i'd like to point out first, my del.icio.us tags include amtdi and non-con

You know, I thought I talked myself down off this one, because frankly, Twilight is not great literature and mounting a defense takes up valuable time reading non-con amtdi porn.

But you know, I just feel that inspired, plus I ran out of Dean/Castiel reading and my son still has Twilight in his locker. Go figure.

I have to know something; did I miss the memo that I'm supposed to be ashamed of being twelve? My apologies; see, when I was twelve? I never really considered to form my actions to meet an arbitrary standard that would come into existence twenty years later on my reading habits, because that? Would have totally pulled the Gor novels right out of my hot little hands.

As in, please to be putting down your AMTDI non-con for a second while ranting on how Twilight is ruining young girls. I will totally be there when fandom as a whole stops finding aliens made them do it rape as a fun and lighthearted fanfic pasttime. I mean, I will be there, but I'll still be writing it. Hell, throw in eroticized slave-fic with idealized sexual slavery and falling in love with your enslaver controlling boyfriend who stalks you...wait.

Writer responsibility comes up a lot with this, which I suppose is fair when one is writing cross-alien-species sexual hijinks and one is struggling to portray those sensitivity, or the reality of slave trafficking in the modern world, or hell, magical healing cock after rape and lets toss in mpreg for kicks, because there's a genre that's incredibly sensitive and socially conscious. I have zero interest in writer responsibility, to be honest, except for one key points--did they tell a story? That's it; that's where it starts and stops, with some codicils of audience. Twilight was readable to a huge group of people.

Maybe the mystery is the plotline? Because I agree; I cannot imagine why anyone would enjoy a fantasy novel about two people obsessively in love with each other and would do anything to be together.

You may pile your under the bed romance novels over to the left, please; lets do this right. Let's blackball the entire romance novel industry already. I want petitions against VC Andrews, Johanna Lindsay, Judith McNaught, Catherine Coulter, Virginia Henley (Okay, I could stand to lose her), and anything set in Viking England with a wee Saxon lass.

Seriously. I get hating them for being bad, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder; shaming young girls for something they've found to love is edging right into the reason I'm trying to stop myself from ever using the term "Like a twelve year old girl" again in any slash fic I write. Which will probably be something I'll have to pick up on beta because comparisons to teenage girls as insults to men is surprisingly common.

Please lay off the girls. And remind me again how Seeds of Yesterday ended. For the life of me, I couldn't find it with my other VC Andrews work.

Comments

yes, thank you

[saffronhouse.livejournal.com]

I went through a very similar progression trying to reconcile my kinks and my politics -- and came out the other end believing (1) certain preferences are bred in the bone, and frankly, it's pretty damned insulting to tell me that I'm a victim of society's prejudices for liking what I like and (2), censors ALWAYS are doing it for the good of the young and sorry, but it's just as misguided whether it's worrying about Dungeons and Dragons 20 years ago, or Twilight, now. Of all the things kids need, moralizing isn't one of them.

Re: yes, thank you

[ratcreature]

Yeah, it doesn't really work to try to make children and teenager read only "good" or "educational" stuff or whatever the particular criteria are. It never has.

My parents didn't do that at all to me (monitoring my reading or my tv or gaming habits) because *their* parents had burned their comic books and pulp magazines as "trash." And you know, I once gave a gift to my father a copy of the atrocious Western pulp he talked all nostalgic about, the one that his mother had always chastised him for reading, and he looked at it and said he could understand her better now, because it really was that bad, but he still loved it as a kid.

My parents actually had the D&D problem too, because my older brother was into D&D big time, spending nights gaming with friends and my parents didn't care, but a bunch of his friends' parents were all concerned or something. Anyway, as a result my brother and his friends played at our place a lot...

I think once children aren't really little anymore and start to pick their reading themselves the only option is to offer information on the ideologies too, so that they can recognize the problems. But not so much as a campaign to influence reading habits but as teaching politics and critical thinking in general. And then they can draw their own conclusions.

Re: yes, thank you

[fyrdrakken]

I've gotten the general impression that a sense of taste is something that has to be developed with exposure -- you take in lots and lots of something, and after a while it starts to sink in and you become discerning and start being able to winnow out the good from the bad, or to make comments like, "Yes, I know this isn't quality stuff, I just happen to like it anyway despite its essentially trashy nature."

The other thing is that I've become a bit wary about the "at least they're reading" argument after having had a friend who follows the publishing industry point out that the hope that the Harry Potter craze would get kids hooked on reading really fizzled out -- kids who liked reading read JKR and bunches of other stuff, but others read the HP series and left it at that. Which I'd find incomprehensible except that my mother lost the urge to read in the last decade or two, but. She'll occasionally get the urge to read something in particular, the novel a good movie was based on, and she'll read it, and maybe even one or two sequels, and then she'll go back to spending her free time playing spider solitaire with the TV running some cable movie she's seen a dozen times off in the background. It depresses me.