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| From
the September/October 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Borderlands
Since trying to sort out the confused nature of YA publishing toward the f-word and other verbal obscenities in fiction for teens (“The Pottymouth Paradox,” May/June 2007 Horn Book), I have found myself wondering why publishers have felt forced into the compromises they’ve made, and why the very mention of sex in YA novels arouses such wrath and indignation in certain circles. Large circles — the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association has documented that the top reason for challenging library material is “sexually explicit” content. They also point out that “books usually are challenged with the best intentions — to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information.” But surely it is apparent that while sex may involve “difficult ideas and information,” it is an overriding interest of teens, who need to know not only the facts but the feelings and pitfalls of human coupling. Why, then, do so many people feel uneasy about giving them the knowledge of how sexuality works, or doesn’t work, in the world? When my own four children were teens, my sex education method was to leave selected YA books lying around for them to pick up if they wished. Sometimes they didn’t, but I was savvy enough to know that one’s own mother is the last person in the world with whom one wants to chat about sex, even if she is writing a book on teen sex-education manuals — which I was at the time. So I persisted with the literary method, and when my boys were old enough to date I let them bring their girlfriends home with them, provided they availed themselves of the bowl of condoms I kept on the bathroom sink. Of course, that was a different time — pre-AIDS, and barely post-hippie. But as a product of that era, I find it very difficult to understand parents who go ballistic at the unzipping of a fly in teen fiction. So I set out to do some research, consulting not only a psychiatrist and a family psychologist but also a sampling of Concerned Parents. “What are your feelings about sexual references and scenes in fiction for teens?” I ask them. The psychiatrist surprises me. “I know I’m conservative about this,” he says (I hadn’t noticed him being conservative about anything else), “but I don’t think young teens should read this stuff.” He explains his theories about the developmental tasks of various ages — kids aged ten to fifteen are “learning to get along with peers”; kids fifteen and up are “learning how you fit into the world.” “If you discover the easy pleasures of sex too early, there is a danger that you’ll get fixated at that point and never work through the other learning stages. Besides, the writers just throw in these scenes to be titillating and sell books.” “Whoa!” I cry, stung. “I know these writers, and I know that’s not true. Most of them are just trying to tell kids the truth about sex and love.” “Well,” he muses, “if it’s about love, I guess that’s okay. It’s just the separation of the two that bothers me.” The family psychologist comes up with a different reaction. She feels it is all about fear — fear of loss of parental control, fear of your own children showing sexual interest and becoming sexual beings. But why are books the particular target? A friend had suggested that books are somehow seen as sacred, a medium that should be pure and “enlightening” — a term that pops up often in censorship hearings. But the counselor is more pragmatic: “Books are the target because their availability can be influenced. Movies and television are owned by big corporations and are unreachable, but the school board and the library trustees are right there for protests, and the local newspaper loves it. Offended parents feel they can make a difference on that level, and they’re right.” My conversations with two parents generate more heat. “It’s undermining parental authority,” says one emphatically. “There are many definitions of responsible sexual conduct — for instance, Muslim parents might be offended even by descriptions of flirtatious glances between a boy and a girl. I want to teach my kids my own values. Authors have a very real responsibility not to guide kids into behaviors and attitudes that are going to be bad for them.” And here I catch a glimpse of the unspoken assumption that underlies the whole structure of protest. “Do you believe, then, that any depiction of sex is a model for the behavior of the reader and will be acted upon?” “Certainly,” she asserts. “What they read is what they’re going to do. You’re learning from your reading, always. It’s even been scientifically proven that viewing or reading about violence leads to violent actions, so it’s probably the same with sex.” This puts me in a tight corner. How can I claim that my beloved YA literature has no effect on teen behavior? It’s an article of faith with us that books make kids better. But then don’t we also have to admit the possibility that some books could make them worse? While I’m cravenly trying to think of how to change the direction of the conversation, she points out, “Besides, books read at school have a certain authority.” I have to agree with her on that. There is a descending scale of implied authority (and thus parental sensitivity): from a book assigned for class discussion, to a book on a reading list, to a book shelved in the school library, to a book shelved in the public library. “Yes, I agree that you have a right to limit your own child’s reading. But does that give you the right to limit every child’s reading?” “Absolutely. Shouldn’t we all look out for each other?” She folds her arms, and I refrain from reminding her that two minutes earlier she had said that there are many definitions of responsible sexual conduct, and what’s okay by one parent might be nixed by another. The other Concerned Parent reflects the widespread underlying notion that liberals have a hidden agenda for promoting sexy books in schools. She whips out a computer print-out. “This tells what’s behind all this filth in books.” The clipping is a news article quoting the website PABBIS (Parents Against Bad Books in Schools). The un-American ALA has taken the American constitutional right of freedom of speech and has perverted it into their right to push graphic and explicit smut on children. ALA and ALA affiliate brown boot bullies are constantly working to implement their weird social Marxist agenda. What started, purportedly, as a professional union-like organization for librarians has morphed into a powerful, dangerous, leftist, extremist organization. The ALA believes “anything goes at any age” and that there is no difference between children and adults. ALA and ALA affiliates decide what books your children should read. They push smut in both public and school libraries. They decide what is read in English class. Their vision of what is best for your child doesn’t include traditional classic literature. Smut-filled, “culturally diverse,” easy-reading books are being pushed instead. After I got my breath back, I went home and surfed the net for PABBIS (pabbis.com), Facts on Fiction (factsonfiction.org), Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools (classkc.org), and other websites who take it as their mission to point out or print every word of the naughty bits in children’s and YA lit and teach horrified parents how to take action to get such books banned. Reading through their statements of purpose and their reports on action, I saw the same familiar unexamined assumptions: that any mention of sex is by definition bad; that depiction results in behavior, even when that behavior is clearly shown to be undesirable; that parents’ own teachings of values are easily wiped out by a passage in a book; that an evil “them” wants to corrupt their children. In addition, I found evidence of a massive lack of literary sophistication. When reading depends on irony, metaphor, allegory, figurative language, or any kind of subtlety in characterization, these folks simply don’t get it. And sex is only one target: the Facts on Fiction site, which rates hundreds of classroom standards on a complex system of possible offenses, penalizes Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for “bad attitude” of a character, presumably Scrooge. And in scoring C. S. Lewis’s great Christian allegory The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, there are negative marks for witchcraft but no acknowledgment of the book’s religious content. And over all of these websites hangs the bad smell of sexual obsession, the inevitable partner of sex negativity. Classic works of YA literature become unrecognizable lists of “dirty” words and “smutty” scenes totally without context except to set up the sexual action. There is something truly nasty here, and it isn’t the YA novels from which these words and scenes are wrenched. PABBIS is especially lascivious as it drools over the precise scoring of “vividness/graphicness” in descriptions of forbidden subjects. Here, for example, is their scale on “description of breasts,” in their own words: • Basic: large breasts I await with trepidation the day when kids discover that they can read all the “good parts” of YA novels online without bothering to turn the pages of a book. When that time comes, who’s going to censor the censors?
From the September/October 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
few months ago there was a mention on the child_lit listserv about
a note that was sent home from an elementary school to alert parents
that the movie Schindler’s List would be shown in
class, but assuring them that the sexual references would be edited
out. What peculiar priorities and attitudes this reflects! Exposure
to sex is perceived as more disturbing to young people than exposure
to the greatest horror of the twentieth century. Could there be
a clearer statement of the sex negativity of our society?
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