Thursday 26 May 2016

NC-17

How do you find books? Personally once +Stephen King's Dark Tower Series let me down and +Anne Rice dashed my hopes that she'd write a good book again where Louis and Lestat resolve their issues finally and live happily ever after...well; I just usually read the first three lines and see if the book will snag me and make me want to read more. Three lines. It's not much to go on but it works for me. It's how I found +Maria Doria Russell's Children of God, and then The Sparrow. I read them backwards because the Sparrow is the first book but hey...excellent pieces of work. Made me want to become a jesuit.

And now, in this time of grief when I'm grappling with how God works, it's also a source of great comfort. If Emilio Sandoz could finally find some answers, well maybe so will I. And if I don't, well, there's always someone to blame.
It's the first anniversary of my father's death in two months. I don't know where the time went.I haven't even really started grieving yet. Still very much dealing with anger. The advantage of being angry I find, is that one cannot hold anger and sadness in one's breast. It's one or the other. And it's so much easier to sleep at night with anger as your bed mate. Sadness blows.
This wasn't meant to be a maudlin post.

Promise.
I was actually going to tell you about this girl I met online. She's English, lives in England; and we got to talking because of our mutual +Supernatural obsession. She was very intelligent, articulate and mature and I figured she was some late twenties chick with minimal responsibilities judging by the fact that I could find her online any time my day or night. Well anyway, quite by accident I discovered she was actually sixteen....
Lucky for her I'm not some fat, sleazy paedo looking for sex online.
I'm sure she'd have stopped talking to me if I was.
I hope.

So I tell my (then) fifteen year old son that I'm friends with this sixteen year old and would he like an introduction. He turned me down. Quite unequivocally. I don't know why. Maybe coz she was my friend. Or her blog was a bit too intelligent for him. I don't know.
So anyway, she writes fanfic.
And I'm reading this fanfic and it's tagged NC-17..
So by rights, the writer of the fanfic is not old enough to even read the fanfic.
And it was explicit.
And hot.
And explored aspects of BDSM that seventeen year olds really shouldn't know about.
At least, that's what I tell myself.
Of course this chick is a year older than my son.
So probably he has intricate knowledge of sex acts I haven't even heard about too.
It's very stressful for a mother to think such things about her child.
I'd rather stick this in the 'ain't broke' column and 'don't go looking for trouble' philosophy.
Of course it made me think about all the other fanfic out there.
And the average age of writers.
Yeah I remember making up "love stories" in my head when I was young. They were also loosely based on television shows; but most TV shows I saw at the time tended to show kissing which gently faded to black as the couple slid down away from the camera. It didn't give too much away in terms of What Really Happens.  but now teenagers are writing gay sex and BDSM and alpha/omega/beta dynamics and hooker!fic...and the more explicit and the more humiliating, the better.

I don't know what to think about all this.
When I was writing Child of Destiny, my editor was aghast at the amount of sex I was writing about. But it's soo tame compared to what I've seen on live journal. I feel I should be worried but I don't know about what. Do "young people" have too much knowledge or do I have too little?
Most importantly what the fuck happened to sex being about connection? communion? love?

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