Exclude the Exclusion Ambassadors ... please!

Some publishers employ "sensitivity readers" (editors) to police language in manuscripts which might make readers "feel unsafe". 

Sensitivity editors' role is actually to make publishers feel safe from attack by woke would-be censors. For that purpose, publishers now hire "Inclusion Ambassadors".

Bret Easton Ellis's latest novel came in for editorial correction* when his publisher's sensitivity readers complained it “was not a ‘positive’ portrayal of homosexuality”. 

Clearly, many classic books are in need of re-writing so that people can feel safe reading them. Readers don't want to be ambushed by the notion that there are more ideas in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Some books that seriously need to explain their attitude:

Black Beauty, for not supplying a positive portrayal of horse-abusers

War and Peace, for a non-positive portrayal of a Napoleonic war

Far From the Madding Crowd, for being negative about crowds

Animal Farm, for implied criticism of farmers

Wuthering Heights, for insensitivity toward people with fear of heights

Treasure Island, for casting aspersions on pirates

The Mill on the Floss, for stigmatizing people who can't afford dental care

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for not portraying "them" as a young woman or trans person 

Where's our freedom of expression, once it's edited away by publishers? Like Eeyore of Pooh Corner said of a lost thing:  "Somebody must have taken it. How like them."   

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PS: A disclosure -- I've never read Bret Easton Ellis's novels* but I might now, for who can resist an author who says "I do not want to write anything with a fucking cell phone in it"?                                                                                         I'm sure tired of reading stories full of them, with characters who do nothing but talk on them, text with them, scroll through them, take pictures and solve murders with them ... So please, edit phones out, thought-pruners. ...

Insensitivity Editors

The Lords of Sensitivity -- editors lording it over writers from Bowdlerizing keyboards -- have insensitively made life harder for satirists. How can satire parody something that insists on comprehensibly parodying itself? 

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/oompa-loompas-no-longer-tiny-sensitivity-readers-take-the-gnarl-out-of-dahl

The latest victim of "sensitivation" is kids-lit author Roald Dahl. His writing is certainly not to everyone's taste, but that doesn't give anyone the right to vandalize and steal it -- only the right to not read it. Would it be legal to seize your neighbour's car, give it a new coat of paint, and say -- here, this looks better, so get over it? Why is it legal thus to vandalize a writer's property and legacy? Whatever happened to copyright? 

Of course, a corporation like Netflix can (as they did) buy an author's legacy (in this case creating the Roald Dahl Story Company). So that gets around silly issues like respecting an author's ... authorship. The Roald Dahl Story Company is a branch of the international corporate chain of Cancel-Culture Inc.

Dahl, like Dr. Seuss and others, has been worked over by the "sensitivity" gang, part of a woke army which is nothing but insensitive to literature and the intelligence of readers. Aiming to be "progressive", this army is in fact regressive -- regressing back to the time of censorious Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825).

Bowdler, a British doctor, took it upon himself (with his sister) to re-write Shakespeare in a fashion "suitable for women and children to listen to when read aloud". Women! They need things well-sanitized of course -- but we get over the sexism of that today by doing it to all genders, including the non-binary ones or those in which men are women simply because they say they are ... And if that nonsense is protected from being criticized for scientific ridiculousness, why isn't Dahl protected? (At least his books won't suddenly pop up un-invited in women-only change rooms.)

If people want to enjoy role playing, gender-blending and cross-dressing, they should go for it. But why should those who enjoy reading freely what authors freely write, be forbidden from doing that?

(See best-selling word-craftsman Anthony Horowitz, British novelist, discussing the matter here: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-clash-with-sensitivity-readers/)

Bowdler had his own reasons for re-writing Shakespeare; here's how the current sensitivity-censors do it:

https://satiricalscene.blogspot.com/2021/11/shakespeare-for-modern-audience.html