A Blog in Which I Complain About the Infantilization of Youth on the Internet

I realize I kind of shot myself in the foot by having my first blog be more like an informal essay, because every time I've tried to write a blog since has ended with me spinning over how I can't figure out how to make my ramble revolve around a specific thesis. I also figure out halfway through that I'm mostly annoyed at something that is exclusive to a very insular opinion I assumed was more popular than it actually was, often one that only exists on social media... but at this point, I'm realizing that I have to say something about the insular stuff that pisses me off if I'm to continue existing on the internet without going insane. Because this blog references other people online, I've changed some details to avoid anything being too identifying while still getting the same point across. This isn't about anyone and I don't want it to be.

So, I hate the concept of a Do Not Interact list, wherein someone gives a list of types of people they don't want to interact with them on whatever platform. My main gripe with them is how they're most often used to bully multigender lesbians and plurals that don't have a dissociative disorder, but this blog is about DNIs directed at minors. I used Sheezy.Art for a little while, not long but I gave it a shot, and I noticed people who put minors in their DNI often misusing the mature themes tagging system by applying it to basically everything they made. Most people didn't apply the 18+ only tag to this stuff, but the things that did get tagged as 18+ stands out to me. On an account where a fully clothed reference sheet gets tagged as mature, a headshot of a guy with a bloody nose is 18+ only material. Someone must be eighteen years old, a legal adult in the US, in order to view a drawing of someone with a bloody nose. Really?

This was on another part of the internet, but the same thing appears on a random Neocities website I find every so often and it always rubs me the wrong way. Unless we're talking about a chat someone put on their site or the Neocities profile page itself, one cannot interact with a website beyond looking at it. So, again and again, I see websites that say minors shouldn't view it at all and there's no pornography or extremely violent imagery, just curse words and blogs about mental illness. I can only assume it's a result of the lingering baggage that comes from using social media. I get that people don't want an opinionated fourteen-year-old interacting with them on the website formerly known as Twitter dot com, but they can't even look at a personal website where someone says “fuck” or talks about having depression? Really?

On the index page of this website, I mention that it contains mature themes, but I don't really get into the details upfront and I don't say that someone has to be a specific age to view it. I am an independent artist and writer, not a broadcast network that needs something to indicate the maturity of what they're playing for the parents at home. If it would not be a crime to purposefully show it to a minor (like it would be with porn), then I don't really see a reason why a minor can't use their own discretion on whether they view it or not. Some people online, social media and indie web, are way too cautious about mature themes. I think that ageism plays a role in this, because I see people justify the needless restriction by saying they write/create art for an adult audience despite the lack of anything graphically sexual, violent, or sometimes anything even that serious at all. It just comes across as infantilizing to me.

Regardless of the political beliefs of the people claiming their non-pornographic, non-violent websites are for adults only, the push towards keeping mature themes out of kids' hands is the result of conservatism. Conservatives want a high level of control over kids' media consumption because media that contains mature themes (such as swearing, mild sexuality, and discussions of systemic oppression) often challenge their beliefs. Younger generations skew farther left in part because of their access to the internet and the progressive ideas that might not appear anywhere in their home life or education, which makes me really question why anyone that considers themselves queer would try to bar their website about being queer from young people, for example. Teenagers are not fragile babies, the young social media users that lose it over so much as the idea of open-mouth kissing in public are reactionaries and don't represent all youth.

I'm almost thirty now and I still remember what it was like to be a kid. I was queer, neurodivergent, mentally ill, and suicidal before I was even twelve years old. I swore constantly with my friends as a thirteen-year-old and listened to Mindless Self Indulgence until my abuser restricted my internet use like crazy to stop me from developing in a way she couldn't control. My school librarian prevented me from reading Twilight as a seventh grader while I was reading Peeps by Scott Westerfeld at home, a book about a guy who has a vampire STI that makes him perpetually horny (and it was garbage but I loved it at the time). If all of these things could be part of my child and teenage years, why couldn't a teenager read about my life at their age now that I'm an adult?

Someone doesn't magically become an adult when they turn eighteen years old. The dividing line between adults and minors is for legal purposes, because a punitive justice system can't function unless the law has an exactness to it. The laws around the age of majority can protect youth from abuse and unsafe work conditions, but they mainly exist to restrict their rights. Minors are considered less than full people in the US, essentially the property of their caregivers. The mythical number of which a young person is granted rights says nothing about their maturity level and I don't think anyone running a personal website on the internet has the right to assert anything based on it. If it wouldn't be a crime to show it to a teenager on purpose, if they could go through it themselves, what right does anyone have to say they can't look at it?

If you put it on the internet without any paywalls, you relinquish control over who gets to engage with it. At the end of the day, a teenager is gonna read whatever they want to read unless someone that has power over them actively prevents them from doing so. People have the right to tell marginalized groups not to look at their websites all they want, but know that I think they look like fuckin' knobs for doing it.