Originally posted by GaryWilcox
Kallie writes some pretty hardcore stuff whens he's in the mood, and I don't really have a problem with that. Some of her stuff I love. Some of her stuff I don't read. Easy enough. <g>
Thank you, Gary That's exactly what I'm talking about--click out, back slowly away if the words on the page offend. I do it all the time, and it is just that easy.

Believe it or not, there are stories I begin to write, and then back away because I just cannot find it within myself to finish. The story you mention was almost one of those. The battle I fight is one where age vs innocence, i.e., I like the innocent victim, the naive victim who is absolutely stunned by what's happening. But it's hard to attribute that naivete to a 37 year old character. I suppose I could make all my victims novice nuns, but that has a couple of built-in problems: 1) it brings about hate mail (people respond very strongly to enslaved, abused nuns), and 2) that would get awfully boring after a while. I've used a deaf character to impart that innocence, and that worked pretty well, but again, I can't make every character deaf. So what I wind up with are 15-16 year old victims who are particularly sheltered. It's a compromise for me.

Personal experience colors all of our works. At 14, I was the only girl in my group of 8 or so who wasn't sexually active. Not one of my friends hadn't had sex by 13. By the time I had my first child, two of my highschool friends were grandmothers. Working as a bartender to get through college cemented my ideas about teens and sex--I spent as much time tossing 13-14 year olds out of the bars as I did mixing drinks. And these girls were dressed and made up and behaving like women, not children. To borrow from them, the were there to get drunk and laid. So in my experience, many 14 year old girls most certainly are sexually active, in a big way. And that's why I don't blink at a 14 year old character.


I can absolutely sympathize with Cleo's distaste for stories/posts that delve into underage sex. What I can't understand is the desire to slap warning labels on anything and everything that might offend. We're adults here--I have faith that we can just close a post that offends and move on to the next, rather than stomp and fume and insist that things be set up in such a way as to protect our sensibilities.

Kallie