Alright, so I was watching 1 Girl, 5 Gays last night and there was a question about censorship and whether or not the f-word should be censored in music. And it just got me thinking, not so much about music, but about cursing in writing. I know exactly where I stand, but I was wondering what other people thought of it.
I know that one man on the show said that it should be censored because if ‘fuck’ isn’t censored than what it really sacred? I can see where he’s coming from, exactly, but I just can’t bring myself to agree with him. It’s hard because, to an extent, he is right. There are a lot of instances where curse words are just used for the spectacle of things, that’s when I think it becomes wrong. I think that it’s just unpleasant to read and there are other ways of shocking your readers and making them feel uncomfortable with your writing.
So on that note, censorship is certainly good to an extent, until a time where we can all decide as individuals when it is and isn’t okay to swear. I certainly think that I’m at a point in my life when I know where swearing will make my piece more effective and I’m always conscious that when I do swear, it actually does something, you know what I mean? I never throw those words around just for the sake of saying it.
I always bring up the same example, only because it’s so true. If everything needed to be censored, some things would lose their meaning. There’s a scene in the book, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (if you haven’t read it, I sincerely recommend it) where, in this dystopian society, Offred (the protagonist), as a Handmaid is forced to sleep with the Commander of that area. It’s a bit hard to explain, basically, the Handmaids are the women in the society that need to bear children and so they must all sleep with the Commanders in hopes of getting pregnant. But when Atwood writes the scene where Offred sleeps with the Commander, there are an abundance of f-bombs thrown in there, whereas, for most the novel, they are nonexistent.
There isn’t another word for what the Commander and her had done, they’re not sleeping together, they’re certainly not making love, they’re f*cking and the feeling of the scene would have been completely lost with the cursing. So, what do you think? Do you think swearing should be avoided, do you do it just for the sake of doing it or do you feel, like me, that there is always a time and a place?
do you swear in your stories?
March 27th, 2011 at 12:33am