A pair of Ohio state representatives have threatened to rescind government funding from Kent State University unless the school pulls a book on the history of anime from its curriculum, claiming that the book in question promotes “sexual violence.”
As first reported by Ohio’s Fox19, the row over the book in question began when a high school aged student, enrolled in a class at the university as part of a college credit program, objected to the use of Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation as part of a required reading assignment, telling his professor through an email exchange that the text went against his “moral obligations” and made him “very, very uncomfortable.”
“The idea of feeling that if you don’t like a subject you ignore or suppress anything controversial is not a very sensible way to approach a subject. It can come back and flower even more because it’s seen as forbidden.”
I presume this is your main takeaway from this article. If someone isn’t comfortable with using the book, I don’t think it’s much of a loss, if they don’t read that book. It’s just a book on animation history, and not anything like biology where “nudity” might be necessary to teach someone valuable anatomical concepts. But, presuming that it is beyond their reading is really infantilizing them in a really pointless way.
Am I the only one that finds people in power responding to the fictional depiction of controversial topics with censorship as extremely disturbing?
Their first instinct with dealing with horrible things is to hide it, so no one else will be able to see them.
So what will happen once they witness a real crime happening? Will they try to hide it too, clean up the evidence, just so no one can ever see the crime happened?
The catholic church also has this approach of censoring things they deem sinful, and then a lot of cases of their own members sexually exploiting minors came into their knowledge, this is exactly what they did, they tried to hide it from the public, so it won’t hurt their reputation.
Apparently, this is what “morality” is all about these days.