Why don’t we have that kind of restriction on books? To be honest, even if we had, I wouldn’t be bothered to enforce them on my kids, but then again – I don’t enforce the rating from TV on my kids either, I simply warn them, and they are quite good taken my warnings seriously.
By why don’t we have ratings on books? We should, since we have ratings on other medias, such as TV and the internet. If your daughter is reading some serious book with a totally innocent title, you would have no clue how explicit the contents would be. I discussed this with a friend last night. And we realised that some of the more hectic either violent or sex oozing scenes from books we read over 20 years ago, is still fresh in our head. They certainly made an impact. We could also agree that what we read in a book and then imagined, is far more troublesome compared to what we ever would see in TV.
Actually the whole thing started for me, when I explained to another friend, that I don’t understand the TV rating system in South Africa. I was born in Denmark, and have only lived here in SA for the last 10 years, but I still don’t understand it.
How can it be that explicit nudity and sex – even more visual than the erotic movies shown is rated 18 and explicit violent movies is rated 16. I mean we are all here on the planet as a result of somebody had sex. It is certainly more natural than somebody has been carved up with a chainsaw.
And the erotic movies shown with the most severe age restriction is nothing compared to what you could read – Harold Robinson was used as an example in my discussion last night.
As I said, it is a rhetoric question. But I still wonder…
