Many were wondering if it would be included in the new movie version (it's not.) Here's what Stephen had to say:
"Stephen King, for his part, seem to find the whole affair mildly intriguing. In a new statement to Vulture, he says, "I'd just add that it's fascinating to me that there has been so much comment about that single sex scene and so little about the multiple child murders. That must mean something, but I'm not sure what."
Here's what Stephen has said about it in the past....
".....The sexual act connected childhood and adulthood. It's another version of the glass tunnel that connects the children's library and the adult library. Times have changed since I wrote that scene and there is now more sensitivity to those issues.
The bigger question is: WHY INCLUDE IT AT ALL IN THE BOOK VERSION!
http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/stephen-king-statement-on-child-sex-in-novel-it.html!
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siegnagel ago
I don't know how I feel about this in hindsight. I'm in my 40's and read IT when I was 16 in hospital. I enjoyed the book and loved the friendship angle. I like many teenagers at the time, kind of just skipped over the scene in my mind. But this is always the way, stuff people used to say and do when you were a kid in the 80's you thought nothing of it having underlying sinister connotations until you grow up and look back on things.
eyeVoated ago
You just described cultural conditioning
greycloud ago
yes, and the culture has conditioned you to see something as evil that you didn't see as evil before you were conditioned.
eyeVoated ago
No, you are incorrect. Moral relativism is not absolute. There is such a thing as knowing Right from wrong. Furthermore, it is possible that one can come to know Universal Truth. Furthermore, it is possible to live according to Natural Law.
greycloud ago
you know right from wrong within the context of your subjective view of the universe and opinions on what is wrong and right. some of your morality stems from the way your brain works. empathy is a natural human trait (and about 5% of the population does not have inborn empathy due to sociopathy or psychopathy) and it is the major source of human morality. when you see another human undergo something, you experience that pain. this is because of how mirror neurons work.
truth is both context and fact, it is a fact measured by a subjective experience. the coin is both heads and tails, as there are multiple ways to see it. the Universal Truth is a thing if the universe is finite, but such a truth would have so many views and opinions that they could not be known by a single human. our minds simply are not designed to really grasp very large and very small things. we cannot accurately imagine a light-year, and the milky way galaxy is MUCH larger than this. all colors are simply our brain recognizing and patterning a relatively small band of electromagnetic radiation. we do not experience the universe as it actually is, we view it through senses that make interpretations of it in our brain.
there is an objective truth out there. but it is such a large objective truth that it is incomprehensible to humans. and part of that objective truth is that humans are not that important on the big scale. when the universe undergoes heat death, all atoms and all things made of atoms will be forever destroyed.
it is impossible to not live according to natural law. humans are incapable of breaking the laws of nature. these laws are what they are, we can discover them, we can try to understand them better, but we can never escape them.
edit: missed the word "see" in the first paragraph. typo in second paragraph.
eyeVoated ago
You're over complicating the issue.
A Right is an action, that when taken, causes no harm to other sentient beings.
Can this be violated? Yes. It's called a wrongdoing. A wrongdoing is an action that violates Natural Law, causing karma in the aggregate.
greycloud ago
a butterfly effect is a consequence that cannot be foreseen because it follows a long chain of causation. if you eat an edible plant, you have removed the capacity for another person to have eaten that food at some point in the future. by eating that plant you may or may not have caused the death of another person through starvation. opting to do action A instead of action B can have massive unintended consequences down the line that are unforeseen.
can you name an action that can be taken that can not harm another sentient being? does a right stop being a right if a sentient being is harmed by the action indirectly?
i don't believe in your magical reality. wrong and right are context. a screwdriver is right for screws and wrong for nails. an action is right in one context and wrong in another. it is right in one belief system and wrong in another. it is right in one person's beliefs and wrong in another person's beliefs. you are oversimplifying the issue and trying to claim that your view is somehow MORE right than another persons. this is a form of arrogance born from ignorance.
eyeVoated ago
Yawn