#its rambley and im too damn tired to care to fix it up
Y'all, why the fuck is it that sexhas become eponymous with maturity ratings in media?
Like no okay, I understand historically why, at least in the U.S. with our crap-factory history of cultural xtianity constantly being at odds with, you know, every other part of the freedom and democracy shit we’re supposed to have or whatever, why that leads to our current system of media ratings and censorship.
I get that.
But why is it that in the hellish good year of 2022 we’restill using how much sex something shows or talks about as a one-to-one tool to get the rating of something? To decide who it’s appropriate for, as if we have all the knowledge and experience to decide that for other people?
I mean, I dunno bout y'all, but I was a kinda fucked up kid (where’s my abusive households gang at) so not a lot bugged me in media past the age of 7 or 8 (more on that later). I read “above my grade level” consistently, and even though I didn’t have the context to understand half of it as deeply or fully as I could have a few years later (and yes I will FOREVER be salty about that one 4th grade advanced reading teacher that thought high reading comprehension meant that these 9 year olds could read fucking Dickens and get something out of Prince and the Pauper), none of it gave my nightmares or left me unsettled.
However. Most of my peers had things that they could not read about: violence, suicide, drug use, politics, certain dynamics in relationships and families….you know, the same shit that can be disturbing to adults at times.
This wasn’t stuff that their parent’s said “No, you can’t touch that,” about.
It was shit that kids were setting their own hard boundaries on.
No, says the other kid in fifth grade, I don’t want to read Warrior Cats. I don’t like the thought of kitties trying to kill one another.
No, says my friend’s younger brother, I can’t watch that movie or play that game. It has too much blood and gore in it.
I don’t want to read that book, says a friend. The description makes it sound scary, and what scares me is different from what scares you, so please stop asking me to read it.
Yet for some reason, when we talk, especially as adults, about what is or isn’t appropriate in media meant for people under 18 (or just media in general) the main focus is always, inevitably, on sex.
And I think that’s very telling.
Because right now, especially in the queer communities in eurocentric countries, though just in U.S. culture at large too, we’re going back and digging up some pretty hardcore purity culture bullshit. Where acknowledging that sex exists is enough to get something marked as nsfw, even if it’s just to the degree that this post goes into. Where sexual deviancy or perversion are terms that we are, apparently, slinging around again, as if they function as legitimate moral qualifiers.
I don’t think that censoring media further is the way to go.
The kids I grew up around, the ones I mentioned above? They were all able to point to what made them uncomfortable in media, and when the adults around them took them seriously and bothered to have conversations with them, they were all able to start healthily sorting through which books or movies or video games they wanted or didn’t want to read, and got the help and tools they needed to do so.
As a kid, I tended to be pretty averse to reading sexual content. It was the one thing I didn’t handle well. I was ace. And a kid. I didn’t know how to conceptualize things outside of my experiences yet, and I hadn’t discovered the wide and wonderful world of embracing queerness or being kinky either, so I avoided reading romances and kept to the Gen and T tags for shit online.
And lo and behold, I was able to manage my own media.
It’s sheer fucking insanity to treat the existence of sex in a piece of media, without nuance to how explicit it is or not, or to what dynamics are present or not present, or to what else the media covers and in what way, as being horrible enough to fuckin, I don’t know, pull books off shelves, or demand that people take their work down and suffer years of harassment in some sort of fucked up culturally xtian form of penance. Of regaining acceptability.
I really, really don’t understand why sex has become eponymous with maturity ratings anymore, and the more I think about it, and the older I get, the less I’m endeared to it.
Why is it that you see a 15 year old in english class being forced to read shit they’ve explicitly expressed a discomfort over as being less a problem, as less inappropriate, than that same 15 year old possibly discovering the existence of smut due to their own curiosity? Or kink? Or gay sex?
And which of you, when it’s the 15 year old, or the asexual, or the traumatized person that you’re worried about, or anyone else that you’re used to seeing as lesser or smaller or as being not quite as fully a human adult as you are, should get to set that boundary for what they do or don’t want to interact with?
Why is that youget to set an expectation for other people and call it “appropriate vs inappropriate media,” as though your squicks and triggers are objective and true?
