Comment by sillysaurusx
10 days ago
Couldn’t disagree more. I watched my first beheading video at 13, let alone porn. I still remember it, Nick Berg. I think I turned out ok. My online freedom was largely why I became who I am.
As for other people being the danger, there’s some truth to that for women. I have a daughter, so this will be a concern. But you know, she won’t die. Everyone goes through trauma. The key here is to make sure she feels comfortable enough to talk to me and to my wife before doing anything (too) stupid.
I snuck out of my parents’ house to go see a girl when I was 16. Took my dad’s station wagon. On the way, some car tried to pass me and ended up hitting a big truck on the side. Truck was fine, I was fine, that fella was not. He ended up on the side of the road. Me and trucker just kept going. I still think about that guy a lot, because obviously the correct thing to do would have been to call 911, but I was a dumb 16yo who was out past midnight to go see a girl.
Point is, if things went a little differently, I could have been the one who crashed, or even dead. But that doesn’t mean that the girl I was going to go see was somehow a threat to me. It means I was doing something dangerous.
Again, this is easy to say as a man. The threat model for women is different. But prohibiting minors from the internet without supervision is totally absurd, and I feel bad for any parent who helicopters their kids like that.
Ultimately your kid will grow up and have their own life. Do you want to be remembered as the parent who had them under lock and key in the name of safety, or as a parent who monitored from a distance and occasionally let them do stupid things so that they could learn from it? For me, the latter is far more preferable.
> Ultimately your kid will grow up and have their own life. Do you want to be remembered as the parent who had them under lock and key in the name of safety, or as a parent who monitored from a distance and occasionally let them do stupid things so that they could learn from it? For me, the latter is far more preferable.
You're trying to logically and emotionally appeal to people whose amygdala have been hijacked by a moral panic.
I agree with you, but good luck.
I'm kindof horrified that your immediate response is to defend a beheading video as something a 13 year old should watch. As a normal thing. What the actual hell. Like, the rest of your argument has some good points, but you led with something guaranteed to offend.
I was not clear enough, so I will try again. If parents do not want their kids to access "bad content", whatever that means to them, then they need to supervise the access. If parents are okay with their kids accessing bad content, then that choice is theirs to make. The internet itself should not be the gatekeeper here, neither should the government, but the parents do need to actually parent. I do not believe technology should be doing the parenting. And BECAUSE I believe this is a choice the PARENT should make, I also do not believe unfettered access to the internet should be a requirement for students. As long as that is a requirement, the parents aren't in control, and we get draconian laws trying to "fix the internet."
You have wildly misinterpreted my intent, and admittedly it is because my opening sentence was poorly phrased.
I largely agree with your second paragraph, but the solution isn’t necessarily to give parents control, but rather to stop draconian laws from passing.
As far as the beheading video, why be offended? Yes, I think teenagers will be naturally curious, and that gore videos will be on their watch list along with porn. It was true for most of my friends, and admitting this truth rather than running from it is how you deal with it. It’s not "defending" when it happens as a matter of course.
Again, you’re basically arguing for draconian powers not for the government but for the parents. To me, this is two sides of the same coin; whether the jailer is the government or the parent, when I was a teen both would have been the enemy. I personally don’t want my child to think of me as the enemy. Other parents can make different choices.
And yes, I think it was fine for me to watch that video when I was 13.
I wanted to leave a bit more context.
The reason I think it was fine to watch the video at 13 is because it was major news at the time. The Iraq war was just starting up, and I believe Nick Berg was one of the first troops taken prisoner and executed. I wanted to see for myself what other countries were doing to our soldiers.
As I got older, I realized it wasn’t so clear cut as good vs evil, and that we were often the evil ones. (Regardless of the reason, blowing up someone’s home with some of their family inside is evil, and there were civilian casualties in the Iraq war.) But at the time, it was a major formative life experience for me. It galvanized me into wanting to join the marines, which of course would have been a huge mistake. So you could argue that me watching the video was harmful in that sense, since it influenced me pretty heavily.
I take a different perspective. Freedom is about freedom to view something and decide for yourself how you feel about it. It’s easy to forget how mature you felt at 13. If at the time you tried to stop me from watching that video, I would have been furious, and said that you’re preventing me from seeing what’s really going on in the world.
Now, I personally think that that freedom also extrapolates to the rest of the evils viewable on the internet. I watched a lot of cartel videos, some war footage, and so on. You can argue that 13 is way too young, and maybe I’ll even agree once my daughter reaches that age. But if a kid is genuinely curious to see what reality is actually like, I personally find it a little repulsive that we as a society think it’s so awful, and that we say children should be babied for their own protection. If you tried that with me at 13, I’d have given you the finger and figured out a way around whatever security measures you put into place. In my opinion, the correct thing to do is for a kid to have a close connection with their parents, to tell them that they’re curious, and for the parents to explain the reasons why the kid might not want to see it. (This also forces you to explain why it’s so horrible. Surgical procedure videos are equally graphic, but we don’t call them horrible.) And if at the end of that process, your kid wants to watch those videos, be it porn or gore, you should seriously consider their request. Your options are to be supportive or for them to do it in secret. Thinking you’ll stop them is wishful at best.
Yes, it’s uncomfortable. I don’t personally know what I’ll do when Kess comes to me or her mom asking about that. But "forbid it in all circumstances" is in my opinion an extreme overreaction given what’s at stake. At worst, it will cause them some emotional trauma. It arguably did for me. It’s good to protect children from trauma. But if they genuinely want to go through it, who are we to stop them and say we know better? Let them figure it out.
We’re their parents. It’s easy to believe we do know better. And in most cases we probably do. But at the end of the day, by forbidding this content, you’re waging war on your child’s curiosity. I personally find that as horrifying as it probably felt hearing me say that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine to disagree.
If this comes up the future, I’ll point back to this comment as my canonical response on the topic. If after reading it people still want to be offended, then okay. But I’m not trying to tell you how to raise your kid. I’m saying, you’re fighting a losing battle if you think you can stop them.
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I do not think that him stating what he has watched implies that he thinks one should watch this something, just that he did, which does not imply endorsement.