My professor in a stage combat class told us often that no matter the type of combat scene--sweeping, emotional, comedic, whatever--the creators of the scene have a moral responsibility to depict pain. Violence hurts. And to suggest anything contrary to this fact is dangerous.
I think about what my professor said more often than one might expect. I no longer choreograph or act in combative scenes. I do not write violence. But that question of the moral responsibility of artists has stayed with me.
There is a line one can cross between "you cannot depict violence without pain" and "you cannot depict sex outside of marriage." I am fervently anti-censorship, and yet the question of a writer's responsibility lingers with me.
Back around the same time that I took the stage combat class, I wrote a sex advice column for a fairly large and famous men's magazine. I wrote under a pseudonym, which was a good thing, because I received death threats in open letters in our school newspaper. I was accused of being a part of a culture that plays into men's fantasies and causes women to be raped. I did not take any of this lightly.
When I wrote the advice column, I had a rule with myself: while I might tailor my voice to the publication, I would never lie. I would never write something because it was what I thought men wanted to hear. It was always what I felt was true and all of the anecdotes shared were my own or those of close friends. I have never questioned the morality of my participation in a men's magazine. But there are those who might suggest that I am an enabler of "rape culture."
Today's post was inspired by Roxane Gay's "The Careless Language of Sexual Violence." Read it. It is important.
And now I ask you: do we, as writers, have a moral obligation in the language we use? The circumstances we depict? The violence we portray as painless? I think we do and, though I can't pinpoint exactly where this sits on the censorship scale, I think that it is dangerous and childish for artists to believe that we have no responsibility for the words we use.
