Mom was usually very anti-censorship; in fact, I was a voracious reader, and once the branch librarian around the corner decided I shouldn’t be able to check out Agatha Christie myseries unless Mom was with me, because they were in the adult section. (I was maybe 8 or 9.) When Mom found out, she had an absolute fit and immediately dragged me back to the library, where she chewed out the librarian and told her that her daughter should be allowed to read whatever she damn well felt like reading.
I think Mom figured my poor, sheltered little brain couldn’t create mental gore out of Agatha Christie stuff, though, becasue she did refuse to let me see Jaws when it came out. I felt kinda left out, bu have always been kind of grossed out by that kind of thing even as an adult, so maybe Mom was right.
My parents made a big deal out of the fact that I was “allowed” to READ anything I wanted. But as far as DOING or THINKING anything I wanted – forget it! They taught me that it was not polite for a girl to wear pants in public (in the 60s). Eventually they lt em wear pants, but not jeans.
But my Dad had some books about WWII (The Last Battle, etc.) that had various scenes of rape, etc., and they were OK to read.
The only thing my parents evre censored were a bunch of books my dad had on reincarnation and alien abduction and such. I’ve never entirely understood why my dad reads them, and I think my mom’s reasoning was that there are a lot of rhetorical tricks in these books which are obvious to an intelligent adult, but which an intelligent 9 year old is particularly vunerable to: if you don’t know anything about statistics or selective reporting, many of those books seem to have an iron-clad case for the impending attack of pschic-yeti-aliens. She wanted me to wait til my critical thinking faculties were a bit more developed, and I think that was the right thing to do.
We also weren’t allowed to watch any TV except on Sat. mornings, but that wasn’t about censorship, that was about keeping us from devloping a TV habit.
When/if I have my own kids, I hope to keep them from ever seeing a commercial until they are 12 and their own critical thinking skills are established. I really think “consumer values” are a great deal more dangerous than sex OR violence.
My mother wouldn’t allow us to have Barbies, only Madame Alexanders and baby dolls. And stuffed animals. I was allowed to pretty much read whatever I wanted or watch what I wanted on TV (of course, with only three channels, there wasn’t much objectionable on). If fact, as with Eva Luna, when the library wouldn’t let me check out “Call of the Wild”, she went down and straightened them out.
My brother-in-law wouldn’t let his daughters see “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” when it came out because he thought Jessica Rabbit was “too sexy”.
Ahhhh… I have so many of these, it’s hard to remember most of them. I love my parents I really do, but they were long haored gronala loving hippie’s and especially during the early part of my life, were always conviced mass media was going to kill me.
Lets see… I wasn’t allowed to have any form of sugar untill I was about 5, and even then it was controlled with grat scrutiny. I didn’t eat meat untill I was 8 or 9. (to this day have never had a hamburger) I wasn’t allowed to join the cheerleading squad. My mother his all the magazines classified as “teen” or “pop” (YM, 17, ect.) Music that was classified as “unproductive” was banned untill I was in high School. I had a very strict dress code, and was constatly told I was “buying into the culture” by the clothes I choose to wear. We only had TV during the Olympics, and were constanly lectued on the brain washing powers of it.
True they loosed up as we (my siblings) got older, bt still. All I missed out on…
Let’s see. I was never allowed to have Barbie’s since they’re sexist and evil–but I did have a Cindy doll.
Was never allowed to watch TV after 9pm until I was a senior in high school–I was the oldest of 5, and if I watched TV, the younger kids in bed would want to as well. I never saw Battlestar Galactica. As a senior, I was finally allowed to watch a half-hour show at 9 on MTV called The cutting edge. I never heard of SNL until the end of high school.
I was allowed to read pretty much anything, but my mom would complain loudly about literary dreck if I had something like Sweet Valley High or Stephen King, etc. She’s a librarian, and complained so much about people who only checked out Harlequin novels that I never touched them.
No name-brand clothes–I had a hippie mom too. Also no sugar cereal, and we used to get a big treat by sharing a can of soda between two kids.
I wasn’t allowed pop often-only ginger ale or Pepsi Free at my grandparents’ and absolutely NO CAFFEINE or sugar cereals, because it made me hyper. I was allowed pop at parties. Funny, she never restricted my eating sweets, like chocolate and cookies, but the sweetest breakfast cereal was Honey Nut Cheerios. I longed for Trix!
Oh well-my mom only really censored horror movies and stuff like that. Anything scary-I wasn’t allowed to see or watch it. Because I’d get really bad nightmares, not sleep, and I’d scream and wake up the whole house. She didn’t care if I read sex stuff, but horror movies and horror novels-no way. Not until I was about 12 and even then she didn’t like me to.
But she had romance novels and Redbook magazine lying around and I’d read and giggle over the sex parts. If she caught me, she’d tell me I had a dirty mind and that there was nothing wrong with any of that-I was just being silly.
This was a woman who accused a nun of having a dirty mind. When Mom was in 8th grade, she was reading Peyton’s Place and her teacher, Sister Immaculate Conception* took it off of her and told Mom it was pornography because in chapter such and such on page whatever so and so did this, this and this. My mother’s reply?
“If it’s such a dirty book, why did you read it and memorize all the sex parts? You have a dirty mind.”
Sister Immaculate Conception gave Mom back the book and didn’t say boo to a goose.
I love my mommy!
*generic name for a nun, not the actual name-she wouldn’t remember!
My parents were not long-haired hippies, but short-haired suburban closet radicals. For quite a long time we were not allowed to have toy guns – we had squirt Pac-Men instead (Pac-Mans? Pac-Manii?) They loosened up considerably as my brother got older (he pushed limits; I didn’t), which meant I was still collecting action figures while other girls were learning how to use hairspray, because it was finally allowed.
They also viewed any form of popular culture more recent than the Beatles or less sophisticated than Masterpiece Theatre with deep suspicion. They didn’t engage in much active censorship, but I still had a mostly TV-free childhood – just knowing my parents disapproved was enough.
The made for TV movie The Day After was censored. I was maybe 9 so that was probably a good idea. When I was 18ish my mom threw away Cypress Hill and Gwar CD’s. When I was 15 I wasnt allowed to buy Aerosmith’s “Gems” because it had a sticker that said “All your Aerosmith HARD ROCK favorites including Chip Away at the Stone and Rats in the Cellar(or something like that)”. There will be no HARD ROCK in this house. Other than those and a few other things I had a pretty open childhood. I watch 3’s Company and Carson with my parents when I was little. I still curse them for this (joking)
dead0man
When my son was a hormonal teenager, he was surfing the net for porn. After sitting him down and explaining the virtues of waiting until he was older to experience porn, he agreed to stop.
A few weeks later I checked his internet history and the entire file had been deleted (or moved, I sure couldn’t find it!). He forgot to delete the cookies, though. When I saw several cookies from various sex sites, the poor kid was busted. I lowered his access to “kiddie” settings. We were on AOL at the time and they had a different access page for children under a certain age. All primary colors and pretty stuff. Totally not cool for a young boy!
My mom became fanatically religious when I was in high school. After that happened, she started forbidding me to read almost everything I liked. I kept a lot of books in my locker at school, but she’d still search my room and throw books away (like Judy Blume).
The thing that pissed me off the most, though, is when I was 18 and had my own car. I had two cool books in my trunk (not hiding them, just put them there at some point after letting someone borrow them) - a book on the Rocky Horror Picture Show and an extremely cool Beatles book. All their lyrics were illustrated, using the techniques used in the Yellow Submarine movie. However, some of the pictures featured - GASP - nudity.
So my stepdad discovered them when putting a jack in my trunk and took it upon himself to throw them away. The Rocky Horror book didn’t bother me as much as the Beatles book, because I’ve never been able to find another one, and I don’t remember the title. I treasured that book. I’m still angry about it. :mad:
My parents didn’t care much. By the time I was 9 I was reading romance novels that my Grandma gave me. I was basically allowed to read any and everything I wanted, they didn’t care. She didn’t like me watching Rated R movies unless she saw them first. Also, and this alway struck me as odd, when I watched movies with dad, he’d let me watch the “fucking” scenes (think the scene in Road House “You’re going to be my regular Saturday thang”) but he wouldn’t let me watch the “love making” scenes.
THe only thing I was not allowed to watch ever was The Exorcist. When it was rereleased, I snuck out with Jaime and saw it–but she still doesn’t know that. I guess she was worried that we’d lose our soul or something if we watched the movie–inviting Satan into our lives and all of that.
When I was in 5th or 6th grade I turned on the TV(my younger sister was there too) and the movie coming on was Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” Mom heard the music and commercial announcement from another room, and came in to tell us we couldn’t watch it. It’s been almost thirty five years and I realize I still haven’t seen the movie, just a couple of clips.
My mom signed my permission slip letting me check out and read Slaughterhouse Five every year from elementary school until I was in high school and could check it out on my own.
When the local movie theater wouldn’t let us see The Doors even accompanied by parents (I was almost 17, BTW) she stood up for me and my friends. Of course, the guy at the door told her there was drug use in the movie which she said she understood but his big objection was that there was excessive female nudity in the film. Um…we had never seen naked female bodies!
She only objected to nudity in movies when it had nothing to do with the plot–that’s what she told us. Gratuitous nudity was wrong but if it had a place in the story it was okay. By that rationale, I guess we could have watched porn if we wanted to…too bad we never pushed it.
However, she threw away my Me So Horny cassette tape.
** DarkWriter** : Off topic, but I remember that Beatles book. It’s called The Illustrated Beatles, and you should be able to look it up on Amazon or half.com. IIRC, only a few pics were done in Yellow Submarine style. I remember the illustrations for Lady Madonna and Martha My Dear vividly – the first was a sort of Heironymus-Bosch-meets-Boris-Vallejo thing, the second was a simple photo of Paul McCarthy sitting on a stoop with an English sheepdog.
I don’t believe my mom ever refused me anything! I’ve thought and thought on it but I can’t think of a single incident. I could read, watch, and listen to anything I cared for, although I remember she wasn’t particularly fond of Ozzy.
Mom was cool!
I do remember my dad taking me and my brother to the drive-in one night because there was this “really cool movie called The Groove Tube” that my teen brother was hoppin’ to see.
I recall my father practically hurdling over the backseat to cover my nine year old eyes. We left about two minutes later.
I didn’t care. We went ice skating instead!
I guess Dad was pretty cool too.
Ahhhh…this, this is the thread I’ve been waiting for all my life. In a game of parental censorship Can You Top This, I do believe I will be the winner. When I was seventeen…seventeen, a few months from being a legal adult…my parents tried, unsucessfully, to prevent me from seeing “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”.
The only time I remember any censorship growing up was my dad breaking the 45 single of the song “The Grass Don’t Pay No Mind” by Mark Lindsey. He thought it was about pot. The wierd part about that is my brother and I were listening to a Cheech and Chong album at the time and he thought it was funny.
My parents were not really censorship types for the most part. I was allowed to read anything I wanted. Mom was strict about the R movies in the theaters – we could watch them at home, or in the theater if she took us, but even though the local theater wasn’t at all strict about unattended children in most R films, Mom thought it was important to follow the rules. So it was more about the rules than the film.
She loathed most of what was on TV, but let us watch almost everything because she felt that if she forbid it, it would just make us more interested in seeing it, and then no doubt we would grow up and fail out of college because we sat around all day watching Brady Bunch re-runs. There was one show, though, that made her absolutely flip her lid. She heard about two minutes of Three’s Company once while we watching it, and put her foot down, with the claim that the show was literally sucking the intelligence out of our heads.
Not that it’s censorship, but the thing that stopped us from watching movies and TV the most was that my parents didn’t really run a TV-type household. We didn’t see Mom and Dad watching a lot of TV, the TV was never turned on as background noise, and trips to the movie theater were an occasional treat, not a weekly event. The only cable station we had was HBO, and at the time, they only had programming in the evenings, most of which was after our bed time. (is this the part where I start talking about walking to school, uphill both ways, in a blizzard …?) But anyway, my point is that I have a lot of sympathy for parents now, because it seems to me that it is harder to pay attention to all the television and movies that are out there, when it’s so easy to get things on video, and on the internet, and that parents today have a much harder job than my parents did in the 70s.
No real parental censorship, I have to say. I was restricted in the quantity of television I could watch, but not really its content.
One embarrassing moment occurred when I was in eleventh grade. My French teacher had us watch Death and the Maiden in French, if you please, and I had rented it in English to make sure I understood it.
My dad comes in. “What are you watching?”
Me: “Death and the Maiden. It’s for a French class.”
