so I know exactly what you mean.

"Demons I get. People are crazy"
-- Dean Winchester