ADULT CONTENT AND DISCONTENT

by Robert Lopresti

Last month I updated my anti-virus software and, in a fit of Buyer’s Glee, I managed to turn on all the features, including parental controls. No one in my house is under eighteen. In fact. everyone in my house has been married longer than that.

So I didn’t feel we needed parental controls. But with one thing and another it took me a few weeks to get around to finding the fuse box, so to speak, and shutting them off. In the meantime I learned a few interesting things.

For example, the software blocked this very website. It said it was about “dating.” Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to override the block (or I would have hunted down the method of killing the controls faster) so I was able to come to the site each day, but I couldn’t find many dating tips here. Maybe my fellow bloggers are up to something I don’t know about.

And speaking of dating, my wife needed to buy some guitar strings. The program would let her look at sets of strings, but put down its virtual foot when she tried to purchase single strings. Because she’s married after all. This really happened.

It also blocked my sister Diane Chamberlain’s website. It said the content was “adult.” Diane is an adult, and a very nice one, but I don’t know what about her website made my software nervous.

Even weirder was the fact that the program rejected Shabot 6000, a webcomic about a Jewish robot. Of course, the week I noticed this the robot was discussing Sodom, so maybe the software was on to something.

But the program was perfectly okay with another webcomic, Ask Dr.Eldritch, which is frequently about Trevor the Troll trying to seduce human females. (“Seduce” is probably a little subtle to describe Trevor’s technique. He’s fairly blunt.)

So we’ve established that the software doesn’t do it’s job very well. But is it a job worth doing?

Comparisons are odious

A long time ago I read a line from a children’s author — I believe it was E.L. Konigsburg, but I can’t find it now — who said, approximately, that a censor is like a prostitute: they usually call themselves something else, claim to be performing a public service, and have only contempt for the people they supposedly serve.

As a reader, writer, librarian, and citizen I have no fondness for censorship. But I am a parent too, and I have no admiration for the parents who say “Oh, I let my kid read/watch anything they want.”

I have also heard a lot of people say “Books can change your life. Reading can open your world.” And then heard the some of the same people say “Books don’t hurt people. As Mayor Jimmy Walker said ‘No woman was ever ruined by a book.’”

Isn’t there a whiff of hypocrisy when you express both of those points of view? Are books the only strong medicine in the world with no side effects? Even aspirin make some people sick.

True confessions

I’ll come right out and say that there are things I am better off not reading or watching. For example, the last few pages of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal had me feeling queasy for days.

Ah, but should the government tell me not to read it? That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nobody wants Uncle Sam, or a software program, telling us what we can and can’t see. And as long as you apply the same rule to other people as you do to yourself, that’s okay with me.