Roald Dahl books have been edited to remove the word "female" along with other edits.

[GoChasingWaterfalls]

www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/18/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-to-remove-language-deemed-offensive?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It's literary terrorism.

I think Netflix is guilty of cultural appropriation. If this were done to books by a black or gay writer, the backlash would have been huge and rightly racist and homophobic but....... we are fair game. The amount of trash culture we are importing from big business, who want us to use pronouns and flag wave every two minutes.

Get out of my culture

Thought Speak is alive and well. Has no one learned from the Cultural Revolution in. China or the Nazis burning books? How is this actually happening in a supposed democracy? It’s terrifying. Who is the ‘they’ who have decided to do this on behalf of the nation and wider world?

People who can't see how dangerous this is, are either intellectually challenged or ideologically captured.

What should we be doing instead of debating censorship? Shopping or embroidery perhaps?

They were probably told to shut the door quietly on their way out of the building.

Yup!

Roald Dahl wasn’t a very nice man. It’s fine to change the odd word here and there in older books. If you don’t want his books in your house that’s up to you. But wholesale rewriting makes the books not Dahl. It’s the weird and grotesque characters that children like. If you get rid of the gr

Whoops! Posted too soon. If you get rid of the grotesquerie you haven’t got much left. Also some of the changes seem just odd. Why is Matilda allowed to read Hemingway and not Kipling? Makes me think the sensitivity reader didn’t know much about Hemingway.

I don’t think it’s fine to change the odd word or two. No.

Why is Matilda allowed to read Hemingway and not Kipling? Makes me think the sensitivity reader didn’t know much about Hemingway.

I wondered that.

I was flicking through a library copy of To Have and To Have Not the other day and there is rascist language on every page (or so it seemed).

They just said, ‘We couldn’t get it past our junior members of staff.’ ”

That is so utterly pathetic it makes me want to puke.

They are JUNIOR members of staff - you don't have to get anything past them. If they are so triggered by books that they can't cope with them being published, they shouldn't be working in publishing.

And the senior members of staff should not be bowing down to them! This is symptomatic of so much that is wrong in the culture generally. Why is someone with 30 years of experience in an industry making business decisions based on the whims and fashions of people with zero experience who are barely out of childhood? We devalue age and experience and valorise youth and "innocence" to such a degree that we're going to end up burning everything down to placate the children who don't have any fucking clue what they're even saying.

This is such a failure of leadership. It's sinister and depressing.

The censors are illiterate and ignorant.

They just said, ‘We couldn’t get it past our junior members of staff.’

I wish someone would interview a senior member of staff at one of these publishers and ask them some questions along the lines of ‘how many objections do you need from junior stsff before you concede to their wishes?’; ‘do you always run your company according to the wishes of the junior staff?’; ‘what would happen if you override the objections of the junior staff?’; ‘is there any point writers sending in work if they, the writers, know the decision to publish will depend on the junior staff?’.

Unfortunately the junior members of staff are almost always the gatekeepers in industries like publishing, television, theatre, etc.. The senior members of staff aren't going to sift through all the work submitted by agents, which makes me wonder how much ideologically impure work gets rejected at the first stage.

A lot of people on Twitter have been celebrating this and quoting unpleasant things that Dahl wrote or said. They don't seem to have reflected that they only have knowledge of his unpleasantness because nobody has sanitised the words they are quoting.

Maybe fiction will end up as in the former East Germany where authors had to comply with state censors but managed so that readers could read between the lines.
I read somewhere and I wish I could remember where, that after the regime ended and writers were free to say what they wanted, one author - maybe Christa Wolf - found it hard to write with carte blanche and found it easier within the restrictions of GDR censorship.

It's telling enough that they even thought it worth trying. Other posters have provided examples where censorship has succeeded.

@BeautifulDayintheneighbourhood Changing the odd word here and there must be fine , mustn’t it , because some words are now rightly totally unacceptable. Take the classic Agatha Christie book, And Then There Were None. You really wouldn’t want to call that by its original name which featured a dreadful racist term. The story doesn’t lose anything by getting rid of that word. Calling Augustus Gloop enormous instead of fat, on the other hand , seems pretty pointless.

Changing the odd word here and there must be fine , mustn’t it , because some words are now rightly totally unacceptable.

No. You shouldn't rewrite books because in doing so you're rewriting history. Books can be allowed to fall into obscurity, to be of interest only to academics or historians. But to rewrite books is to obscure their context and place in history. It's just not okay.

Agatha Christie is one example. But another example would be Mark Twain. His books for children use the N-word extensively. Because he is writing about racism. Same as To Kill a Mockingbird. If you take the racial epithets out of that book, you are not demonstrating what the problem was they were fighting against. You can't have an effective fictional book about racism without showing racism.

When I was a kid, I read all sorts of books with all sorts of words in them that were "totally unacceptable" then as they are now. But even as a child, I was able to understand the historical and cultural context and these books taught me a lot.

One question we haven't asked is, what is the purpose of removing "unacceptable" words from books? What is this achieving? It doesn't end racism, sexism, fatphobia etc (it might counterproductively cover those things up.) Coming across an "offensive" word in a book is an opportunity - to discuss, debate, deepen understanding, open a door into the past. What is the purpose of taking away this opportunity?

You've just blown my mind ... I am so old the edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I read as a child definitely had the Oompa-Loompas as black pygmies who were bribed by Wonka to leave their impoverished African jungle homeland to come be locked up inside his factory and work for chocolate instead of getting paid. Which, as much as I adore Dahl and that book in particular is ... problematic ... in hindsight.

This has just led me down a fascinating sidepath and I wonder if Dahl would have agreed to change them from "pygmies" to light-skinned tiny hippies in the 1973 edition if there hadn't been outcry over the former. Though his response sounds pretty decent.

Saw the musical theatre production recently in which they were some sort of steampunk robots which I suppose is safer.

This is exactly it. Yes, there's a conversation to have about Dahl's approach to characters (not just the women/girls either), and the wider context of his beliefs/attitudes, some of which are clearly indefensible. One assumes and hopes that children's teachers and parents/other adults have these conversations with them.
But in terms purely of the text, this denudes it of its power and its meaning.

Gabby Hinsliff supports the changes (surprise!)
www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/20/roald-dahl-industry-classics-parents&ved=2ahUKEwj6yM37-Kb9AhX4QEEAHRJXBi4QFnoECA0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1gWpeCkFDdaGv4EjAbwqD4

Yes, I would actually agree with you. Removing that particular word from Huckleberry Finn or TKAM would be quite wrong because the whole point of those books is to point up the attitudes and deep racism of that time and place. If you were to sanitise these books you destroy their effect. Agatha Christie, on the other hand, is a different case. You don’t lose anything from that particular book if you change the title ( and the name of the island, if I remember correctly). Horses for courses. I don’t think anyone would read that AC title if it was called by its original name, which would be a pity because it’s a good story. TKAM and Huckleberry Finn are still widely read because they are great works of literature and , yes, it’s perfectly possible and obviously desirable to discuss why that word is used and why it matters.

They've been doing this sort of thing to books for donkey's years!
Enid Blytons 3 Gollywogs, anyone?

How are sensitivity readers selected? Do all minorities get equal representation in that group? All age groups? Women and men?

If the selection is not representative of the society, then the changes done have a bias in the sense that a small handful of people may seem to determine what the society today views as unacceptable.

If I were a sensitivity reader for some of the truly heinously woman-hating books of the past, would my views be given any credence at all?

Her take on the Cologne sexual mass harassment was an epic one for me...