Sex in literature for Young adults.

Highly respected children's bookseller, John McIntyre (right) has his say. 
These remarks were first made on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon programme on Friday 12 July when John McInytyre was in conversation on the subject with broadcaster Kathryn Ryan.

I'll talk about "Into The River" shortly, but let me say first of all that I do come from the liberal end of  this argument, and I also need to declare an interest - I actually like, trust and believe in teenagers.

The New Zealand Post Children's book awards cover the spectrum of New Zealand publishing for young people, from picture books to Young Adult fiction - and I would like to emphasize that word adult in the term Young Adult.

Into the River is written for 16 year olds and up- therefore an audience that is allowed to legally have sex,get married, drive a car, own a gun and occasionally they may use the odd swear word.

But there has been a whimpering response from a mixture of outraged parents, nervous booksellers,and any number of people who haven't read the book.

They have honed in to and become obsessed with a passage where two of the characters have sex- it is fairly graphically described - but totally in context with the story.

I'm actually not sure how you would write that sort of passage without using the words

Ted has, and it's not as if they're words teenagers aren't familiar with.

  

You could of course ignore the idea that teenagers have sex, much as the Twilight series does when Bella becomes pregnant.

That seems to have made Twilight OK, although it was a dismally written saga of shimmering vampires  and vapid humans -  an 118 year old vampire who dates a 17 year old, doesn't drink blood, and who  threatens suicide if Bella leaves him is hardly the sort of role model our children need.

But I also know of many 12 and 13 year olds and younger who read Twilight  with the approval

of their parents -and this is part of the problem.

We seem to live in a world where parents compete to push their children to be too mature too early. 

We often hear people boasting that their 6 year old can read Harry Potter, or their 8 year old read The Hunger Games as if it's some sort of achievement that validates and indicates how fabulous they are as parents.

Well 9 year olds can probably read Playboy magazine too - it doesn't mean they should. It is about choosing age appropriate reading, and encouraging them to enjoy books written for them.

So when someone says that "Into The River" is unsuitable for a 13 year old then we have to ask

why they're giving it to them to read. It wasn't written for them and it isn't the advice they'd

receive from trained librarians or careful booksellers. 

It is a prequel to a book Ted wrote 7 years ago called "Thunder Road", and is the story of a young  Maori from the East Coast, brought up running though paddocks, eeling and going to the local school.

Te Arepa is a lovely young man- smart, curious and aware. He is culturally connected to his whanau, and understands their history and spirituality. He wins a scholarship to a prestigious Auckland boarding school, and is torn about leaving his iwi, but feels he should go.

The school is the opposite to his home - it is a brutal  place of bullying and beatings with a hierarchy of power amongst the boarders. The most offensive word in this book is Nigger. He is called Nigger,because he's the only Maori there, but manages to change his nickname to Devon. He travels between his two worlds in a courier van a relative drives, so he often has to wait hours to be picked up. His fellow students are picked up by parents driving flash cars.

This is a story of two New Zealand's and how a boy from one finds himself trying to survive in the other.

It is about discovering lovers and friends, and keeping some and losing others. It is about  sexuality,and the perceptions that sport is for real men and music for whimps. It confronts our hidden racism,the class divide, and it asks awkward questions about how we treat our young people.

 How we demand that they be open and honest when they are regularly lied too, and ironically, about how adults demand personal and sexual  standards of connducts that they aren't able to meet.

In the end it comes down to Devon telling the truth,  and the school discarding him because they 

can't be having the real story told.

It is powerful, and relevant, and being for older teenagers, that means it at times mentions drugs,and sex. It is also brilliantly written and an utterly compelling story.

This is what is really interesting  - Malorie Blackman, the new children's laureate in the UK has called for more honest sex scenes in YA novels, and without this causing many ripples at all. She says this is because of a comment from a young woman who claimed that her boyfriend was brutalizing her during sex,simply because his only knowledge of sexual performance and technique had come from watching porn.

Porn is many things but it is never about love or a tender and caring relationship.

 It is only ever about gratification, and it is pretty much male dominated.

Her point is that rather than have young men gain their sexual education and their attitudes from 

sources that exploit and degrade women, the ideal place for this to be described and discussed is in the framework of the literature that is written for them.

Much in the way that many young woman in the 1960's found out about periods from reading

Judy Blume in "Are You There God. It's Me, Margaret".

Of course this isn't going to be the only source of their information -you'd be amazed at how

many adults remember finding The Happy Hooker on their parents bookshelves when they were teenagers. 

Nowadays they'll be reading 50 Shades of Grey, which seems to be heavily into sado-masochism and a woman being tied up and beaten.

I'm interested too in the readership demographics of 50 Shades of Grey which has been highly popular with women. As users of pornography themselves it must make it a little difficult to lecture their teenage adults on its inappropriateness.

I need to emphasis again though that we're talking here about teenagers 16 and years and over who  are legally permitted to have sex.

So there is no need for the same booksellers who happily sell 50 Shades of Grey without age restrictions to go all weak-kneed when a superbly written novel set in our own very real world wins a book award.

It hasn't helped that the organizing committee dropped the Young Adult from the name of the awards but they have always been for ages 0 right through to 18.

I really rate the judges this year for their choices, Bernard Beckett and Eirlys Hunter are authors and teachers, and your Lynn Freeman knows her stuff too. Bernard has taught teenagers for over 20 years,Ted Dawe has taught them all his life. They know what they're talking about.

I've been here myself - in 1998 I was one of the judges who voted Paula Boock's teenage

lesbian love story "Dare, Truth or Promise" book of the Year.

For two days our world went mad. We were pilloried on talkback and for our troubles we were publicly branded as perverts by the leader of the moral watchdog Christian Heritage party.

The name of the man who called us perverts was the Reverend Graham Capill, who has since  been convicted and imprisoned for child sexual abuse.

So I've got only praise for the judges for their choice and their courage, and the organisers and the sponsors for toughing it out , and for Ted himself for this wonderful, confronting and utterly compelling story.

It's been selling well too over the last couple of weeks, thanks to the fuss.

 John McIntyre

The Children's Bookshop
Shop 26 Kilbirnie Plaza
Kilbirnie
Wellington

www.thechildrensbookshop.co.nz