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!

gettin' spexy

What does it mean to look for a laptop?

Foreword
Those of you who know me (rather too well) will be well aware that my free time in the last couple of weeks has been largely consumed by laptop shopping. It has caused me so much angst and internet time that I began to wonder: is this more than just a desire to get value for money? Does my indecision between models extend beyond greed for specifications? (specs?)

I started writing this while lying awake at 1am and contemplating the Lenovo Thinkpad X60s and the Sony Vaio SZ38. Superficially I was having internal arguments about specifications such as weight vs screen size, battery life vs hard drive space and so on. Typical nerdism, hey?

But why can I not find answers, despite having hounded the best nerds computing brains to my knowledge? I have my theories... **insane laugh**

1. Girls vs Boys
My girlfriends have very different requirements for techgear than my male friends. For example...one dinner party some weeks ago...

Sue: I'm thinking of buying a Macbook because it's pretty!
Thadeus: Did I just hear...you want to buy a laptop because it's pretty?" **expression of disbelief**

I noticed markedly that when I asked my girl/boy friends whether I should go for a Lenovo or a Sony, that the boys went with Lenovo and the girls with Sony.

Now, why do I suspect Sony is tapping the female market?

Ever seen a man buy a pink laptop?

Moreover, their laptop designs are sleek and lightweight, while simultaneously packing in features like Dual-Layer DVD Burners (and sometimes Blu-Ray!) as well as webcams.

Lenovos, on the other hand, are chunky - but this allows them to outdo the average adolescent male in terms of surviving bumps and scratches. The lightweight ones don't have optical (CD/DVD) drives. To quote my mother, "Who in this day and age would make a laptop without a DVD drive?" She reckons it's because boys have different pastimes to girls - for example, girls watch their chic-flick movies using their laptops' DVD drives, but boys download car/plane/violent/explicit movies directly from the internet, thus rendering the DVD drive useless.
(NB: that Lenovo might cause the boys some issues when they run out of hard drive space though...HAH!)

Penultimate statement - I quote the divine Philadelphia (Dellie!)...

Dellie: (go with) "The pretty one, you're female."

Lastly, take a peek at Sony's latest advertisement.

Sorry about bandwidth - but I felt you had to see it in its full glory -

Anyway, this ad features 3 people, all representing different brands/kinds of laptops. Notice that only VAIO is represented by a FEMALE. I rest my case.

2. What to do with the Ugly Duckling?
With reference to the ad above, notice that the PC man (whom we can associate with brands such as Lenovo) is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. All right, so he's not aesthetically displeasing, but he's not particularly...well, pretty. On the other hand, the VAIO girl takes pride in having a quirky sort of prettiness, I guess "bohemian" isn't the word, since the style implies long, tiered skirts and peasant tops, but it's the same idea - individualistic=beautiful.

Perhaps, (since to be fair, the man in the Sony shop pointed out that boys are snapping up the apple-green laptops as fast as the girls) it's not a question of gender roles, but something even more fundamental to society - the pursuit of beauty?

Several thoughts have run through my head which equate my Sony and Lenovo laptops with different aspects of beauty.
* "I'll take the Sony...it's pretty!"
* "I'll take the Lenovo...I don't want a laptop that's prettier than me..."
* "I'll take the Sony...I'll be sitting in Gloria Jean's using the wireless, and men will be drawn to my beautiful laptop."
* "I'll take the Lenovo...and I'll MAKE it prettier than the Sony! I can knit it a cover! I'll buy rainbow stickers!"

So during my extraordinarily long meditation session, I decided, "let's overcomplicate stuff..."

If I take the Lenovo, it's a question of, adopting the ugly duckling and waiting for it to turn into a swan.
If I take the Sony, it's as if I'm buying an extravagantly expensive parrot.
Does maturity really mean learning to deal with delayed gratification?

3. Magnetism
The Sony has a magnetic clip to hold it together when you fold the screen down - but then I wondered, could Vaio laptops be magnets for other things (apart from laptop thieves?)

A not insubstantial part of my adolescence has been spent on wondering how to be a boy magnet, or becoming an iron filing to some boy's metaphorical magnet. So, combining part I, concerning boys and girls, and part II, all about beauty, I came up with an even more twisted theory.

Just shortly before I was writing about maturity. Perhaps, the conflict between Sony and Lenovo in my case is an expression of despair that I don't know what guys would like to see in me now that I'm supposedly mature enough to deal with long-term relationships with the male species.

Here is a table, which I feel sums up the attributes associated with each brand. And why.

Sony	Lenovo
Looks (already reiterated too many times)	Brains (Thinkpad)
The stuff of flings (I've heard they can be flimsy)	Long-term dependability (everyone says they're durable)
Playfulness (cf PC-Mac-Vaio ad)	Seriousness
Emily Bronte	Jane Austen (if you've read them you'll know what I mean)
"La Vie Boheme!" (watch RENT if you don't understand the joke...)	Conservatism
The OC	Ugly Betty
...the more accessories, the better!	Minimalist fashion philosophy
Consumerism	Frugality
Individuality	Conformity (alright maybe this is really stretching it...)
Sexy boys from the Arts faculty	Nerdy boys from Engineering or Science (thanks for the idea, Perpetua!)

Obviously, both laptop brands claim to capture different elements of personality - good lord, now I sound like an essay - but isn't personality what the guys rave on about these days? **sigh** I wish it were true...if it were true, pornography would not exist.

In Conclusion
a) It is now 2am and I still haven't made a decision.
b) The next morning: "Or maybe this is all just another hiccup on the journey towards perfection? Learning how to make compromises is a sure-fire sign of maturity!"
c) Some days later: "It'll be a Sony!"
d) Sometime in the future: "It is a Sony!"