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

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

I applaud your sensible and responsible statement of your position. From the moment I discovered the fandom_scruples community my initial response was to feel much sorrier for the people on the "gold" list than on the "black" list, simply because it is far better (and gets a great deal more public sympathy) to be seen as the victim of an unjust and ill-thought out personal attack than have your own moral viewpoint (whatever it may be) co-opted against your will by people who do not (whatever they may think) share it, but who by appropriating your name and on-line goodwill hope to make a shabby cause slightly less shabby.

It is particularly disgraceful that in one case where someone was unjustifiably gold-listed without their consent it took 3 emails for them to be removed, yet another had no response at all to their request until they posted material(taken from a published work available freely to teenagers through the public library system, incidently)of the type that fandom_scruples opposes, on their live journal.

For the record, my own response to the list was that given what I knew about those on it whom I knew anything about, that the only principled position I could take was to send a note to the list, with supporting evidence, to the effect that on their rules their only option was to black-list me too. The "evidence" was that I had recommended a fic by a third party (who was not on the list and still isn't)with a warning that it was NC-17, and indirectly supplied a link to it, via a link to the author's live journal which cites the URL and which also gives a warning as to the content of the fic, and an NC-17 rating to it.

fandom_scruples accepted this evidence and promptly blacklisted me, telling me that I would only be removed if my own fics (which I usually rate R on the cautious side, for bad language and violence, mainly though any sexual content is PG-13 at most) were only presented in future under password protection.

So, my hearty sympathies at being tarred with their brush.