Henrietta Hay's Column

The word "censorship" raises hackles all over the place. It definitely raises mine. But it is hard to define. Webster isn't much help. He says it is "the act of censoring." "Censor n. means, "an official with the power to examine publications, movies, television programs, etc., and to remove or prohibit anything considered obscene..."

In a recent group discussion on the subject, the Sentinel's managing editor, Denny Herzog, suggested that true censorship exists only when a piece of information is denied to a whole population. Only a government can censor. The most recent example of that was the press coverage of Desert Storm.

That may be, but everybody with a big or little ax to grind wants to get into the act and tell the rest of us what we may or may not read or see or hear. I like the flip side of "censorship", which is "intellectual freedom," the freedom to choose for myself. The censor thinks I am not smart enough to do that.

A Colorado school has been in the news lately with an attempt to restrict intellectual freedom. The principal of an elementary school in Evergreen pulled 42 books out of the school library. He removed them after complaints from ten parents who did not consider them proper for elementary school children and objected to "foul language and violence in a half dozen of the books." These books were selected from recommended sources and contained such titles as Jurassic Park, The Hobbit, Tony Hillerman's The Ghostway and some of Matt Christopher's sports tales.

I don't pretend to know what the parents had in mind, but I suggest that elementary school kids need to be encouraged to read as much and as widely as they possibly can, and if they are ready for the Hobbit, it beats Dick and Jane. Obviously somebody agrees with me, because the principal has reversed himself and the books will be returned to the Library.

I think Clare Boothe Luce had a wise word to say on children's reading. "Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."

The right to our own personal intellectual freedom, guaranteed by the First Amendment, is so basic that all the reasons given for infringing on it seem trivial. Most of those reasons are pretty ridiculous, but the ultimate in silliness is to be found in the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

There is some argument as to whether the swimsuit issue features athletes or at least athletic fashions, which the magazine claims, or whether it exploits women, which a lot of the rest of us believe. In either case, the magazine says that 50 million people, both men and women, read their swimsuit issue - with some question here as to its choice of verbs.

This year Adidas Canada Ltd. is introducing a line of soccer wear, and scheduled a very catchy ad to run in the Canada edition of Sports Illustrated. But an editor in New York killed the ad because it was showing too much skin. The skin was male. The ad featured a male soccer team wearing nothing but big grins, their Adidas and a combination of hands, soccer balls and trophies. The men were better covered than the women.

This ad with, according to the editor, too much male skin showing was pulled from a magazine, which featured 30 photographs of nearly naked women, plus a perfume ad, which eliminated the swimsuit entirely.

This was, of course, not censorship. The editor had every right to pull the ad although it cost him the Adidas account. Actually, Adidas had several thousand posters printed with the picture and they sold out in a week. But as a journalist it is my sacred duty to laugh at faulty reasoning when I see it. The magazine joyfully exploits women's bodies, but rejects an ad showing a little male skin! Since the reason was obviously not financial, it must have offended the editor personally. As Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women said, the magazine is "obsessed with keeping male bodies out of the magazine. Yet they attempt to exploit women's bodies at every opportunity." The old double standard is still alive and well. It really wasn't so funny after all.

Maybe I can't define censorship, but I know it when I see it.