“What exactly IS fiction?”

It’s easier to answer the question of what is not fiction than to explain what is fiction.  Non-fiction consists of people, objects, events, places, etc. that exist in reality.  Something which is not fictional is (or was) tangible: you can (or could have) touched, watched, or otherwise experienced it.  In contrast, fiction involves “people”, “objects”, “events”, “places”, etc. born from the human mind.  Elements of reality are almost always in a way or another the basis of fictional material, however such material is still to be considered fictional. That is, while non-fiction implies that the representations are conceptually identical to what they represent, representations in fiction only exist as concepts through these representations, be it within one’s brain, on a paper sheet, a videotape or a compact disc. The very idea of hugging a “fictional person” is absurd, as a person that is fictional isn’t a person. It is ink on a paper sheet, pixels on a LCD screen, etc.

The rest of the questions will explain and explore what fiction is, and why it’s so important to protect all of it.

“Why should I care about fiction?”

You don’t have to; that’s a choice that you must make for yourself.  However, if you believe free speech to be a fundamental right of humans as we do, protecting any type of fiction – especially the kind of fiction that makes you sick to your stomach – is absolutely required for protection of free speech as a whole.  Yes to Freedom never would have come into being if serious threats to fictional expression had not come into being.  There is a very alarming global trend towards applying rules which we humans must abide by in reality to people, places, and things that simply do not exist, particularly people that do not exist. And this trend is growing explosively.  There are people in prison right now for owning comic books that someone else was offended by. Yes to Freedom is a spearhead in a global counter-censorship movement that demands the immediate repeal of laws that require any form or criminal penalty related to the creation, distribution, or ownership of any form of fiction, regardless of who makes, sells, gives away, purchases, receives, or views it.

“Why should fiction be treated differently from the real world?”

The biggest problem with applying reality’s laws to fiction is that fiction is by definition nothing but synapses in people’s brains, ink on the pages of a book… A fictional rake left standing up in the wrong direction in a fictional front yard by a fictional man can never injure a real human being.  In fact, a fictional rake isn’t a rake in the first place. Fiction is purely a product of (and stimulation for) the imagination.  Nothing more.  It does not exist, has no life and has no rights. There is no excuse for penalizing someone (including arrest and imprisonment) for drawing an image in their head on paper, or someone else for buying a copy of that drawing, and it hurts society in more ways than one to do so.

“…but wait! What about disgusting or evil things in fiction like brutal violence, rape, or sex involving minors?  Why should anyone protect such disgusting things?”

This question is the one and only ultimate question that opponents to Yes to Freedom pose to further their agendas of censorship, and the problem with this question often lies with the fact that the person who asks it is hoping that there is no good answer.  Unfortunately for such people, the answer is in fact very simple: preventing “disgusting” speech prevents exploration of controversial topics in general, and it also brings up a nasty slippery slope of logic: who gets to decide what is “disgusting” enough to be illegal to talk, draw, or write about?  It’s no different than three wolves and two rabbits taking a vote on what should be eaten for dinner that night.

Today, you might find any exploration of child sexuality or brutal gory street violence in a movie or comic book ban-worthy, but tomorrow the mob rule on what is and is not acceptable speech may very well mean that you are not permitted to draw a picture of a mother breast-feeding her newborn baby – as was the case during the Victorian era – or write a controversially truthful short story to teach about the reality of gang violence, lest you go to prison for a few years and walk out with a federal obscenity felony conviction.  The last thing that anyone wants is a person in power to make decisions about what the common citizen can speak about.

Most importantly, controversial or “disgusting” fiction may be the most important fiction you can have.  Look at some of the things we now consider to be “classic” fiction which has educated so many people simply by exploring some very difficult things to talk about.  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explores a future society where genetics are manipulated and children are conditioned in their sleep to behave in certain ways, with the use of a mind-altering drug being a routine action. Fahrenheit 911 talks of a society where books are illegal and routinely destroyed. Vladimir Nabokov’s famous novel Lolita, which has spawned two films of the same name, follows the course of a doomed incestuous paedophilic relationship where the child is in fact the instigator of the sexual relationship. How about the classic book-turned-film A Clockwork Orange?  So many more examples exist that we can’t list them all.

Some of the fiction that was just mentioned was considered to be so “bad” by many societies when it was created that it was censored or even banned entirely from being made available at the time. Think for a moment, though, that perhaps that fiction which so many people protest as being “disgusting” could be the next Lolita or Clockwork Orange.  Even the most blatantly pornographic fiction can (and does) explore topics.  All fiction explores some aspect of humanity, and for the most difficult aspects, fiction involving no real people at all is in fact the only means available to relate emotions, thoughts, and lessons about those aspects of humanity to other people.

Perhaps the best example of the value of Lolita – which could easily be considered the most “evil” fiction of all due to today’s ludicrous “protect the children at the expense of all else” attitude – lies not in the graphic descriptions of sex with 12-year-old Dolores Haze, but in the lessons its story teaches the reader by the end of it all. One has to read the book to fully appreciate these lessons, and if you were to read Lolita right now, from beginning to end, you may come to understand the true pitfalls of banning fiction, in a way which can’t be explained with simple words on a Web page.

Further reading: Top 10 Banned Books of the 20th Century, Lolita: Should this film be banned?, TIME Magazine’s list of banned books

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.