Responses to assaults on my parenting

[Diana <dianasdolls@yahoo.com>]

Here is my the part of my post all of you are responded to 
originally. I suggest you read it again and, this time, with the 
footnotes I obviously should have provided for you to understand 
what I was trying to say.

I had written:
My son is nine and he does not know what the term slash when applied 
to fiction means. I have not had the opportunity or desire to 
explain it just yet. He does know about heterosexual sex and 
homosexuality, but not every explicit detail - there's no need for 
that until he needs more information and asks for it, then I'll 
answer his questions.[1] He does not need to find a fanfic site and 
read all these synopses. The ones he doesn't understand would 
puzzle him and the ones he does understand would considerably 
confuse him.[2] I don't think stumbling upon a slash fanfic, a non-
graphic one, would make him gay or mess him up for life - that's 
silly. However, I don't want to get into a bunch of topics and 
explanations he's not ready yet to comprehend for many, many reasons.
[3]

I've added the footnotes and my response below.


Here's the responses:
Barb wrote:
> On Fiction Alley, we have a question that pops up on the screen 
when any user clicks on an R-rated fic, asking whether the reader is 
over the age of seventeen.  If the reader answers the question 
honestly, there should be no problem.  The question is there for a 
reason.  I believe that adequate precautions have been taken against 
children seeing material they probably would not be allowed to view 
in a movie theatre without their parents actually taking them; if 
you are not supervising your child's internet use, that is a 
decision that you might need to reexamine, but that is an issue 
quite apart from the precautions that have been taken at Fiction 
Alley and whether a given child is being honest in answering a 
question about age.<<  

John jumps on the wagon
>>Frankly, children shouldn't be running around on the internet 
unsupervised.It is not the responsibility of anybody but a child's 
parent or guardian to monitor their child's internet usage. If a 
twelve or thirteen year old child, despite the R ratings (for 
language, not sex) and lies, clicking through parental 
acknowledgements on FA, and manages to read my Keeper's Secrets, 
it's not my problem.  But surely, as a responsible parent, you 
monitor your nine year old's internet usage, and thus the point 
about children being disturbed by material, of whatever nature, is 
rather moot?<<

bboy_mn jumps on the same wagon with both feet:
>>If the problem is your kids reading my stories, then the problem is
YOU. If your kids are reading racist literature then the problem is
YOU. If you kids are read about bomb making then the problem is YOU.
It's not my job to supervise your kids. I can't come to your house 
and shut off the computer. So if you have a problem with all this, 
then you need to stop being a buddy, and start being a parent. Sorry 
but that's how freedom works. Freedom is NOT safe, freedom is NOT 
easy, but freedom is free.<<


FOOTNOTES: [1] Why would I voluntarily tell my son everything I know 
about sex before he's ready to hear it?  Overloading kids with info 
they are not ready for is not the way to explain sexual feelings and 
intercourse to a child.  [2] My son represents the 'everychild' who 
isn't being watched over by a parent.  The majority of parents are 
just not ready to explain to their child how gay sex 'works' exactly 
in context with his favorite fictional HP characters.  I don't 
explain hetero sex in fantastic detail, either.  And I would not 
enjoy explaining foot fetishes or downright perversions such as 
necrophilia, for that matter.  [3]  In my son's case, I wouldn't 
worry about him being traumatized for life by reading a slash fanfic 
or NC-17 porn-fest by accident, but I would worry about him losing 
the image of HP he currently enjoys and that we share talking about 
together.  Other kids may get negative ideas and reinforcement of 
free-floating stereotypes about gay people or hetero people that 
take much work to undo by their parents.  
 
Now me:
I don't know if any of you have children, but I should tell you 
right up front that insulting a mother by telling her she must be a 
bad parent who lets her kids run rampant on the internet reading 
whatever they want is *extremely* loaded and offensive.  If John 
thinks terms such as 'normal' and 'homosexual' are offensive to gay 
people, he's only hit the tip of the iceberg of offensiveness when 
insulting someone's parenting skills in such an offhanded manner; 
even more so when all these downright rude accusations and 
inferences come from misreading my original post and filling in gaps 
with their own conjectures.

I'm going to try to give all of you the benefit of the doubt, but as 
I'm very offended right now, I'm trying as hard as I can to be civil 
and clear in my responses. 
 
I started this thread by saying that I don't read slash pairings and 
didn't get their appeal.  I have *never* once said that anyone who 
writes or reads slash fanfic based on the HP characters is evil, 
deranged, or anything even remotely like that. [With the notable 
exception of my wondering about the specific person who wrote a 
Lucius/Draco sexual pairing stated for the record.]  I do not think 
ill of people who read and write slash fiction, whether gay, hetero, 
bi or alien hybrid.  I even said that I wholeheartedly support the 
fans of slash to read it, write it, wallpaper their walls with it, 
whatever, but that I would not be reading it myself because I like 
the HP characters as based in my visions from reading and re-reading 
all four HP books four or five times.  IMPORTANT NOTE: I am talking 
specifically about fanfic regarding the Potterverse characters when 
referring to my desire to not read slash fanfics or fanfics with a 
bunch of sex in them. 
 
Don't any of you have friends who are into hobbies that you find 
strange, boring or maybe even bizarre?  And when that friends talks 
about his hobby to you, after a while, you just shake your head, 
smile and say, "As long as you're having fun.  I don't get it, 
myself, but whatever."  That is how I feel about slash fiction.  I 
can't see the appeal, but if it's your thing, go to town.  

My son does *not* wander the internet unsupervised and he has never 
visited a fanfic site in his life.  To use bboy_mn's condescending 
and un-needed advice, I'm not my son's 'buddy', I'm his mom.  

The point of my first post was that, unlike my son, many children do 
not have a parent watching over them to see what they are surfing on 
the internet.  I represented my son as an 'everychild' who could 
find a fanfic site and end up with an unwantedly changed vision of 
the HP characters.  Don't children have the right to maintain their 
own vision of the HP characters from reading the books without 
interference from fanfics that bring in ideas they may not 
understand, want or even be able to handle yet?  The problem we are 
going to have with coming to an agreement on this is that I feel 
that several fanfic writers and defenders feel it's okay to muddle 
with others' personalized and internal images of the HP characters, 
even children's views of the characters, because it will 
cause "growth", "acceptance", "tolerance" and "understanding".  
That's a load of horse manure.  Children don't suddenly gain blazing 
insight into acceptance of other's differences because of reading a 
fanfic posted on some website.  Acceptance and understanding of 
others' differences and being taught exactly what that means come 
from the efforts of the parents and how the parents treat others 
different from themselves on a daily, monthly, yearly basis.  It is 
on ongoing process done through example set by the parents.  

I would not like to see unsupervised children stumble upon a slashy 
or sex-filled [whether gay or hetero] fanfic of their favorite 
fictional characters because the fanfic site was poorly organized, 
incompletely or inaccurately labelled or as easy to get past as 
lying to an onscreen question.  If my son is any example, when he's 
logging on to some favorite children's sites or playing a computer 
game, a screen will sometimes pop-up that asks him if he wants to go 
to go to site b or if he wants to type in his name and he will have 
to punch a button that says "YES" on it to get to the games.  I've 
seen these sites and games and they are set up exactly the same way 
as the "no one under 18 warning screen" described on this board that 
simply asks if the kid is over 18; just press the yes button to 
continue, in other words.  It has now become automatic for my son to 
hurriedly press yes to continue on to his game.  He stopped actually 
reading those screens a long time ago.  I have no doubt that many 
kids are the same and would just click right through that screen 
without thinking about it or reading it.

Ideally every child should have a warm, comforting parent to stand 
over their shoulder to kindly explain every screen, but this is not 
going to happen as we live in the real world of latch-key kids, 
single parents, neglected kids and distracted and overworked 
parents. Even in the ideal household this is impossible on a minute-
by-minute basis.  The truth is parents can't watch their kids every 
single minute.  If we could, there would be no child abductions, 
child sexual abuse or accidental deaths.   
My suggestion was to just sort the stories into gay and het then 
sort further by pairings and then by explicitness.  Or do it in 
reverse - whatever works.  Do the sorting *before* placing blurbs 
about the stories on the main page free for kids [and adults] to 
read before the newbie has one clue about the layout of the site or 
what any of the slashes or ratings mean.  I *never* once suggested 
placing bright blaring labels on fanfics like "gay sex! run and 
hide!", "NC-17 het sex! enjoy!" or anything even remotely so biased 
on any of the fictions.  I also suggested to make the category 
placement, pairings listings and rating not author voluntary, maybe 
even have it done by another party.  While many responsible authors 
will do a good job of categorizing their work appropriately, many do 
not.  Some even feel, as I mentioned above, they are doing 
any "bigoted, gay-bashing, prudes" who accidentally stumbles across 
their fanfic a favor by opening up their "little close-minded 
worlds."  This is very wrong because their assumptions are based on 
their own predjudices against others and only harms acceptance and 
understanding of others' differences, not create it. 
 
I wouldn't want to live in a facist, "1984" society where everything 
is geared toward being fit for children to read.  I don't believe in 
censorship in general, but know that it is necessary to protect kids 
from harmful images and ideas.  I do believe in making it more 
difficult for children to access things that are not appropriate for 
them.  I do believe in guidelines and laws that allow children 
freedom from being bombarded with unsavory images, whether porn, 
graphic autopsy photos or anything that children aren't ready for or 
just shouldn't see.  And what children aren't ready to see *will*, 
by necessity, be decided by their responsible parent or guardian.  
No responsible, sane parent, regardless of their personal sexual 
orientation, would go surfing gay or het porn sites with their nine-
year-old sitting on their lap.  The truth is that some parents will 
not want their children to be exposed to gay pairings, regardless if 
actual intercourse is or is not described, between characters the 
children and the adults have grown to love in a image that doesn't 
fit that scenario.  That doesn't make the parents homophobes.  They 
are just filtering what their children read to fit their individual 
tastes and what they feel is in the best interest of their 
children.  Parents raise children up with beliefs and values like 
their own.  As a parent, I can and will raise my children to accept 
and understand that people are different and that they're are people 
of different color, sexual orientation, background, mental capacity 
and physical ability, but all people are basically the same at the 
heart, with feelings and ideas of their own.   

bboy_mn wrote:
So back to the question/comment that started all this, I can see why
some people don't 'get it'. But, personally, I don't get what the
fastination is with 'Buffy'. Dead boring if you ask me. Solution - I
don't read Buffy stories. You don't like Slash, you don't 'get it';
solution - don't read it. 

Now me:  
I find it ironic that you wrote that paragraph above and then 
proceeded to take me to task for expressing exactly the same thing 
in my original post and then for attempting to expand upon in a 
later post.  This chatter list has been the place of discussion for 
strange pairings of every sort, which prompted my original post.  I 
have stated more than once that I will not be reading any HP-based 
slash fanfic, so you can spare me the admonishments to not read it.  
I *never* said that I felt commanded, pressured, forced or lured 
into reading it.  The fact I still don't understand it's appeal 
hasn't changed.  Yet, I'm called a homophobe by others simply 
because I have no desire to read slash fiction based on HP 
characters.  

It's okay for you to bash "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and say how 
dull and stupid it is, but it's okay if I want to read it, of 
course, but don't expect you to read that stuff...  To quote you, If 
you don't get it, fine don't read it.  But then a few paragraphs 
later you resort to calling me a bad parent just because I have to 
audacity to suggest that some fanfic sites and fanfic authors have 
failed to implement a way of easily and unbiasedly organizing 
fanfics so the stories I don't want to read aren't in my face upon 
my very first visit to the site.  I went to a fanfic site to see how 
the organization was since so many responses to my original post 
went out of their way to tell me that there was no way I 
could "stumble" upon stuff I didn't want to read and everything was 
so properly labelled and clear that I must be an idiot if I did end 
up reading something that tainted my personal image of the HP 
characters.  
The main page had a bunch of blurbs for new fics in no particular 
grouping or in any way sorted.  So, I just lightly browsed down the 
list of fics.  With me, whole sentences jump out at me, not just 
words.  I read sentences like I read individual words, which 
probably explains why all my posts are so long.  :D

What I actually found was blurbs written in such a way as to be 
quite memorable [so you'd want to read the story, obviously] and 
they were able to bring forth instantaneous unwelcome images.  Have 
any of you remembered song fragments or movie quotes and taglines 
for years after the song has stopped playing on the radio and the 
movie has been pushed way back on the rental shelves?  Of course you 
have because those phrases were memorable to you.  Poetry and prose, 
even bad ones, can bring forth images in your mind with only a few 
lines.  Once images are formed they can a bit upsetting.  I'm a 
grown up and I can eliminate the images I don't want - yippee for 
me, but weeding my mind of unwelcome images isn't how I like to 
spend my time.  In the case of strong images, it's more of a 
supression than a permanent weeding.  I won't go crying in my tea 
about it, but it did annoy me enough to dare to suggest a better 
sorting system.  Please keep in mind that children may not be able 
to weed out unwanted images easily, and most children have even 
better imaginations than adults.  

Well, that's enough for this novel.  I'll respond more in other 
posts.

Diana