the idea that suffering (usually in silence) is a virtue has wreaked havoc on our culture, and capitalism has been all too happy to co-opt it. fuck the protestant work ethic, being in pain does not make me a better person, fuck you
‘children should not be exposed to literature about bigotry, violence, etc because they’re Not Prepared For It’ is like one of the most privileged opinions you can possibly have. i hate to tell you this but a lot of children face bigotry and violence in their daily lives! for children of colour and children who are victims of abuse and children in poverty, these things are Actually Happening to them In Real Life! what you are advocating for when you say children should be shielded from these things in media is for the white children with stable loving nuclear families to be shielded from acknowledging the lived realities of their peers!
I saw an experimental standup show by a comedian (his name is Corey White tho he’s not active anymore) who talked extensively about the neglect he experienced in his family of origin and then the sexual abuse and violence he went through in the foster system etc, and at the end he was talking about getting a scholarship to attend a private school. He found The Metamorphosis by chance on the shelves in the library when he was like 15? And when he read it, he saw this character, Gregor, and how he was rejected totally by his family for something that wasn’t at all his fault, and yet his love for them was constant and unconditional.
And being a fifteen year old boy who’d been brutalized his whole life by the people who were meant to care for him, for no reason at all, Corey broke down and cried in the middle of the library. And obviously this stuck with him because he was given this national platform (an hour-long stand up special) and he finished it with this memory. That story and the message he took from it stayed with him long into adulthood, he said suddenly he didn’t feel totally alone in his experience as an abused child. Who would deny a young person that kind of catharsis??
People have even gotten to the point where they’re saying that children can’t experience stories about death, as if death is something “too grim” and “too upsetting” for a child to possibly understand. But children are exposed to death all the time. Children have grandparents who die, parents who die, siblings who die, friends who die, and they know what it’s like go go through that grief. Overall, to act like childhood (which people paint with a very broad brush, sometimes they mean six-year-olds and sometimes they mean middle schoolers?) is a period of complete and total innocence and that children never experience any suffering, any grief, any bigotry, is really deliberately ignorant. People are talking about a fictional, idealized, archetypal Childhood and fictional, idealized, archetypal Children who are nothing but innocence have never experienced any kind of suffering
