so, I've noticed that some Discourseâą posts about adult content (and I am including my own in this) tend to have a kind of misery poker element to them. like, "well, when I was your age, I watched videos of people being literally set on fire, and I'm fine, so stop complaining about zutara!" or whatever, which just isn't really a good argument, considering that the response is going to be "no, you're not fine, you think it's okay to have porn of teenage characters on AO3!"
so, I want to tell a story about the opposite of that.
I think I've talked about this before on here, but my parents were extremely careful about the kind of media my siblings and I watched as kids. not for religious reasons; it was for the entirely secular reason of "screentime in general, but especially violent or sexual media of any kind, is bad for children's brains." I exclusively watched PBS (except for the news and Saturday morning cartoons on ABC) until I was eleven or twelve, because stuff like Power Rangers and The Power Puff Girls was too violent.
I started being allowed to branch out into "adult" media because I was considered old enough to self-screen for inappropriate content, and also pre-screen stuff for my younger siblings and, at least one time I remember, someone else's kids. this is why I started being allowed to watch police procedurals: I watched the first ten minutes or so of an episode of Numb3rs (it was Soft Target, I remember the imagery extremely clearly) and was able to convince my mom to let me watch it because a) it wasn't any more violent than Mystery, b) it had math in it and was therefore educational, and c) it came on at 9 PM on Fridays so it wouldn't keep me up too late on a school night.
the problem wasn't that I was incapable of filtering my own media. I was excellent at filtering my own media. the problem was that I was twelve years old and the most graphic thing I'd seen up to that point was Miss Marple, so my filter was wildly miscalibrated.
some things that I considered "inappropriate for children":
The Will Of The Empress by Tamora Pierce, both then and now my favorite author, not because of the two seconds of implied sexual content that flew directly over my head, but because one of the characters discovered she was a lesbian and kissed a girl onscreen a couple of times, and of course gay content meant something was automatically adult.
Eldest by Christopher Paolini, where I somehow completely missed all the nudity except for one scene where a pair of twin elves are described as dancing while naked, which to me made it basically porn.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, because of the scene where the Sheriff of Nottingham speeds through his wedding ceremony as quickly as possible so he can have sex with Maid Marian right there on the floor, not because it's a weirdly graphic almost-rape scene that's played for laughs for some reason, but because it had sex in it!
I think when someone talks about how X Show Is Problematic or Y Ship Is Morally Wrong, the response tends to sound like, "Suck it up and ignore any potential implications or problems it has, you big whiny baby!", which is not my point here.
my point is that when you haven't been exposed to a wide variety of content and/or life experiences, your Media Immune System is going to overreact to stuff that, in the grand scheme of things, is probably not that bad, because it's the first time you are experiencing it. it's also going to underreact to things that are so beyond your frame of reference that you can't even identify them as potential problems. your filter is going to be badly calibrated because you don't know what to calibrate it to.
I don't think being an adult is being able to handle The Most Viscerally Uncomfortable Movie or anything like that. I do think being an adult is, basically, microdosing on Problematic Contentâą to expand your boundaries enough to even know what your boundaries are.
but if your response to anything potentially problematic is to completely avoid it because consuming it â or, horror of horrors, enjoying it â somehow taints you as a person, I can guarantee you that your filter is already wildly miscalibrated and you're doing your level best to keep it that way.
My parents were the same way about television but not books, so my calibrations were⊠interesting.
At age nine, I had zero problems with the Xanth books, which are full of innuendo, very cringey gender roles, and just-barely-implied-instead-of-overt sexual violence. But I thought Shrek 2 was wildly inappropriate for children. Even though Xanth is absolutely worse in terms of crude humor, sexual references, and gender roles!!! But Shrek 2 had *gasp* visible cleavage.
Over time I figured out where my personal lines were, but it sure as hell wasnât in the places anyone expected them to be. And it wasnât until I was no longer living with my parents that I realized 90% of my problems with seeing things on screen was just HAVING TO WATCH IT WITH MY PARENTS THERE.
(Because it turns out, Iâm totally chill with visual nudity, when I donât feel like Iâm being judged for being chill with it!! But I super cannot handle visual gore. Written gore is a fine line.)
So, yeah, microdosing problematic content is important, but so too is doing it in a variety of mediums (where is your line in film vs. paintings vs. books?) and in a variety of circumstances (is there ever a scenario where I willingly watch a horror film? Am I uncomfy with the nudity when I watch this alone?) because those lines will shift! And learning how to identify something youâre not gonna react well to *before the bad reaction is full blown* is a skill you only learn with practice.
aaaand this is one of the reasons that experienced adults in fandom tend to discount the opinions of kids.
It's not that "you're young so your opinions aren't valid."
It's, "You're young, so you just don't have a wide range of experiences; you haven't had time for them. You know a limited range of things, and you don't even know what you're missing because you haven't had time to figure that out yet."
And of course, that's a temporary condition. It changes. Rapidly.
Doesn't mean there shouldn't be any thought given to media designed for teens. There are LOTS of teens; there will always be more; we should know what's teen-appropriate.
But. It does mean that sites designed for adults, have no obligation to also be safe and supportive for teens.
(AO3 was not designed for teens. They're welcome! We love teen fans! Many of us got started as teens! But. If the content is causing problems for teens, the solution is going to be "those teens avoid that content," not "that content gets removed." Because the goal is to archive the content, not make it safe for all audiences.)
And a 16-year-old saying "absolutely nobody should be reading and enjoying this content" is just not a compelling argument. They don't know what is reasonable for everyone. They don't know what "nobody" should be reading; they don't even know what the adults in their neighborhood normally read.
They sure as hell don't know what I was reading at 16, before WWW existed, back when interstate phone calls cost forty cents a minute. (More than a dollar in today's money value.)
And they really don't know how censorship campaigns work, and what the fallout is from trying to remove "only the very worst of the bad stuff." They don't know how impossible that is to identify, because they and their friends all agree on what "the really bad stuff" is, so they think there are some objective standards that reasonable people could agree on.
(They often think there are some objective standards about who "reasonable people" are, too.)
So when we brush aside their complaints, it's not meant to be "pfft you are clueless and wrong." It's, "You are inexperienced, and you don't have enough data to get accurate results. Your feelings are valid but your conclusions are flawed."
