fierceawakening:

dendritic-trees:

fierceawakening:

newvagabond:

fierceawakening:

dirkar:

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts about the “dangers of fiction influencing reality” with linked scientific findings and stuff and I appreciate the effort to back things up with psychological studies rather than, like, memes, but I’m just letting y’all know… that was literally the argument Tipper Gore used when she went after Prince music for fear it would turn her daughter into a stripper. That’s the exact argument that was used against Rockstar when they were accused of ‘making’ kids shoot up schools. These crusades against media have time and time again failed with their only positive results usually just being more prevalently available warnings for mature content. And their negative repurcussions have been far greater, such as an increased stigma against black music and parents banning their children from playing any video games. (Blocking people off from experiencing multiple genres based on racial bias and excluding access to an entire artform.) I’m not saying that there’s not stuff to be concerned about/critique. I’m just saying that if you’re going the “fiction is dangerous!” route it has historically been proven to be a lost cause.

Let’s not forget that gangsta rap was one of the things people like Tipper were after too.

I.e.: artistic expression by black men who were, sure, sometimes being vulgar for the hell of it (like white rockers weren’t?!) but who were also often talking about social issues and injustices too

You can’t kill the vulgarity without killing the important part too.

Your pesticide kills both.

Yeah. I’ve been trying to communicate this a lot for a few years, that it’s the same as trying to ban video games or certain kinds of music. 

I’m not that old, but I was a 90′s kid and I know so many guys who weren’t allowed to watch DBZ or Pokemon growing up because their parents thought it would make them into violent people. And so when they walk into my room and see my toys, their faces light up and they ask to hold Gokuu. They never got to have that hero (most of them were forced only to look at Jesus for inspiration).

So, it just all looks exactly like that when I hear 14 year olds trying to say that fiction is voodoo and brainwashes people into thinking what’s in it is okay to do IRL and is directly responsible for the crimes in the real world. 

However, now that I think about it, I definitely had friends in highschool who constantly questioned my interests. They thought it was weird that I was obsessed with the Parker-Hulme murder (and the film I learned about it from, Heavenly Creatures). 

They thought I wanted to kill my mom because I was fascinated by this story. I also had friends who were disturbed by my interest in dark fics. Even at 17 I was like, “Uhh… no? Just because I like this story doesn’t mean I think what happens in it is okay?” and for whatever reason they couldn’t understand it. 

Like, it’s fine if you always want fluffy pure happy, sometimes I do, but I feel like to deny the darkness is more dangerous than disallowing it to exist in what can be records of thought experiments which help us to learn and grow in compassion in the first place. 

Some of us like to pretend dark and scary things safely in fiction as a way to bleed out the congested emotions and experiences we’re too full of. 

Also, it’s not always that deep. It’s fun to pretend.

(Another also, this argument always makes me think of my daycare: we weren’t allowed to watch Power Rangers or even say those words because of fear it would make us violent but then the nanny was physically abusive to us anyway. She yanked me by my ponytail and hit me and stuff, but oh no don’t watch Power Rangers!!! Lol fuckin antis, you are no different)

Yeah. I remember when I was in grad school, I took some feminist philosophy classes, and several of the professors mentioned that they limit what games they allow their sons to play for fear of the sons becoming aggressive. As someone whose play was never limited (hell, my dad and I played Wolfenstein together. We had a serious conversation about the blood and gore and graphicness and what we were and were not comfortable with, turned the blood animations off at first, and later turned them back on), it made me feel very weird and uneasy.

I later felt a bit vindicated when the following things happened:

One professor brought in her kid one night, likely because she didn’t have a sitter. He talked about pirates all evening and drew cannons booming/making fire on the dry erase board and ran around with a toy sword. She sighed worriedly and said “I’m so sorry he is doing this, but it was the only compromise we could wrangle to get him to stop asking for toy guns.”

Another time, I visited a professor in her home for some reason I can’t remember. Her sons happened to come home while I was there and a fight erupted because they wanted to (or had, without permission?) play with their friend’s Xbox, which meant games Mom didn’t want them exposed to.

I watched these things and my overwhelming sense was that the moms’ attempts to shield these boys from fictional violence only frustrated them and prevented them from appropriate play.

And I just kept remembering how my dad and I played video games together, including but not limited to ones that had violent content, and how we sat down and discussed it and thought about what it meant and what it might mean that we liked it.

And that just seemed… so much better. And like maybe having those conversations was more work upfront than making a rule, but in the long run it seemed like it was probably LESS work for the parent, given that it meant fights like the ones I saw happened rarely, if ever, in my house.

Yeah that’s pretty much my experience. My parents more or less actively encouraged me to play violent video games, they considered it good stress relief, but my parents also took an EXTREMELY active and non-judgmental interest in what me and my sister were reading and watching, and would ask us about it, and talk about it, to the point that my Mom would often make an effort to read the books I was especially interested in (given that I could get through an average length novel every 2 – 3 days as a kiddo this was an accomplishment).

But when I (inevitably) ran into age inappropriate things, we talked through it, and so they always knew how I felt about it, and that I understood the differences between, real fights and fights that look cool on TV and stuff like that. 

By contrast, when my friends, who’s parents set more restrictions on them came over “lets do the things i’m not allowed to do at my house” was always, hands down, their number 1 choice of activities, so realistically, when you ban your kids from this stuff, unless you’re policing them VERY VERY stringently (which, like, nope), they’re doing it anyway, but you don’t get any control, or any information about it.

And I GET that the level of involvement my Mom managed wouldn’t be realistic for everyone, she was a stay at home parent, with only 2 kids, only one of whom was a big reader. But I do think it was the best way to go about things.

Agree.