fox-bright:

On a hot day many years back, I was riding on a city bus when I noticed a blind man coming down the sidewalk.  He climbed into the bus at the stop, patted his way to a seat across from mine, apologizing as he passed all of the people who had to stand, and sat back with every evidence of weariness.  I was in a pretty crummy mood to begin with, and felt what could be described as a physical wave of cynicism when I realized that he was wearing an attractive watch. He’s not blind! I thought, scandalized.

I was young and stupid. That is not an excuse for thinking somehow that blindness was binary, that either a person could see or they were blind. But I felt a tiny outrage, at the idea that this man had faked needing his cane, that he’d bumped into that woman on purpose, so that he could secure a seat on a packed bus.

And then, eyes closed, he reached to his watch wrist with the other hand, pressed a button on the gold rim, and the watch popped open. He brushed his first two fingers across the face, frowned, and snapped the watch shut again.

And I felt like an idiot.  Justifiably ashamed. I’d been so sure that I understood how life works, that watches only work for people who can see, that I’d actually felt superiority over a man who I thought was a liar. If I’d ever known a blind person, maybe I would have had a little more understanding–but that’s no excuse, and every bit of the fault was entirely my own. I made an assumption, based on no understanding whatsoever of what his life was like, and I deserved my embarrassment.

Perhaps somewhere along those lines, Slate has just dropped an article about sensitivity readers. For people who haven’t heard of them, a sensitivity reader is a sort of editor who will go through your manuscript to make sure you’re not saying anything particularly misguided or dehumanizing about a particular group.  For instance, I’ve been a sensitivity reader for an acquaintance who wrote a story with a bisexual protagonist; the author was straight, and wanted to be sure that they weren’t making any ugly mistakes in their depiction of the character’s inner life.

There are even online forums dedicated to this sort of editing.  You can find editors who are of just about any minority–different ethnic groups, religious beliefs, sexual orientations and identities, young teenagers and septuagenarian war vets. Basically, if you’re writing a character from a group you’re not part of, you can find someone to look through your manuscript and catch things that you didn’t think about.

(You wouldn’t write a novel about wartime Prussia without consulting historians, either through their own writings or through direct communication with them; it’s no less egotistical and wrongheaded to assume that you understand what it’s like to experience life as a blind Native American woman.)

And, predictably, a straight white female author got all het up about it, calling it overreach and putting things into scare quotes.

I want to be clear that I’ve had a LOT of respect for Victoria Strauss’ hard work over at Writer Beware.  She’s put an astounding number of hours in to protecting inexperienced authors from predators, and from making their own stupid mistakes. She’s clearly passionate about making publishing as a whole a safer place. And that’s part of why this is so frustrating.  Because, frankly,

she should know better.

She put “offense” in scare quotes.  But sensitivity readers aren’t about offense, they’re about not making ugly, stupid mistakes.

There’s a post going around Tumblr right now about how “male authors need to stop doing this.”  In it there are a series of quotes from various male authors writing female protagonists, wherein the protagonists are just laughably wrong.  Thinking constantly about the bouncing of their own breasts, about the way their tight skirts nip in just right at the waist, about their own full lips.  You know, thinking about themselves through the male gaze, because their authors are incapable of imagining that women might see themselves differently than the authors do.

A few months back there was Keira Drake’s novel “The Continent,

” which was pulled from publication when the author Justina Ireland got her hands on an advance copy and saw what somehow

no one else had noticed

up until that point; that the book was hideously racist and colonialist on several levels, so deeply flawed that the immediate reaction of the internet at large was one of rage.  So many people protested that the publisher took the book back into the editing stage, and it remains to be seen if it will be released.A sensitivity reader or three would have saved Keira Drake the bad publicity storm, because the problems in the manuscript would have been caught before it ever got out to the public.  A set of female eyes could have saved the laughably awful male writers from writing things that are now being roundly mocked by hundreds of thousands of readers.

Just like any other good editor, sensitivity readers aren’t there to
squash the author’s voice, to police their language, or to render the
text toothless.  They’re not there to reduce a piece to pablum.  A
sensitivity reader is there to tell you when you’re writing something
that is just flat wrong.

It’s not a matter of offending people or not offending people, it’s a matter of not fucking up.  It’s a matter of not being so egotistical that you assume, without even thinking, that you understand what it’s like to try to navigate the world as a disabled EMT, or a fourteen-year-old biracial farmboy, or a Chinese-American college student.  It’s a matter of understanding that there are a million things you simply do not know, and consulting someone who does.