FEATURE
Desperately Seeking Sources: Fiction as a Provider of Sexual Information
by Anthony Aycock
I did not learn about sex in school. I did not learn about it on TV. I did not learn about it from Larry Flynt, Marvin Gaye, or Revenge of the Nerds. Aviaries and apiaries played no part in my sensual literacy. I did not learn from my friends, who were baffled and awkward like me. Or my father, who is a Southern Baptist pastor. Or my mother, who is a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife. Older siblings have I none, so I did not learn from them either. Game of Thrones, alas, was not yet available.
Growing up, I was both precocious and naive. I read Mark Twain in first grade and Stanley Fish in middle school, and I wrote a 200-page novel when I was 15. But on the subject of sex, I knew as much at age 20 as I did 10 years before. These days, that is a common knowledge gap. According to Planned Parenthood, sex education is a mandatory topic in only 24 states and the District of Columbia. Moreover, fewer than half of high schools and only a fifth of middle schools teach all of the topics recommended by the CDC as essential components of such education.
Everyone seems to agree that this is unfortunate. Kids should learn about sex. Where this learning should come from, however, is not so easily settled. HCPLive reports that in one study, 98% of parents thought they should be the main providers of sex information, but only 24% believed they actually were filling that role. More than three-fourths thought that kids learned from their friends, and 60% identified media as the chief educator. Unfortunately, for a lot of teens, “media” means porn, which The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis says has “saturated” their lives. “Some of them,” she writes, “no doubt saw a digital gang bang before having their first real-life kiss.”
My parents didn’t teach me that sex is bad. They didn’t teach me that sex is good. In fact, they scarcely discussed it with me at all. I doubt this was because they were embarrassed or found it sinful. Personal topics were simply part of our culture of secrecy. The pastor’s family has to be tight-lipped; we know the dope on everyone. The effect, though, was the same. Not being a young person who dated, and in the absence of The Talk from my parental units, I would have to look elsewhere. But where? There was no internet when I was growing up in the 1980s. Encyclopedias? Cosmo? Love Phones with Dr. Judy? I couldn’t see myself using any of those. Nor did my friend Steve’s scheme to get his brother, Jeff, to buy us a Playboy mag come to pass. (Jeff was willing; we chickened out.)
There is a tendency to assume that if a teen is looking for information on sex, they must be engaging in it. I wasn’t—purity culture, you know. But that didn’t mean I didn’t deserve to investigate. Studies have shown that teens want more access to sexual information regardless of their own level of sexual activity. My activity was zero, but my interest was pi to a thousand places, minus the decimal. What could kids like me do?
THE LURE OF FICTION
As befitting a future librarian, the way I finally learned was through books. Fiction, to be specific. At first, it was romance novels. I found a bag of them in a closet at my grandmother’s house, and having nothing better to do, I opened one right to a steamy scene. Liking how that turned out, I tried it with another book. Then another. Soon, I was doing the same in bookstores, drugstores, Walmart—any place that sold romance novels. I got to where I could find the erotic bits in minutes: Bible drill meets Penthouse Forum. Later, I upgraded to Susan Isaacs and Jackie Collins and then the most underrated erotic writer of all: Stephen King. (Don’t believe me? Check out “What Stephen King Can Teach Us About Sex and Love” on the Dime Store Cowgrrl blog.)
Was it weird of me to scour books for sex scenes? Not at all, according to information scholars Denise Agosto and Sandra Hughes-Hassell, who are cited in a Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science article saying that teens are “motivated to seek information to develop the following set of variables that directly relate to their maturation process: the social, emotional, reflective, physical, creative, cognitive, and sexual self.” It would be great if they could be left alone to do such seeking. Conservative forces, however, often try to interfere—a campaign that has seen renewed effort in recent years. In September 2021, for example, ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom recorded 60% more challenges than in September of the previous year. In November 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order calling on state education officials to review the books available to students for “pornography and other obscene content,” The Washington Post reports. The Post also shares that a pair of school board members in Spotsylvania County, Va., went a step further, proposing not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them. In their view, allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”
A PRIVATE AND SAFE PLACE
Such censorship is a mistake, according to Michael Cart, author of Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism. To exclude sex from young adult (YA) books, Cart says, “is to agree to a de facto conspiracy of silence, to imply to young readers that sex is so awful, so traumatic, so dirty that we can’t even write about it.” Amy Pattee agrees. In her 2006 essay, “The Secret Source: Sexually Explicit Young Adult Literature as an Information Source,” she argues that sexual content offers young adults a “private, safe place to try on new feelings of sexual desire.” Fiction may be an atypical locus of sex education, but Pattee sees it as an excellent one:
If we recognize the process of sexual maturation as one that has distinct biological and social components, and as a process that occurs and is shaped not just by individual change but by interpersonal practice, we begin to recognize the limitations of sexuality education curricula and see the comparatively more informative mass media as viable sources of scripts, possibilities, and information about sexuality.
Pattee argues that if movies, fiction, and other mass media are the only sources available to some kids, then we need to be less focused on their explicitness and more concerned with their accuracy. After all, to many young people, authors offer more than entertainment; they offer enlightenment. As the writer Robert Lipsyte puts it in The New York Times, “There is a messianic streak to what we do; at the very least we think we are teachers as much as we are artists.” Bottom line: Kids are going to seek out sex. The goal of information providers is to ensure that when they do, what they find is accurate.
AUTHENTICITY
As I have indicated, my sexual knowledge remained inadequate until a fairly late age. I didn’t know “rubbers” were the same as “condoms.” On a physical level, I couldn’t describe what went where or how it might feel. I suppose this is why I was drawn to narrative sources rather than discursive ones: The play’s the thing.
So, what kind of narrative works best for the sex education of young adults? Erin Farrow says in The Conversation that sexual content in YA fiction should be warranted. That is, it should advance the plot or help with characterization. Teen readers are savvy. If a sex scene is superfluous or, worse, included just to sell the book, it will turn off most readers. This is why I liked Stephen King’s sex scenes so much: their authenticity. Amid being scared senseless by the Tommyknockers, Kurt Barlow, or Pennywise the clown, it makes sense that you would need the release that sex provides.
A lot of YA fiction is written in the first person. First-person narratives offer a direct line to characters’ thoughts, meaning that any sexual portrayals are likely to focus just as much, if not more, on the internal stuff related to the act, such as questions of readiness and performance. According to Pattee in The Conversation article, an intimate scene “should include character discussion of the event, from anticipation to reflection.” As for the act itself, how much detail should be included? Farrow says it’s best to consider the reader: Ages 16–18 may have had some experience with sexual acts, but 12–14? Probably not. Thus, writing scenes for those two age groups will be completely different. At a minimum, the narrative should be “candid and sincere,” writes Farrow, but also sensitive and considerate. The only other way to learn about sex is through experimentation. No one would prefer teens do that.
|
