TC and Privacy

[ciroccoj]

Damn, is all I have to say re. tobiascharity's "online stuff" situation.

No, OK, that's not all I have to say.

1. Thank god my own mother, whatever minor disagreements we had re. the myriad ways I wasted my time as a teenager, never went wingy on me. Thank god my father never lived with me, because he so would've gone wingy on me and I probably would've been banished to a nunnery or military school. Not because he believed in religion or the military, but because they'd be able to "handle" me by crushing the spirit out of me.
   
   
2. Getting extremely disturbing flashbacks to a younger relative's internet woes, and it's making me a little scared, frankly. S. was about 14 when we realized that her own parents were going mental on her and cracking down on everything, forbidding her from doing even the most harmless things, in an effort to keep her safe. And it was starting to backfire in rather frightening ways. Like, her mother insisted on reading all her internet correspondence, with caused the rather predictable reaction of S. getting a secret e-mail address and simply doing everything she wanted to do online behind her mother's back.
   
   Bad, bad, bad idea. S. didn't have the street smarts God gave a billy goat. We (those older relatives who hadn't destroyed S's trust in us) found out she was online (thank GOD!) and were able to give her safety tips and at least prevent her from meeting other really fun 14-year old girls online and arranging to meet them in deserted parking lots and never being seen or heard from again.
   
   I know you're smarter than that, TC, and I really hope you have somebody to talk to that you can actually trust. And it really, really sucks that it sounds like trust is being betrayed all around you, not just wrt internet stuff, but regular life as well.
   
   
3. I'm also getting a recurring playback of the time I was a volunteer at the Queen's Sexual Health Resource Centre and got a call from a woman who asked me what I would tell a 14-year old girl who came in to ask about birth control. I braced myself for winginess but calmly explained exactly what I would talk to her about: birth control, disease prevention, responsible sexuality, etc.
   
   Long silence. Then the woman says, "OK. Good. That's, that's good. Because I'm sending my daughter to see you today. She's... she's told me she's gonna go all the way with her boyfriend, so... I'm sending her over to you."
   
   I know my mouth dropped open, and I had to pause for a minute before I said, "That's... uh, that's good. We're open until 5." Long silence, then I finally blurted out, "It's good that she talked to you."
   
   "Yeah." (Mom did not sound happy at all, by the way.) "Yeah. I really really wish she wasn't going to... you know. I really wish she'd wait. She's just way too young. You know? But... I just want her to be OK. I know I can't stop her, so I just want her to at least be safe."
   
   Man, I hope I can be like that woman when my own kids are older. Because I really want them to trust me enough to know that they can talk to me about something like that and, no matter how I feel about it, I'll still keep my head on straight and not make the situation worse. I really want them to know that I'm on their side, even if their side isn't what I would like it to be.
   

::sigh::This really sucks, TC. I'm really sorry.

Comments

Re: Damn

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see the thing with the gay porn (or any kind of porn) is... yeah, if my kids were 14 and I found out they'd been reading/writing/viewing sexually explicit stuff, that would squick me too. I changed their diapers and cleaned up their spit-up. I don't want to think about them having sexual feelings.

But see, that's my problem, not theirs. That's my personal "I don't want my kids to grow up". Unless the sexual material is violent or degrading or any of a number of things that should raise alarms in a parent... really, get a grip. In much of the rest of the world, fourteen-year olds are considered adults, and treated as such. It's only in our culture that they're still considered children and expected to behave as though everything hormonal happening to them must be ignored or repressed.

Which, to my mind, is also a bloody dangerous attitude. It's probably part of why pedophiles have such easy targets - everybody else is telling kids that their own sexuality is dirty or unspeakable, and here's this nice stranger telling them it's OK... isn't that great?

The hell with that. I want my kids to have healthy outlets when they're that age, and to have trustworthy adult confidants, at least in part out of fear for their health and safety. I don't want them to grow up thinking sex is something so scary that it has to be shut down whenever it's expressed in any way, even in fiction. That's just a recipe for disaster, or at the very least psychological harm.

Re: Damn

[gypsum.livejournal.com]

America is very weird about sex and sexuality. In one sense, it is all over the place in TV and movies and commercials, but in another sense, it is repressed as hell. I am sure our collective weirdness about sex and sexuality derives in part from Puritan roots and the whole idea of "virtue" in early American political thought. What's really interesting to note is that periods of sexual revolution, say the 1920s and the 1960s, spur an incredible conservative backlash. The crazy fundamentalist right wing ot today evolves as a response to the 1960s counterculture and New Left stuff of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. People in academia who had been New Deal liberals were so freaked out they became Neoconservatives. Movements like the '60s did a lot of good in terms of civil rights and what-not, but they also polarized the nation.

That is a tangent. It sucks that it had to effect TC so dramatically.

Re: Damn

[snarkhunter.livejournal.com]

Also, TC's slash? Not porn. Not smut. I haven't read her CSI fic, but I know for a fact that her L&O slash contained NO explicit sex, though it was clear that the characters had had sex.