I read the article. It's the idea that one should police what's inside people's heads that's particularly repellent. When I was quite a young child (7 or 8), I started having terrible nightmares. My parents politely suggested that reading Roald Dahl's The Witches just before lights out was perhaps not the wisest idea in the world. But all they did was suggest that reading scary books just before sleeping wasn't a good idea for a child with a vivid imagination. (And lo, it turns out it still isn't a good idea. I don't read gruesome murder mysteries involving serial killers before bed even now, when I'm notionally a grown-up of some sort.) They tended to vet books they bought for me until I was into my teens (they didn't give me Duncton Wood until I was 12, for example), but not books I got from the local library. I was reading books from the 'adult' section when I was 10 (no such thing as a YA section in a small local library then!). Obviously my parents suggested whether I was likely to enjoy something or not, but anything sexually explicit bored me at that age, and gory violence I didn't enjoy reading.
But reading never made me want to emulate destructive behaviours. It was usually pretty clear when someone was acting destructively, and you didn't want to do that, did you? But reading did help me make sense of some things. For example, I went to a Catholic boarding school. You got told about the biology of puberty and reproduction, and a whole set of moral rules that seemed to have no relation to reality. We read Judy Blume, which helped us get a different view on things. Obviously, Judy Blume was banned, so we sneaked it in and read it anyway. (And let's be quite honest: if it wasn't banned we might not have been quite so interested in reading it.) I'm not convinced that reading books with self-harm in is any worse for young people (or older people) today than reading Judy Blume was for teenagers in the early 90s.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-06-08 10:00 am (UTC)But reading never made me want to emulate destructive behaviours. It was usually pretty clear when someone was acting destructively, and you didn't want to do that, did you? But reading did help me make sense of some things. For example, I went to a Catholic boarding school. You got told about the biology of puberty and reproduction, and a whole set of moral rules that seemed to have no relation to reality. We read Judy Blume, which helped us get a different view on things. Obviously, Judy Blume was banned, so we sneaked it in and read it anyway. (And let's be quite honest: if it wasn't banned we might not have been quite so interested in reading it.) I'm not convinced that reading books with self-harm in is any worse for young people (or older people) today than reading Judy Blume was for teenagers in the early 90s.