How can you deny the health care of young men!
I was trying to think of a good video to post up today, and as I was browsing through ANN as always I happened to come across a new article labeled “Florida Mother Protests Manga in Local Library.” My first inclination was that she was another stupid parent who is lacking the parenting skills to keep track of what her child is reading. I was right. Below is the article via Anime News Network
A mother in Crestview, Florida protested the availability of mature manga at her city’s public library and claimed her teenage son was negatively affected after picking up a volume from the general circulation shelves. The parent, Margaret Barbaree, said that the manga had adult themes which she described as “graphic” and “shocking.” Barbaree is the founder of a citizens group called Protect Our Children, and she presented her case to the Crestview City Council on June 28.
Barbaree told the council, “My son lost his mind when he found this. Now he’s in a home for extensive therapy.”
The manga shown to the council to support Barbaree’s case were Psychic Academy and “003: The Naked Suicide Girl” according to the Crestview City Coucil public documents. “003: The Naked Suicide Girl” is a chapter in the Gantz manga series. This particular chapter can be found in the first volume from Dark Horse Comics, and the volume is rated for readers 18 or older. Psychic Academy, on the other hand, is rated by TOKYOPOP for readers 13 or older.
The manga Barbaree’s son found was in the Crestview Public Library’s general stacks. According to the Crestview News Bulletin, Barbaree said her son took the manga from the unsupervised stacks and put it in his backpack. Library Director Jean Lewis said that area was on a top shelf with other graphic novels and comic books not intended for young readers. Council President Charles Baugh Jr. visited the library the day after Barbaree’s complaints and said the manga in the separate young adults section were appropriate.
Barbaree has protested the availability of manga before. She collected 226 signatures against the public access of “anime,” although the petition was directed at manga. Crestview Public Library did not heed the petition, and a staffer said that some patrons thought Barbaree misrepresented the protest.
“They told us [that Barbaree] approached them at the Christmas parade and asked them to sign a petition protesting pornography in the library,” Resource Librarian Sandra Dreaden told the Crestview News Bulletin.
The staff added that manga has been included in the library because there has been a demand for it. The library’s website lists a Teen Anime Club, in which patrons aged 12 to 17 meet for one hour on Tuesdays for anime and manga.
ANN contacted Library Director Lewis, but Lewis declined to comment.
Ahem! if you did not read the article and just skipped to this part of the post, then go back now and finish reading. First of all I want to say good job! The public library did not acknowledge this womans fail attempt at banning manga. It is parents like this that keep manga and anime from becoming mainstream. To an adult, or any ignorant “American,” manga and anime is just a cartoon, so it has to be safe. Disney has successfully diluted animation in the United States. Great job guys! you completely screwed up a whole generation!
I cannot help but point out something. What does the mother mean by “now he is in a home for extensive therapy?” What kind of kid needs extensive therapy after reading manga! I am going to assume that the mother is talking for her son. I cannot imagine being psychologically screwed over just from reading 2 manga books, and if he was THAT sensitive what in the world is he doing by himself in a library. I mean there are so many books in there with all kinds of ideas! They even have books saying we came from apes!!!! Can you believe that! Of course I am using sarcasm here. I can imagine the kid sitting, locked up in his room screaming “I wanna see bewbs!” While the mother is yelling “Its ok hunny! no one can hurt you, there is no such thing as breasts!”
The mother is also a blinded idiot. Instead of petitioning manga, she is trying to ban “Anime” from the library. Get it right! Did you just do a google search on manga and grab the first website for your whole little research project? Maybe if she would keep her nose out of her “Protect Our Children” organization and did a bit more looking into the real world she would not have been as shocked and appalled to find that “cartoons” can be made for mature audiences.
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Personally, I can’t wait until this kid grows up a bit and requires *real* therapy in order to join the real world. Parents like this don’t seem to realize that they’re doing more harm than good with their half-assed parenting.
@Metzger: Exactly! All these organizations and groups trying to keep children safe is just blinding the generation of how things really are. These are the same people who raise kids that believe their is Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy at the age of 30. If they would spend less time trying to “censor” the world and more time parenting we would not have idiotic stories like this cropping up.
Not a surprising story to say the least. The old people in my local town tried to stop the bookstore from selling manga and holding it’s cosplay gathering. Can’t remember their reasoning but probably something to do with filth poisoning the minds of today’s youth.
but I suppose all hail ill-informed parents blaming things they don’t understand. My parents thought anime was childish, then I showed them Death Note, School Days and a few other PG-13 and above shows :p
Asch´s last blog ..First Impressions – Summer 2010
@Asch: My parents thought similar things as well. I eventually opened up and just showed them what I watched; they were shocked at first to say the least. They got used to the idea, and now even though I still live at home they could care less. My mom even looks at my blog despite the fact I post doujin and such.
It is just an entirely different style of parenting. Parents who TRY to understand their children, and parents who don’t.
As a person who helped set up the manga and anime group in my town, I find this ridiculous. If she actually looked it up properly or spoke properly about the subject to people who knew about it properly and realised that she should have just watched her son more if she wanted to ‘protect’ him that much.
Our town luckily hasn’t had that problem. We had an open cultural fesitval in our library once and a few of us had a stand for anime and manga. A lot of people asked me about the contents with the assumptions that it was all pornographic but I pointed out to them that it was not. I could even recommend some people ones that I thought they would find interesting off our own library shelf. Since then no one really kicks up an argument about anime and manga in our town.
I just wish that people just would stop making assumptions about anime and manga from small snippets of it rather than see it as stories in a different form. There are many stories out there, some a lot more disturbing than manga. (see Birdsong and Dracula both of which I believe was on the reading lists for English at one point at school)
@Valdis: In my town anime and manga is non existent. I am surrounded around the ignorance of the mother in this article. People around my area can only view anime and manga as a cartoon. In fact no one even realizes that there IS pornography and fan service in some series.
In most cases people see anime as a cartoon, and not as an art form. In the truest sense, anime is a form of art that has been ported to the United States for its fan base. People cannot accept it because it is not traditional, and not what they are used to.
I actually hope that more people like yourself will become the leader of a next generation of people that can accept many forms of art and not just what we are used to. I really think that all otakus in the United States will stand to prove something about anime and manga if a big enough argument over it arose.
haha but I think I am getting a bit too serious over the subject. It just ticks me off thats all =P
Ha, I so did skip that article at first! But after reading it that woman obviously has too much time on her hands! Also I wish they stated how old the son was. I honestly find it hard to believe that he was so traumatised he needed to be put into a therapy home!!
I think its stupid when people pre-judge manga and anime to just be stereotypical cartoons and comics like The Simpsons and Spider-Man because they are not!
@Kairu I think you may have just given me an idea either for my independent study / dissertation or in the long run the masters degree I intend to do.
Asch´s last blog ..First Impressions – Summer 2010
LOL.. She hate something that she don’t even understand..
poor kid… I wonder what his mother did to him..
JohnDiew0107´s last blog ..HP Mini 210-1073TU
@Troy: I was just about to skip over it myself, but I had to stop and read it when since most of the other news stories were releases. I wanted to know the age of the son as well. Since the age was not released I am guessing he was under 18 and from the article one of the books he had gotten was rated too high for him. I believe it was Gantz. In which case, he should not have even HAD the book in the first place.
@Asch: Oh? ummm thank you? Would you mind sharing your idea?
@JohnDiew0107: I ALMOST want to blame the kid in this as well. If he REALLY that sensitive to manga, I would be even more curious why he was even out of his house alone and not inside his bubble!
If the kid was that traumatized by a couple of volumes, I really feel like handing him my Higurashi volumes, just to see the reaction. I really dislike it when parents or other adult figures take such a stand against “cartoons” because it discourages potential anime fans and really gives even more people the wrong impression. I don’t think that these kind of people even tried to understand the subject of anime and manga before they criticized it. My parents figured it was a phase, but they were soon proven wrong. My parents, unlike these people, are accepting. My dad buys me anime- and Japan-related goods for gifts, and my mom actually sat and watched both seasons of Code Geass with me, and enjoyed it greatly.
Satou´s last blog ..Angel Beats-
I couldn’t agree with y’all more that kid should of never been there, and his mother should of properly researched anime and manga before going on a rampage. Seems like she was trying to banned probably one off the few good things some off those kids have. Satou you should do but make sure I’m with you so I can see it. Make sure his mother is there also. My mom use to think something was wrong with me, but I sat and had a talk with her now she could really careless if I spend 16 hours a day watching anime.
I have a typeo they should be a it after the do.
How old is he again (o-o) ?
I really hate soccer moms. I really do. Extreme feminists, and blames other people or organizations for their bad parenting.
It’s a PUBLIC library. There are tons of books with subjects as violent as ones that are found in SOME manga (does this mean we’ll have to ban regular books and American comics too)? The general public (i.e. older teenagers and ADULTS) will be very pissed if the “public” library’s only limited to kid-friendly books and no horror, etc. You really shouldn’t let your kids wander around in a public library in the first place if you wanted to shelter them that badly.
When a kid gets a hold of Gantz at the library, you know the parents fucked up. If a teenager is forbidden to read Gantz, then he’s just really, really sheltered. And if he gets a hold of it anyway… the parents = epic fail.
That’s why you go to the library WITH your kids, parents. I’m only 17, take care of two little siblings, and even I know how to be a better parent than you “real” parents. -_-;
Overreaction… Not the first to manga/ anime, and certainly won’t be the last.
It’s always interesting to me that anime draws so much hate while Western comics do not, even though both have books dealing with mature themes, such as eroticas.
Yi´s last blog ..Anthropomorphism in Strike Witches