percival

I am not

fandom_scruples, nor do I know him or her. I do not have children. In fact, I am very likely to be infertile.

I think that censorship is wrong.

I also think that blacklisting fics is not the right way to go about protecting teenagers from influences that their parents consider to be potentially harmful.

I have two reasons for this view:

1) Whether a person is impressionable or whether s/he can be damaged, hurt, offended, or plain squicked out by reading certain fics depends less on her age than on his or her personality, history, experiences, preferences, dislikes, and personal traumata. As far as I know, this holds for people 13+.

Therefore, out of courtesy to ALL readers, no matter what age, writers might do well to flag content that some people might not want to read.
This protects the right to free speech, while showing respect for other people's feelings. A win-win situation, really.

2) The internet is only one of the potential influences on teenagers. RL peers, books, TV, newspapers, magazines are just as influential. As far as I can see, if parents want to counteract certain of these influences, the best strategy might be for them to keep in touch with their child, and to live the values that they want their child to adopt, so that their child can do as they do AND as they say.

Has this cleared up some of the confusion caused by the fact that I was friended by a LJ that I did not know of until people started posting about it on their own LJs?

As always, feel free to agree or disagree. I welcome discussion.