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 >

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Make sure to advise them to stay away from that book full of rape, incest, murder and war...you know, that Bible thingy.

[pennswoods.livejournal.com]

Why the hell bother reading if you're only interested in safe and clean? All thoughts are dangerous, dirty, and radical to somebody somewhere.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

But books by their very nature are not safe!

And thank God they are not!

[abbismom.livejournal.com]

I understand exactly where you're coming from. I often have thought that children growing up now feel like they are under a glass bowl with unknown faces staring down at them observing their every move.

[awe-struck.livejournal.com]

As a parent, I have found that some things go over the kid's head if you don't make a big deal of it. E started watching CSI when she was 11. There was a rape story in one of the episodes. Dad was upset she watched it. I asked her if she new what rape was. "Yes, it is when you steal someone's panties." I explained that rape is forcing someone to have sex. If we had never asked her, rape would have been stealing someone's panties. Not a bad definition for 11, but eventually she needs to know more.

I do feel it is more important to talk about the content of the media, whateverr it is, than to be scared by it. Last night, she brought me a book that she thought was beyond her grade level and shouldn't have been in her school library. Why? It contained curse words. Now,keep in mind the story line had a teacher stealing money from the school. I found it interesting that the theft idea didn't bother her, but the language did. More important, she understood the concepts, understood the teacher was wrong and SHE READ for six hours yesterday.

I have rattled more than I meant to. Bottom line, safe is in the eye of the beholder and as long as there is thought nothing is safe.

[tearsinger.livejournal.com]

"Safe and Clean." Loaded words.

I have become very close to a tweleve year old girl and I have to say I really wish there was a lot more in the market for her because the books she reads, such as Gossip Girl are not safe or clean. They teach awful things about women, girls, men, boys and what the reality of sexual connections and what to expect of relationships and highschool. So 'safe and clean' to me is something that tells her something other than she is defined by who she dates and how the years between 13-19 are for her.