Censorship

Should I censor my daughter’s reading? She is 15 and she brings home books that to me are objectionable.

If you want her to acquire a good taste in pornography, certainly ban her books. I recall the day when my parents forbade the reading of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We all devoured it in secret.

Censorship is plain silliness. If Mary does not know a popular four-letter word and she sees that word in a book, it will mean nothing to her. If she already knows that word, reading it won’t corrupt her.

Censorship denotes fear of sex and nothing else. When a home is free about sex, no book nor film is dangerous. Censorship is an extension of parental lying, the old tradi­tions that lied about Santa Clans, and about madness fol­lowing masturbation. Censorship may have worked to some extent in Victorian days, but censorship does not work to­day. Youth is all the better for its freedom to decide for itself what is good and what is bad. How slowly things do move! Some parents are but little in advance of the Victo­rian ladies who clothed the legs of a grand piano. There’s a campaign in the U.S. now to force pet owners to make their pets modest by clothing them in trousers! This seems to me to be so inane that I’m tempted to regard it as the joke of some sarcastic wag.

My school library in Summerhill contains Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Tropic of Cancer, Fanny Hill; I never see my adolescents reading them. The law makes the crime, and censorship makes pornography. And pornography con­tinues to nourish the sickness of humanity.

My kids are crazy about comics. I have read that comics are not good for children. However, in my home I have not seen any bad results from the reading of comics. What do you think?

When I was a boy, comics were comical. Today, many comics are horrible: pictures of eyes being gouged out or scenes of half-naked women being beaten with whips. Though we may abominate magazines that show sadism and perversion, censorship of the comic is far worse than the comic itself.

As adults, how many of us are free from interest in the same type of picture? We watch Cassius Clay on TV beat and beat a tottering Patterson. We have a prurient interest in sex scenes which imply lascivious doings.

You cannot keep all accounts of violence from children. Your daily newspaper tells that a white man wantonly mur­dered a black man. Bad enough! But then the paper goes on to say that the Southern jury brought in a verdict of Not Guilty. Here is murder crowned with injustice. Yet you do not bar that newspaper from your children.

You can’t screen the young from the evils of the day— you can only live in a way that will make such evils appear to them to be unattractive. I said live—not preach!

My son has become friendly with a boy who doesn’t have a very nice character—he is a liar, a bully, a swaggerer. My son is beginning to imitate his ways. How can I make my son realize that this boy is a bad influence on him?

Every boy comes across companions who are bullies and liars and swaggerers. The balanced boy soon comes to real­ize the posings and inferiority of the lying boaster. You can­not help matters by trying with words to wean the boy from his unsatisfactory companion.

I think the best, the only way, is to make your son’s life as full and happy as you can. Ask yourself if he is seek­ing this other boy because his home is too good, too moral, too restricted. He must be attracted to the companion be­cause from him he gets something that he cannot get at home.

But why worry so much about lying and swaggering? Most folks, old and young, do their bit of both even when they aren’t politicians and sales agents. If your boy lies to you, he most likely is afraid to tell you the truth for fear you’ll jump on him.

People do not go on imitating others, unless the faults of the imitated are what they consciously or unconsciously would like to have. The hero attracts those who want to be like him. Hitler’s SS attracted all the sadists and perverts in Germany. Billy Graham attracts all the simple who be­lieve they are sinners. You do not follow a leader unless he is going the way you want to go. I really feel there may be something lacking in your home.