Reading "porn" v. viewing porn
Jun. 9th, 2007 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brainofckWrite responsibly, hmmmm?
I haven't seen the debate and I probably won't.
I rate my fiction as a courtesy to readers, not because I'm trying to tell anybody what to read. As I explicitly state on my info page, I don't care what age you are if you read my fiction. What I do care about is what a minor child's parents want them to do. I request that minor readers respect their parents' wishes.
When I was 10 or 12 I got my first library card. The public library in North Carolina (the Bible belt, *gasp*) did not restrict what I could check out or read. The librarian did not review my selections and tell me if they were age appropriate or not. I checked out Lady Chatterly when I was about 12. It was way boring and I took it back the next week without finishing it.
When I was about 14, my crazed father and I were browsing the library's sci fi paperbacks. I still don't know exactly what he was thinking, but he handed me a novel with one of those lurid covers with the almost nekkid people on it and a very suggestive blurb on the back and said, "This looks good." I read it, though completely mortified by even holding the artwork on the cover in my bare hands, because my Dad suggested it.
I believe in society protecting children from visual materials of sexual and violent nature. But reading is about learning. And reading recreationally is about pursuing knowledge and entertaining yourself with your own brain, rather than with the zombie-making television or some stupid time-wasting video game. I believe that if a literate person wants to read, they should be allowed to read. I also think that in most cases where my writing is not "age-appropriate" almost every child who stumbled across the hot man-on-man action would just run away in horror anyway! I mean, what 14-year-old do you know that would hang around to read a story about some guy getting his asshole licked by another guy?
But that's not really the argument I want to make. The argument I want to make is that I believe in the free availability of the written word and the sharing of ideas. And I also believe in good parenting. My son is 9 and he is not allowed to be on the computer without direct parental supervision. I monitor my child's consumption of media, and I take full responsibility for controlling what he reads. I don't need society's help to do that.
What I do need society's help with is the crap television commercials with high alcohol and inappropriate sexual content that show during football games on Saturday afternoon so that we had to ride the mute and last channel buttons like fiends if he was in the room. Or the lurid horror movie commercials that run durning a show like SG-1. The show is great for a nine year old, but the commercials for Hostel were enough to make me a little ill.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I understand there's some sort of blame being placed on soccer moms for this write responsibily thing. Well, maybe tae kwon do moms are different. Our babies have black belts when they're ten - maybe our world view is different. :D Or maybe people need to open their eyes and note that huge quantities of this erotic literature are written by middle-aged, white, straight women. I wonder what percentage of us are "soccer" moms of one ilk or the other?
I haven't seen the debate and I probably won't.
I rate my fiction as a courtesy to readers, not because I'm trying to tell anybody what to read. As I explicitly state on my info page, I don't care what age you are if you read my fiction. What I do care about is what a minor child's parents want them to do. I request that minor readers respect their parents' wishes.
When I was 10 or 12 I got my first library card. The public library in North Carolina (the Bible belt, *gasp*) did not restrict what I could check out or read. The librarian did not review my selections and tell me if they were age appropriate or not. I checked out Lady Chatterly when I was about 12. It was way boring and I took it back the next week without finishing it.
When I was about 14, my crazed father and I were browsing the library's sci fi paperbacks. I still don't know exactly what he was thinking, but he handed me a novel with one of those lurid covers with the almost nekkid people on it and a very suggestive blurb on the back and said, "This looks good." I read it, though completely mortified by even holding the artwork on the cover in my bare hands, because my Dad suggested it.
I believe in society protecting children from visual materials of sexual and violent nature. But reading is about learning. And reading recreationally is about pursuing knowledge and entertaining yourself with your own brain, rather than with the zombie-making television or some stupid time-wasting video game. I believe that if a literate person wants to read, they should be allowed to read. I also think that in most cases where my writing is not "age-appropriate" almost every child who stumbled across the hot man-on-man action would just run away in horror anyway! I mean, what 14-year-old do you know that would hang around to read a story about some guy getting his asshole licked by another guy?
But that's not really the argument I want to make. The argument I want to make is that I believe in the free availability of the written word and the sharing of ideas. And I also believe in good parenting. My son is 9 and he is not allowed to be on the computer without direct parental supervision. I monitor my child's consumption of media, and I take full responsibility for controlling what he reads. I don't need society's help to do that.
What I do need society's help with is the crap television commercials with high alcohol and inappropriate sexual content that show during football games on Saturday afternoon so that we had to ride the mute and last channel buttons like fiends if he was in the room. Or the lurid horror movie commercials that run durning a show like SG-1. The show is great for a nine year old, but the commercials for Hostel were enough to make me a little ill.
Anyway, that's my opinion. I understand there's some sort of blame being placed on soccer moms for this write responsibily thing. Well, maybe tae kwon do moms are different. Our babies have black belts when they're ten - maybe our world view is different. :D Or maybe people need to open their eyes and note that huge quantities of this erotic literature are written by middle-aged, white, straight women. I wonder what percentage of us are "soccer" moms of one ilk or the other?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-06-09 04:47 pm (UTC)I do agree with you about a couple of things, though.
1) Someone old enough to be interested in reading explicit sex probably isn't going to be all traumatized if they actually read it. I started reading my mom's historical romances when I was twelve. This was the mid-seventies, when it was very common for the Girl to be raped by the Guy and love it and fall in love with him because he was just "OMG SO good in bed while he raped me!!!" I have some ideas about the psychology behind this trend and how it pertains to that time period, but the point is that even reading that stuff at the tender age of twelve, I didn't have my views of sex all warped or perverted, nor was I at all traumatized. [eyeroll] And the "regular" sex -- which was incredibly explicit most of the time -- certainly wasn't a problem either.
Oh, and I love your example about fourteen-year-olds and rimming. [snicker] Yeah -- one of the books I read in... junior high? had a snowballing scene and it was just AckGross!!! in my young-teen opinion. :D I thought it was absolutely disgusting, but still wasn't actually traumatized or anything.
2) If parents are concerned about what their kids are seeing/reading on the internet then they need to police their kids' damn internet! I am not a babysitter for every kid with net access and no I do NOT agree that the whole friggin' net should be sanitized for the "protection" of a bunch of teenagers whose parents can't be arsed to keep on top of them. Put the computer out in the family room instead of the kid's bedroom, in a position where people can and do walk behind the computer user irregularly and often. There you go -- that'll take care of most of it. But however it works, it's not my job to make 100% of the internet kid-friendly, nor should 100% of the internet BE kid-friendly. Jeez.... :/
Angie
no subject
Date: 2007-06-09 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-09 07:16 pm (UTC)Angie
no subject
Date: 2007-06-09 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-09 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 06:00 am (UTC)Your opinion seems quite reasonable and practical to me, btw.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 04:40 pm (UTC)I agree with your point about visual versus textual too. Random anecdote - i watched a TV adaptation of 'The Silver Chair' when I was 5/6/7 or so. Mum had been trying to explain to me for a while that what happens on the telly isn't actually the literal truth, and they people are actors. I watched the lady turn into a snake and get stabbed through the neck. I looked thoughtful and said "that lady was an actress, wasn't she?" and Mum said yes, thinking "thank God we've got that straight!" I followed it with "But she's dead now," because to me it made a strange sort of sense that you might want the role so much you wouldn't mind dying (I think there's a very good argument that little children don't understand death because they can't imagine a world without them in it). Mum had to explain. So I really do think that the way that violent films and TV programmes glorify violence and make extreme violence the logical response to any problem could actually be having a detrimental effect on people (and that's before we get started on video games), especially young teens and kids.