Castration stories about kids

[dingbat (imported)]

I've found this thread very interesting. The trouble with stories is that they are open to textual interpretation. They are not 'closed' texts. That is to say, we probably all interpret them differently and it's entirely possible that none of us interpret them in the way that the original author had intended. The best example of this that I can think of is David Morley's study of the 'Nationwide' audience (you can read it here : http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Modules/TF3 ... leynw.html ). Nationwide was a British news programme which used to be on at around 6 o'clock every night in the 1970's. The really fascinating thing about Morley's study is that he discovered that there were almost as many interpretations of the stories which were reported as there were viewers. He asked the original authors of the stories to describe what they had intended the viewers to understand from the story and then asked viewers what they had, in fact, got from the story. The two things really bore no relation to each other. There have been many other such studies, some focussing more on the written word than on tv reporting, but the Nationwide study still comes out top (in my opinion) as it's one of the fullest and most interesting studies ever conducted on the anaylsis of people's interpretations of someone else's story. It's a very down-to-earth study and doesn't get bogged down in semantics and semiotics, it simply looks at what people 'take' from a story.

Most reports on the tv and fictional stories are termed 'open texts' because they defy closed anaylsis. That is to say, you can't say 'if you read a it MUST mean you understand b', unlike mathematical formulae where, it could be argued, there is a closed interpretation of what's been said (although I do know that some theoretical mathematicians would disagree with me on this!)

Therefore, I don't think this is about 'is it right or wrong?', it has more to do with how we each, as individuals, choose to interpret something.

PS I detest censorship as it rarely achieves anything. To put it in Durkheim's terms, it simply serves to appease the moral conscience of the masses without actually tackling any particular issue.

[A-1 (imported)]

Well,

The younger the child, the more appalling the story is.

It is bad enough to write stories about adults being sexually abused, but writing them about children I feel is an author's attempt to sort out their own experiences.

Generally, these stories scream "I WAS HELPLESS AND SEXUALLY EXPLOITED AS A CHILD." At least that is how I read them...

The thing is that some adults prefer to be sexually abused as the sexual buzz that it gives to them cannot be had any other way. These individuals need to learn not to permanently injure themselves and then be left alone as long as they do not take advantage of others. Their partners also need to know how not to injure them attempting to satisfy them and/or themselves sexually.