Recently on one of the messageboards an adult webmaster asked if he created a link list without a “teens” category and did not accept submissions from websites using any mention of this term, would it cause an uproar? I answered with a somewhat short response and then the more I thought about it, an even longer response seemed necessary to further explain my point..To use or not use the word “TEEN”
by TDavid
Recently on one of the messageboards an adult webmaster asked if he created a link list without a “teens” category and did not accept submissions from websites using any mention of this term, would it cause an uproar? I answered with a somewhat short response and then the more I thought about it, an even longer response seemed necessary to further explain my point.
I’m a parent first and foremost and I absolutely positively do not condone any sort of child pornography — either real, imagined or insinuated — so let me preface this article by saying nothing contained herein is designed to help the one or two sickos in the audience (I’d like to think there are zero pedophiles in our presence, but sadly I think that would be too optimistic). For those tiny few sickos reading: go seek help immediately, because I think you should be caught, strung up and castrated at the nearest public square.
For everyone else reading: what if you want to advertise to horny surfers looking for the 18-30 year old LEGAL models?
Legal “Teens”?
I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the use of the word “teen” by itself and unqualified. Have I ever used it? Yes. Will I use it in the future? Likely not unqualified and by itself. Why?
Think about how many legal teens there truly are. Two. That’s it. Yet there are five teens that are not legal, so the average person when you say you have a “teens” category or “come see these teens” isn’t probably going to immediately think of teens as 18 and 19 year olds. That is 71% of the “teens” when using that word by itself that would not be legal marketing.
Yikes.
Now I hear the objections. Hey, it’s just a word! I can’t be responsible for what people “think”! Is this really true? If one thinks about murder before murdering someone, that is called intent. So I believe strongly that one can be responsible — or perhaps I should say irresponsible — by marketing to someone in a questionable manner.
Using the word “teen” by itself and unqualified is definitely a gray area. If I was an attorney on the prosecution side, and I’m not an attorney, so keep this in mind, I’d argue this point that anyone marketing like this is walking the razor edge and intentionally and irresponsibly doing so.
Yikes again.
By itself and unqualified a word like “teen” is just a word. It leaves to the mind to flesh out what it is about, what it relates to, what it means, what “type” it is. Writers use words without qualifiers to cause readers to flesh out and qualify the words themselves. It is a long standing effective literary technique. If I say:
“Albert is a crook.”
You might think something like: what did Albert do to become a crook? Is he a misunderstood crook? An evil crook? Is he being falsely maligned? What KIND of crook is he? But what if I say:
“Albert is a crook who stole my meta tags at abc website and told me there was nothing I could do about it and here is proof!”
Now you have a much different picture of Albert. A much more defined mental image of why he is a crook and what type of crook he is. Now I ask you to look at the same thing with some of the marketing to “teens” by themself out there and imagine how surfers can be left to wonder what type of “teens” you are talking about. I would discourage the use of the word “teens” by itself. Use instead something like:
“Legal 18 and 19 year old teens!”
There is no way a surfer can misperceive marketing like this. But what if you just omitted the word “teens” altogether?
“Legal 18/19 year olds!”
You don’t even need the word for the same meaning, in fact. Often times people write redundant phrases and text links. The idea with words is to paint a mental image with a few artful strokes, not throw paint at the canvas and see what comes out. Stephen King might be an exception to this, because he has made a fortune out of writing the long and winding road to the point. Although fiction is perhaps a different animal for a different day.
Don’t sell your soul for the almighty green!
The bottom line is not to write text links which could be clearly misunderstood or misinterpreted in an illegal way. You want them to read in a few words what you are talking about and who, but you don’t want to insinuate any type of illegal activity. Make the surfer horny? Yes. Make him think you are promoting illegal activity? No way!
Sometimes the omitting of qualifiers or leaving certain words by themselves such as “teens” can cause you more problems than the money the use of these techniques might bring in.
At the very least this is something to keep in mind.
TDavid has owned and/or operated various websites since 1995. He served as an AOL contest judge in 1997 in their Amazing Instant Novelist (keyword: novel) area. Every Friday at 2pm PST you can catch his weekly radio show dedicated to the technical side of webmastering and programming at http://www.scriptschool.com/radio/
