DAMage Report - Shut Your Mouth and Close Your Eyes - Censorship

Artist Jaesun Duggan had the joy of discovering his oil paintings in the Norfolk Public Library, as part of a display by the Franklin Art Association, were taken down and placed in a closet by a religious group that meets in the library.

The congregation for Providence Baptist Church, which holds Sunday morning services in the library, objected to the nature and deemed them unsuitable for their children. "One of the paintings, "Loa Offering," depicts red-shrouded skeletons. The other, "Dream Adrift In a Sea of Abyss," features a doll's head with a flower sticking out of it."


The religious group found the paintings objectionable and removed them, sticking them in a closet. While meeting in a public place. Uh-huh. Censorship and imposing your values on others doesn't get much more obvious than that. If the group wants to control what their members see and don't see (hello, can you say cult) then they should NOT be meeting in a public space. The artist naturally was a bit torqued. 


Censorship is a subjective topic. What is and isn't appropriate is often open to interpretation, dependent on a person or society's beliefs and self-image. Is censorship EVER appropriate? Sure. There are certain things that are and never will be deemed acceptable by common sense and humane morales. Anything that victimizes another such as child pornography, murder, abuse, racism - these are all things that most of us agree are unacceptable. The common denominator being that they involve one or more attacking a person or specific group that they have targeted. The sticky-wicket comes when censorship is applied outside the areas of criminal behavior. And it is. Often.Then censorship becomes an subjective imposing of what is and is not appropriate based not on accepted criminal behavior but on personal preference.  The definition of  what is “appropriate” varies depending on one’s religious, moral, ethical, and cultural background. 

A censor denies an individual's right to know, access, and come to their own conclusions on a topic. There really is only one purpose for any form of censorship: to enforce ignorance about a targeted topic. It is most often an abused tool used by those imposing their own ideas on others.


Nudity in art is one of the quickest visuals censored and has the highest double-standard. What is and isn't porn is subjective. Subjective equals personal opinion. What is and isn't appropriate for children is also subjective to a degree. A painting of bare booty should not automatically get the "OMG it's porn" stamp. We are getting ridiculous with our censorship bans in this society and allowing the uptight puritanical views of one or two people (or a gossipy clutch of hens) to dictate what we are and are not allowed to view and enjoy. 


I have found out what it is like to be silenced, my voice taken away and my right to share my ideas tossed in the closet. It is unbelievably frustrating.


Answer me this - Except for censorship of anything criminal in nature, what gives any person the right to dictate to others what they can and cannot look at, read, enjoy, and say - based on what they think is inappropriate? 

We need only allow a little censorship to become acceptable and before we have realized it, those little bricks of discrimination will become the blank wall that divides us from the real beauty of our True individual nature and ultimately ourselves. - Jaesun Duggan 

REF: http://sunchronicle.com/articles/2010/03/13/news/7092615.txt

DAMage Report: Can you smell that smell - The Reek of Amazon Rank

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8000401.stm

Excuse me, I need to "Ham-fist" you... it'll only hurt for a second.

The world truly is a smaller place and when bad news hits, it travels faster than ever before due to instant cybernet of Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Sunday morning I saw a cry of outrage in the status of one of my favorite authors, Jaci Burton. In addition to being a best-selling mainstream romance author, she also has numerous erotic romances published. Her link led me to Mark Probst online commentary and a letter from Amazon explaining that they had a change in policy and that is why his YA novel with gay characters was no longer being ranked. 

More than 57,000 books were affected, including gay- and lesbian-themed titles. Novels such as Proulx's "Brokeback Mountain" and Vidal's "The City and the Pillar" were unranked Tuesday morning. Countless romance and erotica authors saw their best seller ranking disappear and many couldn't find their books any longer using the Amazon search engines. However, Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds" by Chronicle Books, which features pictures of over 600 naked women, remains ranked. Even sexual self-help books were unranked.

Debby Herbenick told me that her book "Because It Feels Good: A Woman's Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction" was affected too. Her sales data was gone and the search function was messed up. 

Was it a glitch? A Hacker? A change in policy? It has been interesting to watch the evolution of "oh crap" responses from Amazon. From Policy change it became a glitch. From glitch it became an embarrassing ham-fisting. And from ham-fisting it became a cataloging error.

Bill Thompson a journalist with the BBC observed "...some sort of filtering seems to have been going on since at least early February when former gay stripper Craig Seymour saw the sales ranking on his memoir disappear. He complained at the time and the ranking reappeared.  What this seems to show is that Amazon are trying to make search results more 'family-friendly'. There's nothing wrong with this, and Amazon aren't violating the First Amendment or even, I suspect, breaking the terms of their agreement with publishers by doing it. However they have clearly broken the bond of trust with a large number of their readers, and it will take a long time to recover."

The power of the pen (and keyboard) definitely came into play and showed that even a small, well connected group like the erotica and romance authors can call the Giant to task and refuse to quietly accept censorship. 

Where to draw the line? DAMage report - Art Censoreship

Recently a sculpture depicting a young girl performing a blow job on a teacher was removed from a gallery on the Bowling Green State University campus. The piece entitled, “The Middle School Science Teacher Makes a Decision He'll Live to Regret” was created by Artist James Parlin as part of a series of sculptures called "A Baker's Dozen."  Parlin says it was inspired by a teacher who was the father of his own children’s friends, and his curiosity about why a person would do something they know will ruin their life. 

Other sculptures in the exhibit included, “The Man Who Hasn’t Seen His Genitals in Years,” “Sami Drops a Deuce,” “Bobbie Put Her Gun in Her Mouth” and “John Put His Head in the Oven.” 

(Ermmm - those seem like pretty strong "topics" to me as well, yet they weren't protested against as being inappropriate for children. What is wrong with this picture...I mean sculpture?)

Unfortunately no one can seem to lay their hands on a photo of the sculpture in question, so the ability to judge for ourselves is unfortunately not available. Descriptions say "there's no genitalia. It's made in such a way that you can't see any sort of ecstasy on the man's face and you can't tell the exact age of the person but the title tells that it's a young teen. It's not pictorial graphic. Is it disturbing? Well sure. Is it hard to look at? Well sure. But it's not explicit."

Palin's work (that i've seen) is quite abstracted and spooky. Definitely not realistic and created in a manner to invoke a sense of discomfort in the viewer. 

So is it the concept rather than the visual that is being objected to? According to the the National Coalition Against Censorship although the material may be inappropriate for children, it is appropriate for a public university.

One student's opinion is: "The removal ... sets a dangerous precedent for the removal of controversial works at the peril of academic inquiry itself. Is the university a business? Or is it an institution of higher learning? If the university is a business, an entity that merely exchanges money for degrees and considers customer satisfaction to be of the utmost importance, then the decision to censor a controversial piece of art makes perfect sense. However, if the university is an institution of higher learning which encourages and expects critical thinking from its students, then the administration has done a serious disservice to the learning process." 

Part of the concern with the sculpture, which was on display within a gallery not in a general public area, is that it was uncomfortably near a children's theatre. I feel very, very strongly that there are concept that young children should not be exposed to... not graphically. But are university students still children? I'm pretty dang sure every single one of the students attending have already been exposed to the concept, if not the reality of pedophiles. For the sensibilities of those that do not want to get a face full of it - there are really simple precautions and advisories that can be implemented. Signage, warnings in advertising, restricted admission based on age, etc.

We do it on a regular basis with our movies and our books. I don't see a problem applying the principle to exhibitions. (This gallery show has been rated R for strong adult content. This gallery show has been rated X for explicit nudity, no one under 21 admitted.) 

As strongly as i feel about not exposing young children to concepts that will rip away their innocence, i also detest censorship. Denying people the choice to view the art is taking away our freedom of choice. The outrage is less to the artist in my opinion - who was not denied his right to create the piece - and more to the gallery that has been denied the right to show it and the audience, that has been denied the right to see it.

How can I, or anyone else, make up our minds how we feel/think/react to something when we're denied access to it? 

The entire "controversy" could have been easily solved, without all the national hoopla and teeth gnashing, by simply using some common sense and restricting access to the show, based on age appropriateness. 

http://www.dailyvanguard.com/sexual-expressionism-1.1642393

http://lakotaphillips.blogspot.com/2009/04/stories-of-interest.html