They’re likely to spontaneously grab a Steven King novel, tho’, or a Michael Crichton one.tenia wrote:I would argue that movies are perceived as more openly "mass-market" (especially regarding kids), and thus are more subject to the creation of a stricter classification. Kids are unlikely to spontaneously grab a Sade book, but very likely to try and play GTA or watch the latest Saw movie.
My local library wouldn’t let you borrow R rated movies, tho’ you could borrow any book you wanted. Weirdly, they went by the American rather than Canadian rating (perhaps because it was more reliably on the back?), which led to some contradictions. For instance, I wasn’t allowed to borrow Hitchcock’s Psycho at 17 because the US rating on the back of the VHS was R, even tho’ the Ontario government had by that time rated the film PG. And yet, 10-year-old me had been able to borrow the novel Psycho from that same branch. So as a near-adult I was not allowed to watch a movie the government had deemed well below my age limit, but as a child could read a book that by any measure should not be in the hands of kids (I remember vividly the scene of Norman peeping on Marion and becoming aroused as he repeatedly called her a bitch).
Even my parents were not immune: they weren’t especially strict, but they had limits. They weren’t happy with me watching Predator, a movie whose violence is fantastical, but had no trouble with me repeatedly reading their copy of Douglas Preston’s The Hot Zone, a book whose graphic and detailed depictions of people turning to soup from ebola were all too real. My mom even helped me put together a presentation on the book for a grade 6 assignment.
I’m sure, too, as a 13-year-old they wouldn’t’ve wanted me seeing graphic sex scenes in r-rated movies, but didn’t seem to care I was reading the pornographic explicitness of Michael Crichton’s Airframe.
I think all this is cultural. We have much different fears and concerns when it comes to literature now. Societies tend to think of it more as a medium of ideas and concepts than of visceral experience. When books are attacked or banned these days, it’s less often for the appropriateness of their descriptive content ala the Joyce and Burroughs trials than what the book’s content represents: racial or religious or political ideas this or that community finds objectionable.
Perhaps it has to do with the lack of control mass media suggests. Music is feared and regulated for its words when poetry is not, tho’ they are the same. But for the most part one book only influences one reader at a time, and for a while at least was limited to something very controllable: a physical copy. But music can be heard by groups all at once; many friends can hear it at one friend’s house; it’s on radios, tv, now the internet. It spreads as an intangible, uncontrollable influence. It reaches widely. That scares parents and more conservative people. And because music and to a lesser extent movies, tv and video games are perceived as visceral experiences rather than intellectual, there’s a lot more to fear about their influence, which is ill-understood and therefore easier to attribute all sorts of dark and surreptitious effects to. Next to that, most people don’t care what their kids are reading; they usually say: “ well at least she’s reading.”