I’m perfectly fine with not having every book on the shelf.
Devils advocate here.
First, these are high school students, if they’re not already sucking and fucking each other, they’ve already watched it all go down on the internet-enabled iPads you gave them as toddlers to shut them up.
Second, removing every book that has any description of sex or a blowjob would leave you with a giant hole in your fiction section. If we’re going to remove anything a pearl-clutching parent could take offense to, we might as well just have encyclopedias (as long as they don’t mention sex).
Third, reading this book is NOT going to turn your teenager gay, or incestuous. It just doesn’t work like that. If you did anything to raise your kids you shouldn’t be afraid of them reading fiction. Just words.
Fourth, BANNING BOOKS IS BAD. Banning literature is a tool of control. Literally 1984.
Fifth, there are some people with situations in their life that may benefit from being able to identify with the characters in this book. Maybe they have had someone in their family act inappropriately with them and don’t know how to process it.
Sixth, no one has to read it. No ones being forced.
@criitz @OnlyTakesLs You’ve probably made the best points in favor of keeping these books in schools that I’ve seen so far, particularly that first point.
I’ll say on the second point, the issue in the article seems to be that the scenes depicted underage sexual activity. Sex scenes and smut in books is pretty standard, it’s not hard to find them in public libraries.
@criitz @OnlyTakesLs And the fourth argument is a little silly. If there are going to be cartoons showing nude children in schools in a way that borders child porn, a case can be made that it should be banned. Books with actual child porn in them should certainly be banned.
Censorship is generally banned, but some things should still be banned. A book that says “kill all your neighbors if they disagree with you” should also be banned.
Would you argue that online censorship is bad?
I think the line for most people is children. In a school library paid for by the community, the community has a legit say in what goes in there…it’s their kids and their money. You won’t please everyone but there are likely topics that will get a consensus. This isn’t banning a book in the general sense. The book can be published and can be sold. But that doesn’t mean everyone has to offer it. Freedom goes both ways.
We do make legit child porn illegal because you can’t make it without committing a crime. That is different from a story that would have such a written scene. While many would find it distasteful, it’s not illegal because no child was harmed. The messier area would be images not based on anything real. I tend to fall on the side that they are legal unless they can be shown to be based directly on an actual abuse image. But if it is literally just drawn out of someone’s (albeit twisted) imagination, then it’s legal. Not something for me, but that’s hardly a standard for anything. I understand that others will sincerely disagree with that and that’s fine. My default position typically is for freedom. That’s a big part of why I set up an instance here, left FB and never had a presence on Twitter. I want to choose for myself. I’m not even on someone else’s instance here. I’m entirely self hosted and my instance consists of me and a few bots that I run (forked an open source project and hacked it to my liking)
Online censorship is a hopeless cause. The internet is global. So whose laws and customs apply? How much time and effort was spent trying to shutdown Pirate Bay? Stuff like that needs to be handled privately. Anyone can filter at their house and it’s perfectly fine for an ISP to offer a censored service for people who want that. Governments can say what content is allowed in their jurisdiction but anyone who cares to know can figure out how to get around that.
Are you talking about the Bible? The Bible has incest and so much more within in…
Yeah I don’t know what a book with that level of graphic does in a high school library. The fact that it’s underage incest seems somewhat irrelevant though. It’s a book after all.
Many books don’t belong in the school library.
@OnlyTakesLs I think worse than this being in a library is that anybody would write this in the first place.
@OnlyTakesLs Okay maybe that’s unfair, art is art. But that’s pretty disturbing, and I don’t know why an underage incest scene would be necessary even if underage incest is a theme of the story
