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RE: Violence and Brutality in Fiction: The Ink Well's Stance

in The Ink Well3 years ago

Thanks for your thoughtful comment, @ganjafarmer. The point of our article is that there are places for everything. You wouldn't walk into a classroom of third grade children and read them Lolita. Right? That's not censorship. It's about what's widely believed to be appropriate for the context. That's just one example.

The Atlantic and The New Yorker do not publish stories about violent rapes, brutal stabbings, beheadings and point-blank shootings where blood gushes from the wound. It's not censorship. They just choose what they publish.

True crime stories and R rated movies tell it all. You want violence? You want rape? You want to read about children being beaten and bashed by their parents? You want women being thrown against walls, bludgeoned, bloodied and murdered? Go find it. It's there for the viewing.

We have made a choice, and have defined what our community is about, with clear boundaries. We are a short story community, and we want great stories that don't feature disturbing scenes of violence. Just like we don't accept poems, essays, introduction posts, novels, articles about how to grow and harvest a great crop of weed, or content on gaming, we also don't accept stories here about brutality and violence. It's not that those things can't exist. They're fine... elsewhere.

We have had people leave our community and our admin team because of the prevalence of these kinds of stories, and how they appear almost daily in spite of our clear boundaries. We are merely trying to help people understand where the lines are drawn.

Does that help?