What I mean is, sometimes concerned citizens will get up in arms and lobby to ban a certain book, movie, TV show, video game, etc. because they’re afraid children will become corrupted by its content.
Were you ever one of those children? Did you get denied one of the above, see/read it anyway, and wonder what the big deal was? Or, do you remember getting corrupted, scarred for life, suffering mental anguish for which you’re still going through therapy, or anything similarly related all because of something you read/saw that you shouldn’t have?
I don’t remember anything like that happening to me, but maybe it was because the unsightly thing erected a mental block and still controls me secretly.
I was kind of the opposite of that kid. I remember reading “Helter Skelter,” serial killer biographies and accounts of their deeds, gory horror novels, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)”, graphic accounts of the Donner Party expedition, Playboy magazine (for the articles–I’m female ), and “The Rape of the A.P.E.” in grade school, all with my parents’ knowledge and consent. We didn’t have video games when I was in grade school, but if we had, I doubt the 'rents would have minded what I played. And no, they weren’t terribly permissive. My mom was somewhat overprotective, all in all. I think she felt like if I was home reading (regardless of what I was reading) I was safe.
I turned out (mostly) all right, and I can’t recall anyone ever objecting to my reading habits.
Oddly, the only thing I ever read that affected me enough to be disturbing was a book called “83 Hours Till Dawn,” which was a nonfiction account of an heiress who was kidnapped and buried alive for several days before they found her. That freaked me out bigtime.
My parents didn’t censor or restrict my access to any books. The library wouldn’t let me in the “adult” collection when I was 7–I wanted to look for books on microbes in pond water and they wouldn’t let me (I probably had a 10th grade reading level at that point).
I was told that D&D led to psychosis and devil worship, but so far as I know that didn’t happen.
Well, according to my grandma, I’ve rejected Jesus because of all those books I read when I was a kid about ghosts and witches. You know, like The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe.
My parents never restricted my reading matter much–though my mom made a habit of complaining loudly in my presence about people who read nothing but Harlequin romances or Stephen King. I doubt that she would have been very happy about the V. C. Andrews books my best friend made me read. I wasn’t really very happy about them either; they made me feel pretty icky.
How very odd. I read The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe, The Earthsea Trilogy and the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in an ‘advanced’ English class in 7th and 8th grades at the Catholic grade school I attended in Illinois. The instructor was one of the parish priests. Discussing religious symbolism in fantasy novels with a priest was somewhat surreal.
No I’ve never been one of the protected in the “Won’t someone please think of the children” sort of way.
Yep, been there and done that. I was homeschooled from 2nd grade on up, no TV in the house for most of my growing up years and so on. My mom would buy and read books like Turmoil in the Toybox about the evils of things like Care Bears and My Little Pony.
Oddly, I had pretty much unrestricted access to the library and read everything I could get my hands on. I can only recall once or twice that I was not allowed to read something…probably because I read things so fast they didn’t know what I had read.
She really has mellowed a lot over the years, my siblings have a lot of things I didn’t…maybe she’s realized that you don’t have to be overprotective.
My friend D told me her mom went through all their books and used a magic marker to cover up naughty parts on pictures of nude people. This included angels and cherubs with their baby genitalia.
My parents removed all the nudes from some fancy art books they got to give us some culture.
On the other hand, they totally ignored the books I bought by the boxful at auctions and estate sales, which included many fascinating gems by the likes of Harold Robbins and Erica Jong.
Well, I remember my 9th grade English teacher saying that the school was about to ban the book Forever by Judy Blume (because the teenage lead characters in the book have sex and there are {gasp!} no dire consequences from them having done so!) and that if any of us wanted to read it before it was banned, she had several copies available to loan out. I read it. Mainly to see what the fuss was about.
When I was around 14 years old, I wanted to see the movie The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, but my mother wouldn’t let me. So my father bought me the book, instead.
I don’t think I was irredeemably scarred by either of these things.
I let my teenager pretty much read/watch whatever she wants, with the understanding that if she has questions, I’m here, and will answer them honestly. She seems okay, too.
My parents let me watch and read anything I wanted. I watched violent movies and looked at magazines with pictures of bare boobs and played Mortal Kombat and read Stephen King and listened to Marilyn Manson and all that good stuff.
My parents never acted like (entertainment) sex and gore and violence and other controversies were big deals. For me, as soon as the novelty value wore off, I moved on and thought of them no more, so there was no trauma at all.
I think the only thing that ever really scared me as a kid was when Large Marge showed Pee Wee her monster face in “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure”… and that was mostly because it made me jump in my seat.
I remember reading Clan of the Cave Bear when I was in sixth grade. One evening, as I was sprawled on the floor, inhaling the text, and my parents were watching the evening news, they did a bit about concerned parents trying to ban that very book from school libraries.
“Hey, Mom!”
“What, hon?”
“Did you know I’m reading that book right now?”
“Good for you, hon.”
Between that and the constant D&D and comic books, my parents were pretty cool.
I was raised in a charismatic, fundamentalist church, so yeah. It can best be summed up this way: Most of what I remember from church when I was growing up was not learning about Jesus and how to be a good Christian, but rather a series of dire warnings about things to avoid. To be fair, the pastor himself was an outstanding Bible teacher, but since I was a “youth”, the majority of my time in church was spent with the youth group and its sundry “teachers”, rather than the pastor. It was those youth group teachers who were the problem. I wrote a brief essay on the topic on my Web site.
One specific, ridiculous thing I remember being “banned” was the movie E.T. I wanted to see it, but was not allowed because my mom had “heard” there was something “evil” about it. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I finally discovered what the objection was: the kids in the movie played D&D. :rolleyes: I ended up reading the book as a high school senior - it was required reading for an English class. I did eventually get around to watching it in my 30s, but I can’t remember: did the “penis breath” bit make it into the movie? If so, I imagine that made it “objectionable” too.
I was essentially raised without TV, but that was more circumstance than anything. The family TV broke when I was 10, and my mom convinced my dad to not repair or replace it on the grounds that it kept us from talking to each other as a family. Looking back, I can see that while her intentions were good, Mom was misguided. When we watched TV together, we were all at least in the same room, and we spoke to each other. With the TV gone, we all went our own individual directions, doing our own thing. The only time we talked as a family was around the dinner table (and even then, it was mostly Dad’s monologues rather than conversation).
On top of the lack of TV, as I got to junior high school my mom also decided to forbid listening to rock music, because it made me “rebellious”, and it was a “bad influence”. So in her efforts to protect me from the evil media, she completely cut me off from pop culture right at the age when most kids are beginning to emulate what they see pop culture. So I had no idea what was “cool”. I didn’t know how to dress or act “cool”, and I was completely left out of typical junior high school topics of conversation like what shows people watched, what bands people liked, and sports.
Oh yes music, I totally forgot to cover that. No ‘bad’ music, when I was taking piano lessons she insisted that the teacher use a book based on hymns. (thankfully, the teacher partially overrode her and only used it as a supplement) So I missed a lot of music through the 80’s.
As we can all see, all those efforts worked. I turned out to be a gay pagan which is every parents dream. Right?
My parents were also pretty cool with letting us have access to anything we wanted book wise, some books came with a “if you have any questions or concerns while reading that please come to me and let me know” including the copy of Everything You Wanted…etc that I got at the Goodwill when I was in 6th grade. My mom even Godwinned a guidance councelor in Jr. High when she had to come to a conferance about my reading evil books like Stephen King. She called him a book burning Nazi asshole if memory serves. My mom was pretty cool about stuff like that.
She wasn’t so cool about the satanic scare regarding heavy metal in the 80’s though, but mostly because Father John came to talk to our CCD class and went off on some whack job tangent that if you listened to the music demons could take over your mind or some such bullshit. I got a bit panicky that night trying to go to bed so most of my tapes were gone in the morning. However that did lead to the conversation about “Ok, we talked about ghosts and werewolfs and such not being real…well really neither is the devil or Jesus or any of that stuff either and Father John is an idiot”.
Yeah, my mom is pretty cool. I won’t even touch on dad, he of the teaching 3rd graders really explicit jokes…
When I was a high-school soph there was a big flap about this book one of the teachers had assigned, Catcher in the Rye, which a lot of the people in the Bible Belt-area I lived in thought was a sinful book. It wasn’t even a particularly new book at the time.
The only thing I can ever remember being told not to watch was The Simpsons. Yes, the Simpsons. My father found it unspeakably offensive. I don’t think it was particularly a moral objection, but more that he found it to be the most tasteless and obnoxious show ever on television. No accounting for taste, eh?
Funny, I’m now starting to feel the same way about Family Guy, myself.
), and “The Rape of the A.P.E.” in grade school, all with my parents’ knowledge and consent. We didn’t have video games when I was in grade school, but if we had, I doubt the 'rents would have minded what I played. And no, they weren’t terribly permissive. My mom was somewhat overprotective, all in all. I think she felt like if I was home reading (regardless of what I was reading) I was safe.
