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Wednesday, January 28, 2004
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Long time no post. Much strangeness in my world, none of which I'm going to bring into this venue, which has developed some strangeness all its own.
I've had several opportunities to shift this blog over to a LiveJournal, and have been generally too lazy to do so. Now I'm excessively glad that I didn't. Some fucking idiot with a LiveJournal, who calls herself Fandom_Scruples, is blacklisting other LJ'ers who post adult fiction on their sites. Until a couple of days ago, she was merely listing their names on her own blacklist. Now she threatens to report them to some un-named federal agency for violations of the COPA (Child Online Protection Act) if they don't password protect their sites within two weeks. Is this woman a moron? If I were a 14-year-old who'd discovered slash fiction and wanted to read more of it, I sure as hell wouldn't be slowed down by having to swear I was 18.
I'm as concerned as anyone else about children being exposed to things that aren't good for them, like hour after hour of television to substitute for their absentee parents, levels of violence in their entertainment that innures them to real pain and suffering, lousy diets as a result of food industry advertising and parental laziness, such educational mediocrity that children are turned loose from high school with little preparation for living as adults . . . shall I go on? The kid who stumbles across a bit of amateur slash fanfic will be enormously lucky if that's the worst he or she ever has to deal with. In fact, they might learn a thing or two from the care with which most relationships are depicted in fan fiction.
It isn't much consolation to realize that the same open medium that has allowed us to share our love of fanfic also makes it easy for someone else to attempt to gag us.
I've had several opportunities to shift this blog over to a LiveJournal, and have been generally too lazy to do so. Now I'm excessively glad that I didn't. Some fucking idiot with a LiveJournal, who calls herself Fandom_Scruples, is blacklisting other LJ'ers who post adult fiction on their sites. Until a couple of days ago, she was merely listing their names on her own blacklist. Now she threatens to report them to some un-named federal agency for violations of the COPA (Child Online Protection Act) if they don't password protect their sites within two weeks. Is this woman a moron? If I were a 14-year-old who'd discovered slash fiction and wanted to read more of it, I sure as hell wouldn't be slowed down by having to swear I was 18.
I'm as concerned as anyone else about children being exposed to things that aren't good for them, like hour after hour of television to substitute for their absentee parents, levels of violence in their entertainment that innures them to real pain and suffering, lousy diets as a result of food industry advertising and parental laziness, such educational mediocrity that children are turned loose from high school with little preparation for living as adults . . . shall I go on? The kid who stumbles across a bit of amateur slash fanfic will be enormously lucky if that's the worst he or she ever has to deal with. In fact, they might learn a thing or two from the care with which most relationships are depicted in fan fiction.
It isn't much consolation to realize that the same open medium that has allowed us to share our love of fanfic also makes it easy for someone else to attempt to gag us.