So Moon Unit loves the stuff she sees at DeviantArt. Despite the URL, it doesn’t appear to be, well, “deviant” - it appears to be a genuine art-related site.
She’s begging for permission to set up a user (bless her - as poor as her judgement is, she is very good about asking for permission before signing up for anything).
Looking at the content, I don’t see anything wrong with the place, but this is just after glancing around.
Thoughts? Anyone more familiar with the site than I am?
Typo Knig is thinking it’s sort of like Facebook for artists.
Becoming a user gives her access to pictures labeled “adult” by their creators. Some of those pictures will contain stuff that puts the “deviant” in DeviantArt. Whether or not that’s cool is up to you.
Hmmm - that’s exactly the sort of thing I needed to know about the place, thanks!!
At 11-going-on-6, alternating with 11-going-on-18, this might NOT be such a good thing. She wouldn’t handle those sort of images appropriately. I’ll look around to see if there perhaps are “classes” of membership that might limit access so she’s confined to more age-appropriate stuff.
But there are options where you can block the display of “adult” content if you so choose.
There could be an issue with that…as the artist could post some racy material and not choose the checkbox to label it as adult.
Overall I think it’s a pretty good site. But just like any other, there may be idiots out there who make stupid comments.
I think if you help her, and explain things (probably by playing with it yourself), and maybe check it from time to time yourself, she should be just fine.
At 11, she’s probably already or just about to go off finding naughty pictures on the web, anyways.
Of options, I’d probably rather my 11 year old get her titillation at DeviantArt than elsewhere on the net since DA is honestly artistic for the most part. There might be fetish photos and maybe some drawn tentacle sex (though I’ve never encountered it on DA), but this is all going to be a lot more…dunno…not necessarily softcore, but at least more well-intentioned and less cheap, less exploitative, and less disgusting. And being mixed in with lots of stuff that’s clean and artistic, I think that says more about the proper place for adult stuff. It’s not bad and dirty and needs to be hidden away in the evil corners of the internet, it’s just another thing in life.
DA is also less likely to install a bunch of spyware on your computer.
It objectifies men at about an even handed rate. And objectifies anthropomorphised animals probably more than both human genders combined.
I’ve always been impressed with the site, as an art gallery and showcase of people with a range of skills and talent. With some caveats and supervision, I think it’s probably fine for an 11 year old.
My now 14-year-old cousin Olivia has been on that site for a few years. My aunt monitors her internet usage, and when she links me to her page I never see anything inappropriate. It seems like mainly a bunch of kids drawing anime to me.
Really? It objectifies men at the same rate? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, because a walk through the fetish or nude photo categories tells a different story.
There are a ton of pictures of pretty anime boys making out with one another, or stripping down, posing like hookers. You’re right in that there are more boobies than penises, but both are prevalent.
Personally, I would be a little wary of setting an eleven year old up with an account to a site not completely intended for children and giving them free reign of it. Some of the stuff I’ve seen on DA include - photography of nude women in bondage, photos of nude men posing sexily, images of teens slitting their wrists, bloody images, Disney cartoon characters commiting acts of self harm, photography of people snorting lines of coke - most of the stuff on there is harmless, but not all of it.
There are quite a few anime fanartists who draw softcore porn of their favorite characters (and unfortunately sometimes don’t bother with the “mature” tag) so she might run into something you consider objectionable. That said dA is fairly tame compared to the rest of the internet (as long as you don’t hang out in the “nudes” section) and maybe you can use that awkward “mommy, why are Naruto and Sasuke kissing in this picture?” question as a teaching moment.
This is a big-ish issue with the adult art, IME. Particularly because the artists who do slightly naughty stuff - cute nudes posed in not explicitly sexual ways, so everything’s covered, for instance - seem to be more likely to tag than the artists who blatantly imply felatio, or show blood-spattered tits. Luckily the thumbnails on the front page are fairly tiny, so a properly monitored kid wouldn’t get more than a brief, hard to discern, look, so I don’t think that problem rises to the level of forbidding her to go (but, I don’t know the kid, you do). [Edit - also, this is a minority of the stuff in the sections that she should be allowed to visit, anyway - I don’t want to give the impression that the front page is full of that stuff.]
So, unless your internet monitoring style is hovering over her and OKing or refusing every click, I think a DA account is probably not a good idea, as yet. And even without you should keep a close-ish eye when she’s there, so you can deal with the stuff that the artist fails to properly tag.
Is she more into the photo side or the ar side?
If she’s more into the photosite (including photomanipulation) another great site is fredmiranda.com (click on forums at the top and go through the threads for pictures). The photos on that site are very much on par with DA (sometimes even better).
