amazon forums

[rm]

So I've been participating in the Amazon forums a bit over the last couple of days, mostly in the HP topics for reasons that should be obvious, but also, because it shows up on the page for my book, on requests for reading recs for teens. Most of the requests are either from teen girls themselves looking for more challenging books and apologizing for seeming bratty for saying they have a high reading level or from parents emphasizing the need to find SAFE and CLEAN books for said teen girls.

All of this makes me by turns unspeakably sad and angry. Because books are always safe and never safe. And I think people are afraid not that these girls will discover ideas and characters which are foreign, adult and theoretically disturbing, but that in reading these girls will find out that they are not singular, defective or naughty, but capable and covetous.

I am SO GLAD I grew up without the Internet and clear backpacks and cell phones and everything having to be checked and cross-checked for the so-called safety, cleanliness and morality of my private thoughts.

Comments

[delchi.livejournal.com]

You know, I hear alot of this, and it makes me wonder. From where I sit, nothing has really changed in so far as the situation, but now we have instant reporting of it. As I'm typing this CNN is going off about a school shooting that happened about an hour ago in Ohio. It seems to me that we have always had school shootings, beatings, book censorship and so on ... it's just that now we know about it instantly and in 20 languages via the net. I remember in my grade school days - people getting abused, beaten , the PTA fights over Tom Sawyer , bringing knives to school ... in my freshman year of high school the assistant principal was stabbed. The only thing that has changed is that now instead of it being a story for the local papers it ends up in every living room from coast to coast.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I know that some people overreact and run for the nanny button instead of the education button. I know that I would have rather read Henry Miller than S.E. Hinton in my classes. No one ever questioned my science fiction collection , or the string of James Bond books that I read all through school. I'm sure if the thought police had been as prominent as they are now they would have never let me near them.

I just hope that at some point people realise that there is a big difference between hiding their children from "dangerous" thoughts and concepts, and teaching them about the world as it is, and not as they want them to knwo about it.

At the same time that high schools are requiring transparent backpacks, metal detectors and searches, we have been going through much of the same for years at nightclubs and airports for more than a few years.

Maybe it's just a wake up call to change things. We need parenting, not censorship. We need education on all topics, and not only on the " safe " things. It's a real world out there. Denying that won't change it.

< /IMHO >

[heron61.livejournal.com]

From where I sit, nothing has really changed in so far as the situation, but now we have instant reporting of it.

I largely agree. I hear many reports of various fear-related horrors children and teens must endure, but I also see a surprising number of reports from the civilized (IOW non-fundy controlled) portions of the nation that fill me with hope, including a far greater tolerance for gender diversity and non-het sexuality that I can ever imagine in school. What I see is both that we can now hear about all this instantly, and that the nation has polarized considerably more than it was in the 70s & 80s - the progressive portions are doing better, and the scary parts are far worse. Culture wars + a generally conservative mass media that thrives on fear and shock + instant reporting = a complex and difficult time.