INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 106: Why a "liberal" supports book banning.

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Kat Rosenfield. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)

What Happens When a Political Movement Goes Too Far?

THE WRITER KAT Rosenfield wants to ban books from school libraries. Technically, in the piece she wrote on the subject for the Boston Globe's Ideas section, she presented herself as an advocate for banning only one specific book. She was out to make a larger point, though, and the larger point was that books need to be banned. 

Rosenfield self-identifies as a liberal, but a very special and by now familiar kind of liberal—the kind of liberal who is fed up with all those liberals. "If I disagree with my liberal tribe, does that make me a conservative?" the headline of her Ideas piece asked. Last year, in the National Review, she published "Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conservative." 

Why does Rosenfield keep getting mistaken for a conservative? Like conservatives, she is against the graphic novel Gender Queer being available in schools, to such an extent that she felt the need to make a public declaration about it. 

Here's how Rosenfield described the controversial part of the book, which is a coming-of-age memoir by an author who identifies as nonbinary: 

[T]he scene depicts a moment in which the protagonist and a partner experiment with a strap-on dildo...

It's racy. Enough so that the page can’t be shown on TV, not even in the late-night hours when the Federal Communications Commission’s obscenity regulations are relaxed; enough so that I can’t name the sex act in question without playing an elaborate game of charades to avoid running afoul of the Globe’s editorial standards. (Hint: It rhymes with “whoa, bob.”)

The "whoa, bob" bit was an odd and telling falsehood—not about the book, but about the supposed prudery of the Boston Globe. It's true that the paper appears to have a specific prohibition against publishing the term "blowjob." For instance, two years ago, when the Globe published an interview with a theater artist doing a one-woman show titled "Get On Your Knees," under a headline calling it "a provocative oral report," it used "[fellatio]" in brackets, twice, along with unbracketed "oral sex" two more times, and one reference to "a certain kind of job."