#contributor info

I grew up— and still live— in a conservative, rural area (I’m poor). There are many things I love about where I live. It’s quiet, it’s peaceful, I can see the stars and the Milky Way at night, and the full moon hanging over the mountains and illuminating the valley is so ethereal that it still makes it hard to breathe, even after almost 16 years of living here.

That being said, there are many other aspects of this area that I hate, and among them is the idea that some topics are inappropriate and thus not to be discussed, not to be brought up, not to be considered at all. My high school never offered a comprehensive sex education. I was never taught how to use a condom, or what types of birth control existed. In our Musical Theater class, the one (openly) gay kid in our school wanted to play the role of the heroine in a melodrama that maybe 30 people would attend, but was told he couldn’t because “some of the student’s parents wouldn’t like it”. Our theater department as a whole was stuck using musicals from the 50s (and then only select ones) because our schoolboard wouldn’t approve anything else as “appropriate” for high school students to perform. At one point, I wasn’t even allowed to say “Pour the wine” when performing a piece for an assignment because it wasn’t “appropriate” for a high school student to discuss alcohol, even when playing a character in a skit. I did competitive speech and debate, and my senior year I wanted to do an original oratory about gay marriage (then not legalized in my state) and the LGBT+ Community as a whole, but my coach told me that “judges wouldn’t like it,” so I backed down and got myself stuck with an Oratory that was dispassionate and lackluster.

I’m not campaigning that we should be talking about sex around five year olds, or showing porn in schools, but to try to police content, especially when its creators have been very clear in tagging that content with appropriate warnings and ratings, is abhorrent to me. Let me make my stance crystal clear: Censorship is a conservative agenda to police minds and thoughts, and to disengage critical thinking. Censorship breeds Authoritarianism and I refuse to live my life afraid of the hammer of a new age McCarthyism.

We don’t purchase tickets for an R-Rated horror film only to stand up in the middle of the film and start accusing its viewers and/or director as being murderers or serial killers. My mother loves Silence of the Lambs, but she is not a cannibal. I enjoy Pretty Woman, but I am not a sex worker, and I’m sure as hell not a billionaire (my student loans wouldn’t be quite so pressing if I were). Humans have a natural curiosity about the world in which we live, and other worlds in which we do not, and it is physically (and sometimes morally) impossible to actually experience every story, every sensation, every perspective that creative media allows us to.

Sometimes the stories are dark, but humans have dark thoughts, that’s inescapable. No one wants to have a serial killer after them, but every year hundreds of thousands of people sit down to watch Halloween or Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street because we want to experience the rush and the adrenaline and the question of “What happens next?” in a controlled environment where we are, ultimately, safe.

Sometimes stories don’t have any deep meaning, and exist only to make the audience feel some sort of emotion, be it fear, sadness, happiness, humor, or anger. Sometimes stories involve sexual, physical, or mental abuse, and sometimes stories don’t have happy endings. Sometimes dark stories are created as outlets, or mediums, for the pain and suffering a creator has gone through.

If you are an audience member who has gone through some form of trauma or abuse in your life, and you don’t want to engage with these stories then that’s okay. If you are an audience member who has gone through some form of trauma or abuse in your life and you do want to engage with these stories, then that’s also okay. How you choose to process trauma is your prerogative, and no one else’s.

I am a victim of Child Sexual Assault, and my assaulter was a member of my family who was trusted to babysit me for the night. I was four years old. He never faced any legal consequences for his action, and my family hushed it up and swept it under the rug. To this day, I’ve convinced my family that I don’t remember this happening to me— that I was too young and the memory didn’t stick— but I remember. I remember, and I am 23 years old now, but I am still not ready to tell my story in detail. I’m not ready to tell my story, but I don’t want my story trapped inside my head, and I’m not the only person in the world who feels like this— far from it.

Maybe some creative media involving sensitive topics is just porn, pure and simple, and— well— so what? Porn exists, and it’s never going to stop existing. The Sex Industry is home to the oldest professions in the world and people have been trying to stamp out the sex industry for thousands of years on account of its obscenity. However, they’ve never been successful, and they never will, because, while Asexual individuals absolutely exist (I should know, I’m on the Ace Spectrum), the majority of humans have sex and enjoy it.

However, there is too large a percentage of creative media intended (and marked for) adult audiences that isn’t just about sex, and to ban one is to ban the other— to open people and creators up to questions of “artistic quality” and “social relevance” that are subjective to the individual and can never be anything but.

Stories, artwork, film, literature— they’re all ideas, not actions, and when we try to censor ideas or behave like they have the same weight as an action, we have allowed Authoritarianism to rise, and critical thinking and engagement with media to fall by the wayside.