this is a post about censorship and setting your own media boundaries
my mom is a professional film critic. when i was a kid, she'd often take me with her to film festivals and let me see whichever films i was interested in with her. now, the thing you've gotta understand about film festivals is that pretty much all the films being shown there have not seen any kind of wide release yet; maybe they've played at a few other festivals, maybe this is the first-ever public showing. iirc many of the films didn't even have official ratings yet
which is all to say: my mom took little ~10 year old me to watch films that she knew basically nothing about. she had a 1-2 sentence description of the film from the festival guide. sometimes she'd have a press kit with more info. so she may know that a film is about, say, a serial killer, but be unsure how explicit the violence would be
so when we were walking into movies together and she wasn't sure how heavy/dark/violent/sexual it was gonna be, she'd tell me beforehand "hey, this film might end up having stuff in it that makes you uncomfortable. i need to stay through the whole film because it's my job, so if you get scared, your job is to decide if you can keep watching and go out to the lobby if you can't. get some popcorn and i'll find you after the movie is over."
out of all the countless screenings i watched with her, i only remember walking out of one (a movie about a school shooting). i hit a point where i realized "oh, i'm not feeling fun-scared anymore, i'm feeling Real Scared", so i quietly left. one of my mom's friends saw me in the lobby and asked where my mom was, and i explained what happened, and she chatted with me for a while. i got some popcorn. i checked out the arcade games in the corner. by the time the movie was over, i was feeling fine, and now as an adult i don't even remember what the exact moment was that freaked me out so bad i had to leave
similarly, starting several years before that, i remember a few nights where i was having trouble falling asleep and feeling pretty restless, so i'd go out to the living room and ask my parents if i could watch whatever tv show/movie they were watching with them. and they'd say "yep, you can, but this our time to pick what's on the tv, so if you don't like what we're watching you can go back to your bedroom and read until you're sleepy". there were a handful of times when i decided that the thing they were watching was too scary, so i left. the rest of the time, i stayed, and it ended up being an interesting exposure to tv shows and movies i wouldn't have otherwise seen
the points i'm drawing to here are:
exposing kids to media that's "too mature" for them is Good For Them, Actually. adults have a tendency to way underestimate how much kids can handle! i watched mulholland drive when i was like 9! my favorite cartoon in elementary school was futurama!
teaching kids how to judge for themselves when they need to stop engaging with a media experience does a much better job at setting them up to have a healthy relationship with media than just banning them from anything deemed Too Mature For Kids
the ability to recognize "this media is upsetting me, so it's my responsibility to walk away from it and stop engaging" is a critical skill that is actually not that hard to develop, but for some reason a lot of young adults on the internet have apparently decided that they're permababies who are physically incapable of doing something i learned how to do in first grade
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