Today's children see about two hundred (for illustration purposes only, not a true figure) murders on TV by the time they are twelve years old. This is something so horrible that hopefully they never have to experience it for real themselves. Explicit depiction of sexual activity, something that is as natural as live itself, on the other hand is much more regulated and the average twelve year old probably has not seen much of it. This doesn't make sense to me. I am not a psychologist but I think this might give the message that violence is more acceptable than sexuality and that somehow sexuality might be something bad.
Obviously I am not saying that age restrictions for sexually explicit material should be removed all together, especially not if the material contains violence as well which is often the case in the Japanese Hentai Comics. What I am saying is that it should be brought into line with the regulations for violent material or rather the other way around.
An other thing of course is that using age as the sole criteria to decide whether a person should have access to certain material is too simple and only works if the age is chosen so high that everyone at this age has the required maturity to view this material. It would be much better to tailor the criteria to the individual person as different people mature differently and usually girls mature before boys. This is very difficult to achieve with a computer program and usually only parents have the knowledge that is required to make an informed decision. Unfortunately parents do not have the time to always supervise their children and kids often know more about computers than their parents and can easily circumvent any parenting measures.
For a while I have been thinking about a maturity test for my visitors. This test would be a small amount of multiple-choice questions the answers to which would determine whether someone was allowed access to my site or not. Ideally there would only be a few questions that could be answered quickly without making the experience too cumbersome for the visitors. Choosing the right questions is the problem, especially since I am neither qualified nor do I have any experience in this field. I am not even sure if it is possible to get any meaningful information at all with, let's say, just five questions. If you have any experience in determining the maturity of a person or just an opinion on this subject, please let me know.
Maybe I am spending too much time thinking about this issue and the percentage of underage persons visiting my website is only very small. That's why I have setup an anonymous, one click survey to get an idea of the average age of my visitors. If you can spare 30 seconds, please take it.
About the author: I am Andy, the BOO (Bilder, Owner and Operator) of this website
Rating: Agree: 313 (68.2%) Disagree: 79 (17.2%) Undecided: 67 (14.6%)
Views: 80703
View the survey - How old are consumers of erotic cartoons
B bomb: [2012-07-07 01:29:21]
I really take offense every time I hear that "usually girls mature faster than boys" - I'm not sure why it grates my nerves. My personal experience tells me that the entire idea is a load of hogwash... but I don't really have the energy to get into a detailed or "scienticised" debate about the merits of the position. I think that our (and I use "our" very loosely here) society values violence more than life-giving things very sick, and even morally reprehensible. It would make more sense that a child be protected from witnessing violence than sex at an early age; and furthermore the reality is that our legal system is perhaps rather broken in this regard and is less about protecting children and more about protecting adults from being offended by their children's (obviously extant) sexuality. What it teaches to children and eventually to all people is that it is not wrong to do things that contravene the letter of the law, so long as they remain within the boundaries of it's spirit - which seems fine but in practice also leaves the entire society vulnerable to unscrupulous people. It is rather obvious that people under the age of majority are regularly accessing sexually explicit material via the internet, but because our sexuality is virtually hidden from one another it fosters an atmosphere of guilt, shame, and self-blame - things which are in some analogous way soft forms of violence against our bodies and if you like, the spirit of our selves. And now you will observe, I am coming down from my high horse. Cheers!~
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