Just for the record ...

[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.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

For the record, I'm 46 years old and the mother of a 14-year-old daughter, with a B.A. in Education and three decades worth of experience working with children of all ages. I agree with everything you've said here.

Attempts to censor teenagers' reading-materials inevitably backfires, because the censored material takes on the allure of "forbidden fruit". It is impossible to stop a teenager who wants to read porn from doing so - and it's not just "these days", or "the Internet" either. The Victorians, too, made a determined effort to keep sexually-explicit material out of the hands of young people, and failed.

It IS possible - in fact it's very easy - to make a young person feel guilty, fearful and ashamed about sex, and believe that this is the normal way to feel about it. It's easy to cause a young person to shut down channels of communication because he or she doesn't dar bring up the Forbidden Subject or admit to having indulged in Forbidden Acts. It's easy for a kid who's gotten used to hiding, sneaking and lying about one activity to move on to other activities. It's easy for a kid who's figured out that there really isn't any harm in pornography to assume that drugs, alcohol, casual sex and other dangerous indulgences are equally harmless.

Those are the real dangers of the sort of censorship fandom_scruples is trying to foster. Fortunately, most people in fandom immediately recognize drama-queening for what it is. fandom_scruples will stir up a little tempest-in-a-teapot for a few days, possibly weeks, then fade into oblivion again. Most writers will not make their fic password-protected because they know that doing so cuts out a great many of their adult readers who are not willing to mail their personal ID to strangers online. Those on the Blacklist have no reason to care what fandom_scruples or her tiny band of followers think of them. The whole idea is ridiculous.

The only real effect this misguided person will have is that of providing minors looking for thrills with the handy Blacklist (http://www.livejournal.com/users/fandom_scruples/1110.html#cutid1) which tells where to find them.. As a result, as the list gets passed around the teen communities, readership of the writers on the Blacklist will increase. They should probably thank her for the free publicity.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

And ironically, this person has hurt the very cause that she wanted to promote: protecting people from fics that have content which they may not want to read. I'm firmly in favour of writers labelling their output with respect to categories such as slash, violence, sex, ... so that their readers can make an informed choice. But any person pleading with writers to clearly label what they produce, especially if it contains content that might unsettle quite a few readers, will now be tarred with the fandom_scruples brush of censorship.

[taotheannoying1.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that Fandom_Scruples has conveniently disabled the comment section on their site. Even more interesting they don't have the balls to actually debate the issue.

Instead, they just want to take the "nazi" approach and label everything they don't like.

Personally, I don't read NC-17 fics, and I don't care much for slash. However, I think the approach fandom_scruples is taking kind of reminds me of Orwell's 1984.

Not to mention the fact that nothing can stop a determined kid from looking up pornographic material on the internet...they'll always find a way, not matter how many blocks you put up in front of them.