Everyone so worried about Normal kids reading scary shit and getting scared and disturbed but nobody care about the wellbeing of kids who are already fucked up for real. In the head. Badly. Maybe itās not polite but IDGAF about sheltered kids getting scared I just donātttt. I care about fucked up kids and as a former fucked up kid myself I think finding fucked up shit that confirmed the fucked up nature of my reality was honestly pretty stabilizing all things considered.
Cuz it was like ohhh ok so other people do know about the agonies and itās actually fine to acknowledge them and depict them in fiction for fun. Agony is real and it sucks and you can play with it and talk about it. ok. Thatās not so bad, I guess I donāt have to keep it inside forever.
Has anyone looked into this. How do I find studies on the effects of scary violent sexual media on children who seek it out cuz theyāre already evil due to events and such.
Like ideally there would be focus on making kids feel safe in their environment with like, their parents and stuffā¦ so maybe ideally a kid still wouldnāt need to resort to brutal fiction. but like. If the kids already fucked up then chances are that the environment and family is somewhat to blame anyway so, kind of a nonstarter
i wrote a bit about this āā the appeal and necessity of books for young readers about abuse, carceral environments, torture, involuntary transformation āā in a recent article about Madness/psychiatric abuse in speculative fiction! Emphasis relevant to the above post added.
I was seventeen when I began writingĀ Failure to Comply, having spent the majority of my life until that point consuming literature for younger readers. I clung to a particular form of fictional suffering, a particularāand, to me, familiarākind of story. This type of story was usually oriented around some form of extraordinary medical incarceration and torture, preoccupied with the lived experience of powerlessness shared among many demographics of children. While largely marked as exaggerated and unrealistic inĀ degree, the basic denial of bodily autonomy in many of these texts was recognizable inĀ kind: Childrenās and young adult series likeĀ AnimorphsĀ (1996-2001)Ā by K.A. Applegate,Ā Maximum RideĀ (2005-2010) by James Patterson,Ā ViralsĀ (2010-2016)Ā by Kathy Reichs,Ā UnwindĀ (2007-2015) by Neal Shusterman, andĀ The Program (2013-2018) by Suzanne Young combine familiar motifs of carceral eugenics, literal and figurative dehumanization, and ominous demands for compliance, transparency, sanity, and purity. These books do not necessarily take aĀ deliberatelyĀ crip, Mad lens to the experience of childhood. They donāt need to. The subjugation of children to the whims of authority figuresāparents, medical practitioners, teachers, and moreāis real, and children notice, gravitating toward speculative books that dispense with adult authority and depict scenes of resistance against injustice. Yet here, we see the lines between theĀ nowĀ and theĀ not-quiteĀ blur, for a child might read of a protagonist denied food and then emerge from their book to a locked cupboard, emerge from a story of solitary confinement to the threat of grounding, with the removal of electronic devices that connect them to the world outside a likely-nuclear home. What I mean to say here is that science fiction for young readers often has fewer barriers to overcome in its links to āreal lifeā violence, simply because for young people, a profound and legislatively mandated denial of autonomy is an unavoidable part of daily existence.
Childrenās literature is vital for the formation of ideas about personal agency, resilience, and resistance. It shows children what oppression can look like and gives it a name. It tells them that sometimes authority figures are not good people and itās okay to resist authority when it feels dangerous or unpleasant. All this (and more) is why certain groups of adults are always trying to restrict childrenās access to it.
rant incoming sorry. ok yeah agreed to all of the above and i appreciate the engagement but like. this post aint about childrens literature. it's about how what i needed could not possible have been in any childrens literature. Any depiction of my reality and feelings as a 9 year old were automatically pornographic. so i went to the porn being written by other molested people for it.
like, there is no way to honestly depict what was going on in my life and how I felt without, at the VERY LEAST, explicit depictions of sexual assault. and how it felt. and how sometimes it feels kinda good to be molested, for reasons you don't understand, and people will use that against you, but ultimately it still sucks and isn't your fault.
like i cannot express enough how this is about how the only place i ever saw and ever COULD see my experiences put into words will default be at least SOMEWHAT pornographic. even if the point of the story is that it sucked and you hated it. because without that detail, with a fade away or a skip or whatever, you are missing the most important part. The sensations affect the thoughts. If it's brutal or not is important, if it's coercive, if it's "consenting" with a groomed party, those specifics matter. They gave me a moment to moment breakdown of how the abuse works as it's happening, as the abuser is actively making you think its your fault that you don't like it. That things can be sexual abuse without you being penetrated or whatever. They gave me the ability to think "hey that WAS fucked up" even though internally it wasn't like, the worst most brutal thing ever.
i really do appreciate this but like. you're gonna have to admit at some point that most of y'all are not ok with letting certain kinds of kids see their lives depicted truthfully, in a way that they and everyone else their age can access, cuz it could scare some other kids. you absolutely dont want the stuff im talking about in classrooms. like, it's not even good for all molested kids. A lotta sexually abused ppl find that shit inherently triggering and traumatizing to read, right?
ultimately the issue here is less about media (since a lot of media is more about what you get outta it anyway) and more a lack of trustworthy adults to discuss shit with and help you IRL. which ain't as simple a problem to solve. but i feel like i gotta be really clear here this is absolutely not about Children's Media lmao.
also while I'm here:
sorry to this person in the tags but I still dont give a fuck about kids being scared by books and shit cuz like. 1) that can happen about anything. genuinely the feelings you're talking about with realizing people want to hurt you and no one would help is a realization you can have at any moment as a child. Especially since you say you had zero safe adults,. I'm not an expert here but since you left the tags I'm just gonna say I do agree with the assessment that it's more important you should have had literally anyone to trust.
like, despite what I'm gonna say in point 2 the shit that really tangibly fucked me up for a long time was Slenderman, like, i couldn't shower without a radio or stand alone in a room cuz i'd get too scared of the idea of Slenderman Getting Me. I'm still lowkey scared of him when I'm home alone. And I think it's less about the specific media and more that the media was too good at latching onto the fears i already had. I do not literally think slendy is real. It's a way for my mind to channel my paranoia & fear of the unknown & stuff.
but back to the point, 2) I was also terrified by fucked up scary media for adults. from true crime media and horrifying accounts of real shit. most of my fears about the world are from accounts i read or watched shit about. but again, it wasn't traumatizing just to know that the world was scary. it was traumatizing to be aware that, despite what adults loved to say, people actually did not want to help me at all. but that wasn't new to me, because I'd been living it already, so, idk. I had/have a really bad anxiety disorder that makes it hard to leave the house. I don't trust a lotta people. I had to come up with a framework of trust and morality that lets me function and lets me trust some people anyway.
so idk, sorry if i don't super care about prioritizing saving kids from a nebulous conceptual fear that could be triggered by anything. it's a fear you're probably gonna have to tackle one day anyway. plus I feel like there's a lot of ways to come to the conclusion that the world is bad and people don't wanna help you, like you also say here that other media kept reinforcing that and i agree. but a fucked up book in your classroom just isn't one i think is worth policing. you think you shouldn't have had access to that as a kid? fair enough I guess, but i think i should have and I'm glad I eventually did. my childhood would be rated for ages 18+ regardless, so maybe im a bit callous about it, but that's just how i feel.
tho to be clear I'm also glad I was a lurker until I was like 19 and rarely interacted with adults/authors of those works lmao. not cuz they were creepy but cuz if any of them had been predators i would've been an easy target. but that's its own post.
fuckkk. i really need to stop csa posting at 3 AM
