What Do You Tell Your Children About The Internet?

My son told me about 4chan. He’s a massive gamer (by my standards, which probably means he’s a total amateur) and went to an all-boy school. We’ve had the usual kind of rows about how much time he spends glued to DOTA 2 or whatever, but (and this is going to sound cheesily virtuous, but I swear it’s true) the nearest I’ve come to telling him to cut down on a particular site was when I told him he should stop reading the comments on Feminist Frequency videos, because they were just making him angry. (We had a few conversations about sexism in video games, months ago, but they were short conversations – there wasn’t anything we disagreed about.)

I love my son.

What do you tell your children about the Internet? “Stay away from the comments section” seems like worthwhile advice. Nothing good is ever found there.

I told my kids to be careful about giving out personal information. I said lots of people lie on the internet, but any time you tell a lie think about how awkward it will be if you ever want to tell the truth to the people you lied to before.

I didn’t give them any sort of censorship, but told them to click off anything they didn’t like. And that sometimes people try to shock each other.

When I occasionally look at their browser histories they show no sign of any interest in any of the sexual stuff. They don’t pay much attention to the real horror stuff but get kind of scared by children’s horror. One of them spends more time on Imgur than I like, and she’s far more informed about internet memes than I am. Possibly that might be good for something someday.

I feel like they spend too much effort on activities that are intended to be addicting. They play games which are intended to keep them clicking for intangible rewards, special shiny pokemon etc. They feel satisfied trying out strategies that eventually get them rare rewards, and they discuss arcane strategies with each other. The oldest one explains that she enjoys the feeling of fake accomplishment she gets from it, and even though the accomplishment doesn’t mean anything the feeling is real.

I have a sense that this is going to be the biggest issue in the long run. We have all these operant conditioning techniques available, and they’re getting used randomly by game designers to no real purpose except to make small amounts of money.

My oldest is 2, he calls the computer the “booby”. So I mainly tell him not to call it that.

I’ve wondered, do kids intuit what the internet is and how it works, the decentralized structure of it, or do they have to have it explained / shown to them? Also, do you try to explain how new it all is, how this all used to be fields?

No kids yet and I have no idea what the correct way to integrate all this new fangled tech into their childhood is. Hopefully I will be able to glean some knowledge from this thread. Thanks Belle.

There’s nothing “perverted” or “creepy” about japanese tentacle “rapes” . Its part of a subtle cultural tradition that goes back at least to Hokusai and which questions the union of the natural and human realms (that’s the definition of eroticism). The women in these depictions experience immediate, material, bodily pleasure by mating with multiple phantasmagorical creatures. And so the physical and phantasmagorical worlds coexist, intermesh in a shared heightened state of awareness, paroxysmatically. This questions the role of the biological and the phantasmagorical in human sexuality .
Granted the contemporary avatars of this tradition as present in mangas are coarse and do not rise up to the level of their woodcut predecessors but they are in no way perverted unless you believe that desire, fantasies and sexual exploration are unnatural . I find Superman to be a much creepier figure (with his fantasies of unlimited power and his totalitarian obsession of a pure world, entirely rid of evil )
The real perversion may be in conditioning a young woman to believe that natural human behavior is a form of deviancy.
As for the internet , I think its wonderful to see how young people today (although I’m not much older) seem carefree and curious about sexuality. They engage in role-playing and ritualized behaviors , multiple partners etc .. Seeing sex on the internet is liberating and educational – in fact the whole issue of sex education , which in fact in its awkwardness perpetuated taboos , is now moot . This generation may break some kind of barrier (I’m talking mostly about western societies, especially Protestant ones) This is good news in the sense that healthier , less repressed people sexually makes for a more balanced society in general and more likely to focus on and solve other problems.
In summary I think this is a wonderful time to be a young woman especially if you are not overly “protected” from the world but allowed to fully be pervaded, taken over by it , much like Hokusai’s fisherman’s wife who achieves mastery and control and lucidity in self-abandonment.
Sorry for my english.

Have I got a story for you. It’s about the olden days in the webtubes when Michael Bérubé was King of the Blogs. There was a guy there, The Constructivist, who was in Japan on a Fulbright. His family, of course, was with him. He had two daughters, one somewhere between 3 and 4 and the other one a bit younger. As things worked out, I ended up wrting stories about Sparkychan and Gojochan and posting them to the interwebs where The Constructivist would read them to his daughters. When the time came that the family had to go home back to upstate New York, onechan (the older daughter) was feeling anxious about having to leave her Japanese friends.

So, I conspired with The Constructivist to arrange a surprise. I put up one last episode of the Sparkycan and Gojochan adventures, a long one in which the two BFFs are captured, put into a cardboard box – I had photographs of them in the box, so you know it was real – and the box was tossed into deepest outer space. End. Of. Story.

What a bummer.

However, The Constructivist and I timed things so he read the story to the girls after they got home in Dunkirk, without, alas, their Japanese friends. When they were done with the episode and pondering the fate of Sparkychan and Gojochan, what should happen but it seems that the FedEx man had delivered a package for the two girls. They open it up and guess what they found inside?

In case you just can’t figure it out, I explain this more fully in a recent post, The Freedoniad: A Tale of Epic Adventure in which Two BFFs Travel the Universe and End up in Dunkirk, New York.

Interesting to hear how you handled it. I took more of the hands off Glen Tomkins approach, trusting that good parental examples and learning enough PC in school would do the trick. Oddly my kids are far more PC and anti-drug -even anti alchohol (they are 22 and 25 now) than I or my wife, if anything square and geeky kids overlearn these lessons. If anything they are a bit too correct.

I grew up with conservative Christian parents. They sent me to private evangelical schools where swearing, sex, and anything contradicting young earth creationism were off limits. They were also careful about vetting movies and TV shows. I was living in a filter bubble 20 years before anyone used the term “filter bubble,” possibly indicating that we didn’t really need a new term for the online equivalent.

The big hole in the filter maintained by my parents was reading. I read a lot. What do you tell your children about books? The only warning I remember was when I checked out some of Isaac Asimov’s novels when I was 10 or so and my mom told me to be careful, because he was an atheist*. I read lots of science fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction history. There is a lot of sex, violence, and racism in history. There’s also harrowing violence and weird pervy sex in fiction, depending on the author. These aren’t aspects that usually reveal themselves through the cover or the inside blurb. Strangers can’t ask children to do things through books, so they’re safer that way, and maybe text is safer than images in terms of driving odd attitudes or desensitization. But pretty much every weird pervy thing or horrifying act of violence you can encounter on the WWW I first encountered in library books. I don’t know if or how parents should pre-filter books their kids want to read, but the problem of teaching your kids to enjoy reading without uncritically internalizing everything pretty close to the same problem with material on the net.

*It turns out she was right. It really was contagious. Sorry, Mom.

I’d like to congratulate Phillipe for the best troll comment I’ve seen in a long, long time.

I think this would be a great opportunity for that guy to say “I can’t believe that everyone is calling us a white supremacist prison gang! Actually it’s mainly about ethics in video game journalism”

(and God, I swear there are like 12)

I have the death of your soul right here, ma’am. Will there be anything else?

This makes me very relieved 1. I could not read adult books at seven, and 2. I never really liked sci-fi .

I think the delicate years are where you are suddenly able to read adult books, and have no real understanding of how to contextualise adult books, so you start reading them as in the same way you read children’s books.

On holiday when I was about 11 (much older than 7 happily) I ran out of books and picked two about children from the shelves – one was To a kill a Mockingbird, the other was The Counterfeiters by Gide. I did not really see any difference between them at the time . But they are quite different.

Belle@21: “Maybe I should have made it more clear that I’m not actually worried about to catch a predator-like bullshit so much as I am some random board deciding to doxx you and burn you to the ground because you entered their field of vision briefly”

But isn’t that at least as much of a risk on Facebook as it is on 4chan? And the gods help you if some baddie breaks into your FB timeline; lots more there than your address.

Glad I asked, because that link was hilarious.

It sounds like you’re all a pretty bad-ass crew, even more so than my family, which is all to the good. In the original post the girls seem merely confident and matter-of-fact, which is normal for young ones, in my experience. Now upgraded to tough and capable and may know how to deploy a dieresis, which is to say, however temporarily diminutive, threatening.

#25 TheTemporaryName

I think I made it up to #8 as a teenaged boy and thought “This is sick. I should probably stop here.”

Oh, I remember those. Yes, #8 was probably about the right place.

I liked the first few. I mean, OK, BDSM, but #3 had giant ants! Intelligent giant ants with high technology! They had a giant insect that gave them beautiful dreams while it ate them, and they kept it as a sort of pet, they could look forward to the time when the ant colony didn’t need them any more and they could experience the joy of being eaten. They didn’t care about human beings much, except to make sure they never got enough technology to be dangerous. They were charming.

And then here’s the hero, who sees how utterly dysfunctional the society is and he plans to change it. He and his girlfriend against the world! Sometimes while they’re planning they do consensual BDSM, for fun. But then he decides the place is too dangerous for her, and he sends her home to earth where she’ll be safe. And away from him. He doesn’t consult her. She is understandably outraged. I think #8 is about the point the main character (MC) decides the society doesn’t need to be changed at all, he just needs to adapt well enough to be the best at everything. It lost its last fig leaf of decency about then, and it was all downhill from there.

It had a certain world-building consistency if you ignore the MC’s misunderstandings. The ants keep humans from having much technology, except somehow they let them do a lot of biology and somehow they never do much biowarfare, against ants or anybody. They cured old age in everybody. That would be enough to create a giant population given enough food, except the men enthusiasticly kill each other. I didn’t notice a book where the main character wasn’t involved in at least 10,000 deaths including at least 10 men he knew personally. They didn’t kill women nearly as much, though they sometimes used them as bait when trapping monsters etc. This reflected the population imbalance. So, lots of old infertile women who look young. Not nearly enough men to go around. Given the death rate, the women would need to be pretty much continually pregnant during their fertile years, but no, many slave women are given contraceptives. The men would be mostly young (unless it’s mostly the young men who get killed). The women mostly older. This explains why they kidnap women from earth when they have a surplus already — they want young impressionable women who don’t know as much about manipulating them.

The whole system run by a few mean old men. It largely fits together if you look at it right.

The writing was not so much bad as insufficiently edited. He used a technique where he would mention a flock of a particular kind of bird, or a special fruit that usually had an even number of seeds but the ones with long necks had an odd number of seeds, and the avid reader was supposed to remember the scene where the MC bet with a local about how many seeds, or what direction the birds would fly, and lost. Each reference to past stuff was supposed to build up a web of pleasant memories. But there was way too much of that. Also there was a whole lot of repetitious, boring BDSM. I think the author really enjoyed thinking about that, because he wrote it over and over without a whole lot of variation. As his books got popular he accepted less editing, the books got fatter and more repetitious, and much harder to read. He kind of got blacklisted for awhile, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was not only because his work was so offensive, but also because he was probably getting harder to work with.

Occasionally ageless beautiful women got sent back to earth. Wouldn’t it make sense that they would accumulate wealth and power? How much of current culture and news could be because of such women? I didn’t see him consider the possibility at all. Unless it was in the many books I skipped, he just was not interested in writing about an earth dominated by mean (or otherwise) old women.

Oh well. I wouldn’t forbid my kids to read it, but I sure wouldn’t encourage them. Or maybe I would. I tried to get my oldest daughter to read Atlas Shrugged thinking she should get inoculated to those ideas, and after a brief description she refused. I’m pretty sure she’d be less likely to read this stuff if I suggested it.

Lynne @6, any chance that novel is by Anne-Marie MacDonald?

Commenters thinking they scored a triumphant gotcha! by asking Belle Waring what she tells her kids about books ‘n’ films ‘n’ “the universe”: books and films and the Actual Universe, Actually (the sort of disembodied big one we occupy, not the metaphor we employ when talking about ourselves), don’t attack kids, don’t target them, try to groom them, throw slurs at them, send them dick pics and threats when the books (films, universe) don’t get their way. No one is owed access to kids because: freedoms against nags and killjoys trump all.

Negotiating the inevitability of your children losing their childish naivete and wonder and becoming A Small and Hardened You while fearing the consequences of insulating them too much (thus setting up a much harder fall later in life) is a dilemma worthy of discussion. Explaining why we are socialized as a culture to do and feel horrible, dehumanizing things is something most parents will more or less screw up, if they attempt it at all, because they’re drowning in the same shit and we lack a vocabulary that is free from prejudices (the kind that sets up traps for well-meaning adults) and simple enough to explain complicated things.

” No one is owed access to kids because: freedoms against nags and killjoys trump all.”

But no one has said that, I don’t think, just that all the problems that exist online exist X100 offline. (Is online bullying worse than the offline kind? The odds of being groomed online is far lower than by someone in your family, a local taxi driver/gang etc .. perhaps buying drugs online is easier now, but I’d doubt it, or at least would imagine the vast majority of young ‘uns still do it the old fashioned way)
‘Saturation by disgusting porn’ is certainly something relatively novel, but again you have to go looking for it. I’d assume most people looking up s**t eating videos are (1) those curious of what it entails/doing so ironically (2) people who find it sexually arousing. I dont see why we should lose any sleep over either demographic. It might be, to my eyes, pretty disgusting, perhaps unhealthy, but too each their own.

Having said that, I dont have any kids – and so as my mother always said to me ‘ all your stupid ideas will dissapear once you do’.. so there is that.

Pat @ 37. Yes. I’m more than half way through and sadder by the page, reluctant to read on but I probably will.

All of which raises the question: is Game Of Thrones anything more than Gor without the giant birds?

@32 –

There’s nothing “perverted” or “creepy” about japanese tentacle “rapes” . Its part of a subtle cultural tradition that goes back at least to Hokusai

“There’s nothing perverted or creepy about it, it’s part of historic Japanese culture” is right up there with “there’s nothing gay about it, it’s just how the classical Greeks did things”

Thanks for you reply but you are misreading me and your statement is not logically equivalent to mine. Just to be clear: japanese tentacle rape is not perverted not because it has a cultural history but simply because in itself it is neither perverted nor creepy. Also I find the idea of perversion applied to the imagination or to creative works disquieting. As far as I know there have been no documented cases of women being assaulted by molluscs.

Yeah fair point Belle (and JT) I had actually heard of that Jezebel situation now that you mention it. (JT – Goatse was a little before my time online. Thanks for making me aware. Pretty disgusting)

Belle,

Fear not! Weird & humorously subversive but no Gor.

Really interesting Philippe.

If you want to imagine a world without depictions of rape or abuse, imagine a world without Nabokov, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, A Boy and His Dog, or Infinite Jest.

57: Or the Kuroshistuji manga/anime that Belle is allowing her children, written by a mangaka who built his reputation on hardcore yaoi. Apparently toned way down in the manga, and suggested allegorically rather than explicitly. Still, the central theme of a murderous demon serving an extremely jaded and cynical pre-teen Faustian boy with consistent physical contact is not material many people would permit pre-teens. The manga is still ongoing, interminably but very profitably, the anime provided the logical conclusion to the story, in which the Black Butler ate the 14-year-olds eternal soul.

But the late Victorian fashions are so kawaii.

Sorry, her reputation, the Black Butler mangaka Toboso Yana is a woman as is usually the case for fujoshi art.

Doing a search for her, I find that explicit “shotacon” was her specialty starting out.

@59

Most people don’t realize it but Black Butler is actually a Japanese adaptation of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster.

@57, 58:

Oh, horse-shit.

The issue isn’t the “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife”, or of the radically patriarchal and misogynist culture that produced it. Nor, for that matter, is it about “Lolita” (nah, that one wasn’t written by the original fedora-wearing douche-bro, now, was it?).

It’s about using these as a back-door to slip in the defense of pornographic images that depict sexual violence against women (cf, JT’s relatively high band-width [!] remark on bukkake, above).

Philippe’s arguments are little more than “sophisticated” versions of those put forward all the time by MRAs and others of that ilk.

His theme of the “convergence of norms of behavior” is fine as far as it goes. But he is trying to get it to do too much work, and there is no good reason to fall into that trap.

YMMV, but I don’t see a lot of suppression of creativity outside of wing-nuts trying to cut funding for Mapplethorpe and “Piss Christ” and the like.

63: Wodehouse?? Have you read Kuroshistuji? It’s available online in scanlation

1) Black Butler is late-Victorian blood-drenched opium horror of the darkest variety. I am not clear on how Belle’s daughter who is sensitive to scarey stories is able to handle it.

2) Ciel Phantomhive, being a 13 Chess master who runs a toy company, is very far from idiot Bertie Wooster

3) Sebastian Michaelis, although a hypercompetent servant, will obey any command, will kill anyone Ciel asks and does, and is always staring hungrily at Ciel’s soul.

“Well, I see that one or two of the brothers of the “old left” have chimed in to take Philippe’s side in this debate.

Why am I not surprised?”

Any left that excludes sex workers is not a left that I would support.

For the record, whatever “Philippe’s side” might be, I am not on it. I am fairly indifferent to the substance of Free Speech issues and politics although interested in them sociologically.

Although I wouldn’t touch the stuff (or it’s male counterpart, if such exists), I am interested in fujoshi/june/yaoi/shounen ai/slash fiction etc as particular sociological and political phenomena, and in the regulation of culture and expression in general.

The Black Butler live-action movie changed Ciel P into a young woman. That’s interesting.

“everything is permitted except that which absolutely 100% needs to be prohibited” only offers hard negative feedback. People drift along until they bump into one of these absolutely-must-be-prohibited things.

That is a cultural thing. I have read that austrian culture tends to do things that way — there are hard limits that no one must break, and everything is fine within those limits. I don’t have much personal experience about that, but I met an austrian man who explained to me that once when he was in his teens he took an apple from a tree he was passing on the way home from school. The owner saw him and called his father. He wound up working for two weeks after school until the man agreed he had paid for the apple and declared it was over. He said, “We do not steal. We are all happy together in society, snuggle like bugs in a rug, do what you want, but if you cross the line then you are outside of society and all alone.”

I don’t know whether that is better than the US way where people struggle to be richer, to be more stylish, more with-it, more normal than their neighbors and the competition never ends.

There isn’t just one way to do things. But within each culture, maybe in fact there is just one way to do things and if you violate the norms you are on the outside, unable to encourage others to change with you. And if the culture does change there is nothing you can do but try to keep up.

Maybe that’s just the way it is.

Belle,

Now I am relieved I stopped reading Jezebel – that is quite a horrible thing for someone to do. I find it quite easy to not come across these things on the Internet , but it must be worrisome being a parent of curious kids these days. And one problem is one can never know what will just be a brief phase of interest for a curious teenager, or what could go on to be damaging life long – eg. Lots of teenagers might experiment with drugs, but for some this will turn to a path of addiction and perhaps overdosing.

I made this following point on Henry’s recent Internet post – but I will make it again here since no one responded there.

I think the idea that the Internet should be governed in the way we govern texts (eg. Books, films etc) is misguided. I think it should be governed more like we govern public places.

Films are governed a bit more than books – because they have to be watched by the censors and get an age ranking, or get banned. In practice this does not work very consistently because it is quite easy to see adult films at a young age .

Places are governed more extensively by zoning of the land and needing to get permits to change uses and requirements on uses etc – like residential use people have to look after their kerbs and gutters, ‘adult’ premises must be away from schools and childcare premises etc, premises licensed to serve alcohol have requirements about age, not letting people get too drunk etc.

So I think you could have a virtual land governance approach to Internet governance. People would make too much of a fuss if you decide to govern all Internet sites as if the content should be suitable for children – but Internet sites that are not suitable for children can be regulated in a way that would try to prevent children accessing them. this would not necessarily work 100% eg. it is fairly easy for teenagers to get entry into licensed premises, but it would be more preventative than things are now. Also, even adult sites could get regulated, so eg. Violence against women could be limited to being shown only in contexts where this violence was approached critically (family violence to women and children is a big issue in our state election here in Victoria at the moment.)

The main problems I see would be the costs of compliance, so that would have to be worked out, and that regulation could stop some downloading which would limit poor people’s access to knowledge, but that could be worked out too no doubt.

Just to be clear: japanese tentacle rape is not perverted not because it has a cultural history but simply because in itself it is neither perverted nor creepy. (emphasis added – DD)

I think maybe ten years ago – certainly fifteen years ago – I might have got into a long argument about this. I regard it as a potentially hopeful sign of impending maturity that I’m not going to. Philippe, get a telephone, give yourself a ring and ask yourself what the fuck you think you’re on about.

Philippe, get a telephone, give yourself a ring and ask yourself what the fuck you think you’re on about.

His point could possibly be defended. I have seen four of these. I tried to select them randomly but there were likely unknown biases in the selection. I found some common themes in three of the four.

There was a solemn scene where an authority figure explained something complicated to the girls. They appeared to volunteer for something. (It would be easier if I understood written or spoken japanese.) Later there was a scene in which they resolutely and angrily marched into a weird landscape, possibly representing some sort of battlefield. There they met the tentacles, got suspended into the air and thoroughly raped. Each of them came about the time the tentacles did. There was a human or demon male connected somehow to the tentacles, in two cases he had dozens of them sprouting from him. He looked evil. After the rape, one or more of the girls was possessed by a goddess or something. She acted protective of the others, and she soundly defeated the demon-man.

The fourth was different. Students in a school were having various disputes, it looked like girls arguing about boys, boys arguing about girls, teachers trying to get students to pay attention, etc. One girl didn’t participate much except for some extra-ugly arguments, she looked unpopular. Excluded. Then cracks opened in the floor and many tentacles came out, grabbing the girls and women teachers. The boys and male teachers were completely ineffectual trying to stop it. Some of them were injured and maybe killed. The unpopular girl managed to protect an injured teacher, and retrieve a few of the girls while beating up on some tentacles. She had a protracted argument with some sort of demon and then the demon and the tentacles left. Afterward she did not seem more popular than before, not at all, but it was hard to tell what was happening.

There’s a lot more going on than just tentacle rape. In three of the cases it looked like self-sacrifice for a noble purpose. The fourth looked like some sort of nerd-girl wish-fulfillment.

I don’t see it as integral to japanese culture. It looks like something designed to evade censorship, like Belle said. Like, the censors have some specific set of rules so somebody figures out a way to evade them. I understand it worked that way in the USA for BDSM for awhile. They could do BDSM with the participants fully clothed with no sex, and the censors didn’t have it on their lists. That might have served to make the stuff more popular, at least it got more exposure than it would have otherwise.

“Wh-what are you going to do to me?”
“Why, anything I want, Mwa-ha-ha-ha…..!

Yes! No awkward small talk, no rude rejections, of course very awkward if it turns out she doesn’t like it….

“So we’ll start with the whips, and then the needles under the fingernails, and then the branding!”

Wait, what?

People are really good at sublimating, and when you try to pass laws against sublimating it’s an uphill battle. If the censorship had gone far enough, we would eventually have had porn showing fully-clothed women eating bananas. We’d get men with banana fetishes. More men with banana fetishes….

Dr. Science, @12: “…what kind of info to give and to lie about when setting up accounts. How to keep from DLing viruses (this is v. important!). How to scan a list of google results and figure out which sites are likely to be bogus or infected.”

Pray tell us more! I’ve dealt with computers since the days of eight-inch floppies, but a couple of grandkids (in Singapore!) have preciptitated me into a part of the digital ecosystem I’ve previously ignored.