Adults Only
By David RobinsonAs it appeared in Broadsword issue oneWhy the #%*@ is swearing considered worse than sex and violence?You don’t believe me!In issue 106 of Data Extract they published the results of their most recent survey. These results included a graph of the degree of suitability of sex, violence and swearing in NA [1]. The interesting thing about this is that the results show people don’t mind much about the violence or sex in NA, however they strongly disapprove of the swearing.Doesn’t that seems a little odd to anybody else?I am not going into the discussion about the motive for inclusion of sex, violence and swearing (i.e. to prove that it’s for mature readers only, or because it fits in as a necessary element of the story) but rather the fan’s response to this aspect of the novels.When Benny stepped out of the TARDIS and said the immortal “Maybe time travel fucks with your mind.” [2], there was an explosion of childish responses. All of them screaming `I can’t cope with new ideas’. Why is it that the readers didn’t mind that all through Transit people were being turned into homicidal killing machines, with gorish attachments to make their killing more fun.Since the `Transit bashing’ that went on, the writers have been a little more discrete with the inclusion of swearing, but it is still there. Rather than Ace actually swearing they now usually use a literal device such as: `Ace chose a few expletives from her vocabulary’.You may well ask what is the difference?By not actually including the swearing the reader is not confronted by anything offensive but rather told that something offensive happened there. They are pampered, the swearing is softened to a suitable level of acceptance. This technique the writers use is not clever, it is cheating.The readers were unable to accept change, the underlying constant of all Doctor Who. They would not consider that adding swearing to the stories was a benefit, or, that it heightened the level of character development.Naturally moderation is in order. The inclusion of swearing, violence and sex must depend on the character and the situation. The swearing of Reservoir Dogs most likely would not fit in with a Doctor Who story, nor would the level of violence.Yet this inability to accept change is rather hypocritical, swearing is less acceptable than sex or violence.What makes swearing worse than violence or sex?Social constructs that don’t make sense, in society we learn that violence is simply unacceptable and that sex is behind closed doors (an attitude that is ever so slowly changing) whilst people swear anywhere.Perversion, perhaps the reader gets a kick out of the violence or the sex. Some sort of deep frustration venting itself, but surely that would include swearing as well.I think the problem is that the swearing is in character, not pointless. People have become all too familiar with swearing in public, but that it is actually uncomfortable for them to read it in it’s context.Yes, you can justify sex and violence as unavoidable parts of the story if you want the characters to seem anything more than two dimensional, but surely you can justify swearing the same way.Footnotesfn1. `Adults Only?’ (insert), 1994, in Data Extract No. 106.fn2. Ben Aaronovitch, 1992, Transit, Cox &Wyman Ltd: Reading, Berk.