Censorship and back room politics are not new to those of us providing health care to women and children. From the Supreme Court and the Food and Drug Administration down, our ability to provide education and services, particularly those involving family planning and information about safer sexual practices, is constantly being hampered by rules, regulations and re-interpretations. Last spring, the battle crept into the children’s and young adult literature market. Two excellent works of fiction, both involving sexual content, were banned by Borders. These were:
· Pop! by Aury Wallington (New York, Penguin Books, 2006. ISBN I-59514-092-1, 248 pages) was endorsed by Planned Parenthood on its Web site.
· The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron (New York, Simon and Shuster, 2006, Hardcover, ISBN-13: 9781416901945, 134 pages) won a Newbery Award.
Pop!: I got a copy from the public library, and I was prepared for the worst. Wallington is a writer for such shows as Sex and the City, Veronica Mars, and Courting Alex, and anything that has to do with teenage sexuality is frequently problematic anyway. In the book, 17-year-old Marit has decided that being a virgin is getting in the way of holding onto a boyfriend she really likes. So she decides to lose it with her best guy friend, Jamie, since it will be pressure free.
The book is well written and captures perfectly the trials and tribulations of being a teenage girl, including peer pressure and great expectations that turn out not to be so great. Certain parts of the books are so real, such as Marit getting dressed just before her boyfriend, Jamie, arrives, and interacting with her father the day after - they can move the parent of a teenager to tears. Although the book feels like “chick-lit” and there is at least one reference to Cosmopolitan, the situations are realistic, and there are clear choices and lessons to be learned.
The teens are not represented as mindless slaves to the ravages of hormones, but as good students, and aside from the usual nasty, cat-fighting clique, respectful of each other. They think and plan ahead. And parents are involved, but as usual, teenagers cannot speak to them about sex -- they go to their friends first. For example, Marit gets advice from her older sister and a condom from her stash, but she does not need it since Jamie brings his own. There is no sexual exploitation, coercion or violence in this story, and although Marit is pressuring Jamie as much or more than he is pressuring her, the reader cannot be angry at him for being an inexperienced teenage boy. Marit wonders what all the fuss is about, until one of her friends who is pregnant has morning sickness in the bathroom at school. After that graphic message on some of the consequences of sex, Marit decides that it might not be worth it after all.
Pop! is as graphic as it needs to be, but certainly not as graphic as the Cosmo sex articles that girls can pick up with their gum, breath mints, and condoms (but not their Plan B) at the counter of the local drugstore. The title refers the bubbles that com out of a can of soda. Marit says, “I felt carbonated, like little bubbles of happiness were fizzing up inside me, pop, pop, pop.” In the end, she is happy to discover that, “maybe, just maybe I could still end up with everything I wanted -- a boyfriend, love, sex… But the important thing was that I still had my friends.”
The Higher Power of Lucky: This book, which won a Newbery Award, faces similar problems, but for a slightly different reason. The book has already been banned from school libraries in a handful of states in the South, the West and the Northeast, and librarians in other schools have indicated in an online debate that they may well follow suit. Pat Scales, former chair of the Newbery Award committee, said that declining to stock the book in libraries was nothing short of censorship. However, Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don't want to start an issue about censorship,” Nilsson said. “But you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature.”
In the book, a tough young girl named Lucky lives with her foster mother, Bridgette, in a town called Hard Pan. Lucky has a job sweeping up the town hall where 12-step meetings are held, and during one of these meetings, she listens in as one of the attendees confesses that he stopped drinking when he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog on the scrotum. Amazingly, it is the appropriate use of this word in context that has caused all the furor.
The Higher Power of Lucky is gut-wrenching and gritty, reminiscent of Sounder by William H. Armstrong, a harrowing tale of young black boy and the victimization of his family in the Deep South. The Higher Power of Lucky is well-written in the same tradition as many young adult classics and well deserved the Newbery Award. It is difficult to understand how a librarian could be upset over an anatomically correct word used to educate children about sexual predation. Although the subject matter of the book is far from genteel and polite, the censorship that has followed the book is much more disturbing than any anatomical reference. All of us in the trenches need to be vocal and vigilant as we continue to fight against the censorship and politics that threaten the health and well-being of our children in the name of decorum and decency. Denial of the real dangers faced by children and teenagers and the real reasons for censorship is neither polite nor moral.