see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil

Does the internet need further censorship?

Smut?
No offence to anyone, but most smut in fanfics has never bothered me. I'm not talking about paedophilia, or S&M, or bestiality, or incest, I'm talking about two mature people making a decision to sleep together. And as for things like rape...I guess it is touchy, since it's a matter of how well the author handles it. But ANYWAY I think that if you don't like it, nobody's stopping you from moving to another page.

I mean, if you walk into a bookstore, and pick up a novel, it doesn't come with a "sex scenes here!" warning on it. If you walk into a library, and read a blurb, and you think it interests you, only to find out there's rape in it (eg: Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Mariller, which I read in year 7/8), and you don't like reading it, you just return the book unfinished, or you skim over those parts and enjoy the rest of the novel.

No-one told me, when I was 13, that while Daphne du Maurier's classic Rebecca, although it has a very twisted plot (and some very twisted characters, hello Mrs Danvers!), is rather discreet and subtle (as most 1930s novels would be)...that the sequel by Sally Beauman, Rebecca's Tale, is NOT. And when I picked The Blind Assassin off the "gold star recommendations" shelf in a library, no librarian stopped me from borrowing it, even though it's scandal galore.

No-one told me, when I was 14, that Ian McEwan's Atonement would contain a graphic sex scene, the coarsest swear word in the English language, and a rapist. I also grew up in an all-girls school, so I had no inklings that a boy, only a few years older than me, would have...inklings...of the sort that turned up in Catcher in the Rye. But hey, what do you do when it's on a list of "Classics"?

No-one told me, when I was 15, that Snow Falling on Cedars would not only be a mad murder story, but a really steamy romance. Actually, multiple steamy romances, if I remember correctly, including a shower scene. And no one told me that just because Pharaoah had a historical fiction label, didn't mean the characters couldn't have sex every fifteen pages or so. I had a friend who was the same age, and her favourite book at the time was Lolita, which also shocked me when I got round to reading it.

Perhaps I'm only speaking for a niche crowd who wouldn't be mentally scarred by smut in their early teens, or perhaps you'd argue that I myself have been scarred, and shouldn't be allowed to comment on such matters. I can tell you that my parents were quite strict - they liked to censor things - I wasn't allowed to read Wild Swans when I was eight, even though my grandmother gave it to me. But once I got through Jane Eyre, in about year five or something, I was mostly allowed to read whatever I wanted. Movies were a different matter. You see my mum was under the impression that I wouldn't "get" what was going on if two characters started having sex in a book anyway, whereas when sex and violence in moving pictures is just in-your-face, there's no way of getting around that. And to a great extent I agree with this thinking.

So if a piece of writing on the internet is given an "M" label or an "NC-17", that's better than you'd get in most libraries or bookstores. (Moreover, FFNet have fixed it so that any "M-rated" fics don't appear by default on the front page!)

You usually get "picture books", "junior fiction", "young adult fiction" and "fiction". Once you're past young-adult (and if you've read some John Marsden, you'll realise that teen fiction isn't squeaky-clean), you're into the wilderness. And let me quote Oscar Wilde on this:

"There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice."

So you know, Kayla, I wholly support you if you want to read and write M-rated stuff, because if you're old enough to cope with the original fiction, you're old enough to cope with the fanfiction.

I'm probably sounding horribly postmodern now, but fanfic is art, and art deserves freedom of expression.

I know people say, "but kindergartners could be browsing the site!" But honestly, I'm not too sure if kids under the age of 10 should be given free range over the internet (although my family didn't install the internet until I actually was 10, so maybe I should keep my mouth shut...) I think there's a lot worse things they could come across if they weren't being supervised than a simple fanfic that they probably won't comprehend the meaning of. To me, there's a difference between an explicit piece of writing and an explicit piece of film. In Roald Dahl's Matilda, where a 5-year old girl is reading Dickens and Hemingway and so on...

If I could only remember the exact quote, I would put it here, but essentially it's something like:
Matilda: Mr Hemingway writes about a lot of things I don't understand...especially about men and women...
Librarian: Don't worry. Just enjoy the story, just let the words wash around you, like music...

Essentially, I don't think that if a 5-year-old accidentally stumbles across a piece of adult fiction, that they're going to fully understand what it's about. Most children at the age of five haven't been reading for terribly long - their reading skills would not be strong enough to comprehend a lot of the material on a site like FFNet (I doubt they'd find the M-rated stuff, for starters), and they would get bored and move to a site like Disney.com.

And as I said before, would you let your 5-year-old cross a busy street, let alone roam through "a land of pit and precipice" on her own?

I didn't think so.

In the fourth or fifth grade, my friends and I were all into Tamora Pierce, particularly the Song of the Lioness Quartet, and the later books had mild smut (which I shamelessly plagiarised in one of my "novels" in year seven). We also read David Eddings' stuff, which makes references to whores and things that go bump in the night. And when I look at John Marsden's books, which plenty of people read in primary school (I didn't though) I start to wonder why some people get so hung-up over a few swear words in a K+ fic.

Swearing?
In kindergarten, we had kids dropping words like "crap", "damn" and "shit" in the playground. And don't get me started on John Marsden and ANDY GRIFFITHS. I just remembered Griffiths - look at this sample from his works:

• The Day My Bum Went Psycho (2001)
• Zombie Bums from Uranus (2003)
• Butt Wars (2004)
• Bumageddon: The Final Pongflict (2005)

And he had a poem in one where a boy was jumping on a bed and swearing at his mum entitled something like "Learning to Read, the Andy Way".

I mean if you use "the other c-word" which was what Atonement centred around, then you need to slap an M-rating on that, because it is one really filthy word with awful connotations. Just as if you want to have as much blood as Sweeney Todd, you should put an M-rating on it. Sure, an M-rating might make some 12-year-olds go hunting for forbidden fruit, but if they're looking for it, as I've said, they probably have some idea of what is out there already, AND FURTHERMORE they should accept the consequences of their strayings.

Savagery?

In the film "Our America", two ten-year-olds dangle a five-year-old out of a 9-storey building window to scare him. The five-year-old falls out of their grasp and dies. Their defence is that they didn't mean to kill him. The law does not accept it, because at ten, you are old enough to know that you are taking a risk by dangling someone out of a window.

Similarly, at ten, you are old enough to know that the internet contains material that may be disturbing. It is up to you to respect the locks on the windows to danger. If you don't, no one is going to save you.

And I still firmly maintain my stance that children under ten should only be surfing the net with the guidance of an adult. I'll start with the banner ads of bikini-clad women saying, "HOT BABES OVER HERE" and move onto the "3NLARG3 UR P3N1$" spam mails. Surely a piece of spam advertising such cosmetic surgery with pictures is more traumatic for a kid than someone describing a sex scene which they're unlikely to "get" anyway.

See, I remember when I was seven, I said to mum, "You've Got Mail is a film about two people making love over the internet". I meant "making love" in the sense that they're "falling in love". And in the novel "The Chrysalids" they use "making love" to mean exactly the same thing. A child will read "and then they made love" as two people expressing their affections for each other, nothing else.

Summary?

It's ridiculous how many double-standards there are in the media...jeez, look at advertisements and music video clips these days, some of them are borderline pornographic.

But no, no, no, when it comes to the internet, we have to shield our pre-teens' eyes from everything under the sun!

And here I'm going to address the drug issue. Over half the population of 14-year-olds in Australia consume alcohol at least weekly. More than one in ten Australian teenagers binge drinks every week. Our kids grow up fast, but the internet has turned into our scapegoat in so many ways.

There are seven- and eight-year olds out there who watch hip-hop videos where the female dancers and lyrics leave nearly nothing to the imagination.

But no, we must protect our seven- and eight-year olds from fanfics that leave nearly everything to what your imagination can do with the words on the screen!