Close Topic Options

News Article Here

So its been reported that a 10 year-old girl managed to get a hold of and check out a yaoi manga from a public library, the manga had a Parental Advisory sticker on the cover. Its also been reported that the girls was all by herself, left alone at the library and the adult that reported the book was her uncle, not her father.

So what is everyone's opinion on this? Was the manga inappropriate for the girl? Is is the Library's fault for allowing easy access to such titles? Or is it the parents' fault for leaving the child unattended in a public place?

TVNihon posted a pretty interesting opinion on it:

It's ultimately the parent's and the child's responsibility to regulate what is and isn't appropriate for the child's viewing. While the library might have some sort of policy wherein ID is required for borrowing works with explicit content, the same is true of video game storefronts and M rated games. Kids circumvent it all the time. The only tried and true way is to establish that boundary with your child as a parent and subsequently enforce it through supervision.

If this is the girl's first time being caught with explicit material from the library, then I don't think there's really anything to take away from it other than a lesson learned by the parents. I'd hope that in the future if they don't want her viewing that material at this point in her life, that they would be more diligent in checking her library check outs.

Basically, I completely agree with the opinions you quoted TVNihon sharing. In a case like this, the uncle has no jurisdiction and neither does the library. That manga does not have any material that can by law be objectively defined as "explicit" (genitalia exposed, etc.)

The "Parental Advisory" sticker is just that - an advisory to parents that the material may be unsuitable for their child. It does not hold any legal ground in any way, so any argument whatsoever against the library is asinine. Not to mention the fact that the uncle is not even her parent, so the "Parental Advisory" sticker doesn't even apply to him (if you want to get technical.)

This whole thing is no one's fault. No, it's not the parents' fault, either. This material, while arguably not suitable for minors, is not going to do any kind of harm to her either. If this were something actually dangerous, we could start placing blame, but to say that "it's X-person's fault this happened" is more than a little extreme, because, quite frankly, nothing happened. This manga, as I said before, was not even explicit. This is just a bunch of hyper-modest, closed-minded foolishness by people who get butthurt about the slightest mention of sex and kids reading about it. It's insane.

Now, for the record, I would be against my kid reading this manga. Not because I have any objections toward the content, but because yaoi manga is usually a gateway to fujoshi-weeabooland.

This, oh god fucking this....

I have met some respectable people who aren't like this, but it seems the majority (and by majority, I mean loudest) of this fandom is like this...Any con I go to hear on the east coast has that one booth in the dealers' room which exploits this shit to the fullest.

Not saying this shit is bad, just another case of a few bad eggs spoiling the dozen. Same could be said about some of the guys I've seen checking out other shit like figs and gunpla. Some of the creepiest, most-likely-to-be-considered-pedophiles-in-a-completely-non-joking-manner guys I've seen at cons. They make some of the classic Japanese stereotypes look tame.

But getting back on-topic, the sticker says "advisory"....it's not like it states flat-out that youth are restricted from reading, just advised not to.

It's like in Pirates of the Caribbean with regards to Parlay...it's more like guidelines.