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njlauren -> RE: Should books be subject to age restrictions? (3/29/2014 1:13:08 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FelineRanger
A rating system based on any arbitrary point is the beginning to censorship. There have already been successful efforts at removing the n-word from Huckleberry Finn, which were unnecessary since the whole point to Twain's "excessive" use of the word was to promote civilized discussion and to eliminate it eventually. I'm another one who read way above my grade level and all sorts of books when I was a kid. Among them was Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which had graphic sex and descriptions of poly relationships. Those went way over my 10 year old head But part of Valentine Michael Smith's message stuck with me and that was that everything is good as long as nobody is seriously hurt and all consent to whatever is going on. Sounds kinda familiar, don't it?
You hit the nail on the head with that thinking, because to censor books, you need to have a basis to censor them, that says "this book is good", "This books is bad".
The problem is the rating system used reflects the values of those who create them. I think of movie ratings and how fucked up they are. A PG13 movie can have some really sick scenes in it, with violence, but the ratings people can give an R or worse to a movie with sex in it (among other things, the "family values crowd" screams and yells about sex in movies, about gays being portrayed as normal, etc, but seem to have no problems with violence, there have been several great articles written about the religious right that pointed out that the same parent who objected to sex in movies, thought it was fine for young kids to watch violent war movies and such). I would much rather a kid watch sex or hear 'bad words' then see the kind of violence I have seen in some movies that were rated PG or PG13.
So you can have a book someone rates "adult", let's say 8 of 10, because it has scenes with sex in them but give a young adult rating (let's say Hunger Games) that has some really nasty violence and killing in it....
If parents have questions about books, they can read places like Good Reads and see what people say about the contents, you get a much better idea of what is in the book from a cross section like that, and you also judge people's objections. Rather than the book being given an 8 cause the rater didn't like images of gay sex, a parent could read that reviewers were objecting to gays being seen as 'normal' and realize the bias of the person writing it, or if someone else went on a harrang because the book didn't support "feminist" language, whatever...you can at least see biases at work there, with a rating, you can't.
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