A lot of people don't know that the reason there's not a "rating system" for books like there is for movies, video games, music, etc. is an intentional and explicit stance of librarians. Librarian associations have long, and correctly, insisted that categorizing books into specific ratings or age categories is censorship. The decision of an outside group of people about whether a book is or is not appropriate for someone of a certain age is censoring content to them.
As we've seen with the right's attacks on libraries for LGBT content in books, they would LOVE if some outside party had already done the work of classifying books into a particular category, and they could simply lobby that one central body into insisting that any mention of gay people means it's Adults Only. Then in one fell swoop they could brand the entire debate as "we just want to make sure that our libraries only carry age appropriate books" without having to have the debate on a case by case basis on each individual book across each individual library and across each individual library patron.
After all, does it even make sense that literally the diary of a tween/teenage girl is not appropriate for a tween/teenage kid to read? If you ask conservatives, the uncensored Diary of Anne Frank should be Adults Only. Despite it being written by a teenage girl and having real historical value in humanizing the victims of the Holocaust. But if they could do that fight once, centrally, at a ratings board, they could get it banned from all libraries in one fell swoop.
Mastodon Feed
