What's Black and White and Red all over?
The NY Times has an op-ed piece from Ann Brashares, the Young Adult (YA) author. In the piece, Ms. Brashares starts with a discussion of a rating system for young adult books:
At one time, there was discussion in the Romance Writers Report, (the RWA industry mag), about implementation of a ratings system. The suggestion went nowhere, for exactly the same reasons that Ms. Brashares notes. The publishing industry likes to think there are more variables than just sex, language, violence, nudity, and drugs. (I don't think there is, but I don't want to see ratings on books, either). Eventually, Ms. Brashares hits on the revolutionary idea of segregating books by content:
What's fascinating to me is that we naturally choose to segregate on interest. It's a very practical solution; there are too many books for a reader to have to search among all the books for the ones that interest them. A grocery store has a frozen food aisle and all the soft drinks are one in place. But books? Would a gay romance go in romance or gay fiction? Is it discriminatory to have a "gay fiction" section? And multi-cultural? Does that get its own shelf, too? From a reader perspective, I see the reasoning, but I remember when de-segregation hit my elementary school, too.
I'm not trying to answer this one, because the question is: where is the line between what's "acceptable" and what's "wrong?"
In New York, they recently began bag searches on the subway and Paul Sperry, a Hoover institution media fellow, wrote a piece about the idiocy of not using racial profiling in the searches. Again, on the surface, searching the bags of Middle Eastern men seems reasonable. But, oops, that nasty "anti-discrimination" argument rears its United Colors of Benetton head. This was written a few days after British police shot and killed a Brazilian man they had assumed was a suicide bomber. Shoot first, it's the Israeli way. Again, if the man had been a suicide bomber, the police would have saved countless lives. But he wasn't.
In the days when Martin Luther King still had a dream, things were black and white. There was no perceived right or wrong. Segregation, every day, all the way. But that's not the world we live in, and there's no more black and white. Now there's gray stuff, like Tiger Woods and gay romance. Stuff that fits into a lot of different boxes. And the brain is wired to put things into boxes.
I have no smart answers, no funny answers, not even stupid answers. I'm not sure there are answers. But I think we should ask the questions.
"So what's the best way of telling you? Should publishers put a ratings system in place? It seems to work effectively for movies and electronic games. It's a fairly simple solution. If a book has obscenity, sexual content, drugs and drinking and violence, publishers could put an M for "mature content" on the cover.
This seemed at first like a good idea, but the more I thought about it, the more tangled it became. For example, with books it's tricky to separate the content from the quality. Can any ratings system express the subtle things that make a book valuable or potentially harmful? It's not so much the difference between M for "mature" and E as in "O.K. for everybody." The more salient distinction is between R for "rewarding" and G for "gratuitous." EE for "edgy and enlightening." SS for "sensational and stupid." It is easy to get carried away. What about scary books? S for "scared the pants off me and my kid." BD for "gave him bad dreams for a year." And sad ones? BH for "breaks your heart." AD for "at least one animal dies." One likes to be warned."
At one time, there was discussion in the Romance Writers Report, (the RWA industry mag), about implementation of a ratings system. The suggestion went nowhere, for exactly the same reasons that Ms. Brashares notes. The publishing industry likes to think there are more variables than just sex, language, violence, nudity, and drugs. (I don't think there is, but I don't want to see ratings on books, either). Eventually, Ms. Brashares hits on the revolutionary idea of segregating books by content:
"What if books for 13- to 19-year-olds were developed, marketed and sold by adult trade publishers as a category, like science fiction or romance novels? Maybe that would spur the growth of a new book market for under-served 13- to 19-year-olds, who may like to read about themselves but won't go near the children's section. "
What's fascinating to me is that we naturally choose to segregate on interest. It's a very practical solution; there are too many books for a reader to have to search among all the books for the ones that interest them. A grocery store has a frozen food aisle and all the soft drinks are one in place. But books? Would a gay romance go in romance or gay fiction? Is it discriminatory to have a "gay fiction" section? And multi-cultural? Does that get its own shelf, too? From a reader perspective, I see the reasoning, but I remember when de-segregation hit my elementary school, too.
I'm not trying to answer this one, because the question is: where is the line between what's "acceptable" and what's "wrong?"
In New York, they recently began bag searches on the subway and Paul Sperry, a Hoover institution media fellow, wrote a piece about the idiocy of not using racial profiling in the searches. Again, on the surface, searching the bags of Middle Eastern men seems reasonable. But, oops, that nasty "anti-discrimination" argument rears its United Colors of Benetton head. This was written a few days after British police shot and killed a Brazilian man they had assumed was a suicide bomber. Shoot first, it's the Israeli way. Again, if the man had been a suicide bomber, the police would have saved countless lives. But he wasn't.
In the days when Martin Luther King still had a dream, things were black and white. There was no perceived right or wrong. Segregation, every day, all the way. But that's not the world we live in, and there's no more black and white. Now there's gray stuff, like Tiger Woods and gay romance. Stuff that fits into a lot of different boxes. And the brain is wired to put things into boxes.
I have no smart answers, no funny answers, not even stupid answers. I'm not sure there are answers. But I think we should ask the questions.
posted by Kathleen at 2:30 PM
4 Comments:
When we're talking about categorising books, I don't think it's really the same as segregation. Readers aren't excluded by categorising something as "romance" or "gay fiction". It's more segmentation in terms of target audiences. As a reader, I find this valuable because some days I want to read romance and other days I want to read fantasy and if bookstores didn't shelve using categories, I'd probably leave in bookless frustration! While it's true that most books can be segmented in more than one way, there are usually one or two dominant categories based on the target readership of a book.
Content classification is another matter altogether. I'm a believer in caveats but I agree that classfication doesn't distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate content in the context of the story. I think that instead of a single rating, books should have markers to indicate what type of content can be expected. I know some erotica publishers have this and it enables readers to pick out or exclude books according to their preferences. I don't see why a similar kind of system can't be applied more broadly.
Kat, I guess what tweaks my spine in the content classification (which I actually can see the reasoning behind), is that it implies that romance has some sort of "naughty bits" and should be rated accordingly. And yes, some books have naughty bits, but I think it just gives people another reason to point a finger of shame at the romance industry. OK, I'm secretly a paranoid person. :)
Actually, I was thinking of applying classifiction tags across other genres. I reckon that might draw people's attention to the fact that other genres have naughty bits, too. I was also thinking about violence and other classifiable content, not just sex scenes.
Maybe we can have a classification for bad writing - that ought to clean the genre right up! Hehe..
Ah, so tags for ALL books. Interesting..... Exactly like ratings for movies. And ROFL at the classification for Bad Writing.... The "Bulwer-Lytton" tag! Love it!
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