Ethics are In

The fashion world is a center for many controversies, but mainly on the mass consumer level. And for good reasons, Clothing stores like American Eagle, Hollister, Abercrombie and Fitch, and Aeropostale all use Sweat Shop labor. Back in the day, PETA used to throw red paint on fur coats that they saw. Now they are using the scandalous "Go Naked" ads to protest the unethical raising of animals purely to skin them for fur coats.

These ethical dilemmas of "Do we buy a fur coat even if it was made with ethically treated animals?" or "Do I buy this cheap polo even though 3 year olds in Malaysia worked 15 hours a day to make it?" make fashion a tricky road to walk on sometimes.

We face a similar level of ethics in writing. We have to make decisions as writers not to alienate our readers. We control a very touchy medium called "Language" and how we use it can anger people, or pacify them, or even mislead them. And there are times where we may need to do those, but oftentimes, I'm sure those aren't for ethically sound reasons. When we begin to write, we have to take our audience into mind and think about how far we can push them. Maybe using the word "fuck" for a very conservative audience isn't your best idea. But if that's your voice, you have to remain true to it, but learn the lines you can cross without making your audience take up red paint and throwing it all over your hard work.

Image from fanpop.com