Book ban attempts reach “unparalleled” 20-year high in 2022
axios.com
axios.com
https://www.deseret.com/2022/3/16/22979747/book-bans-are-the...
> At first blush, the reports could seem sensational, a narrative driven by political campaigns that could be decided in schools. But the growth in efforts to suppress books is real. Last November, the American Library Association warned of “widespread efforts to censor books in U.S. schools and libraries,” while The New York Times reported that the association received “330 reports of book challenges” — attempts to remove books from library shelves and classroom curricula — last fall. For comparison, the association reported about 240 book challenges in the entire year of 2017.
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> Beyond school board meetings, where parents, students or teachers can voice their concerns, the movement to restrict material has spread to state legislatures. One Texas Republican, Matt Krause, recently released a list of 850 books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” Krause asked schools to investigate whether they possessed copies.
The thing is that LGBT+ content tends to be conflated with sexual content.
We both know that the vast majority of these books aren't banned because they're obscene. They're being banned because people don't want any mention of LGBT+ people or topics, with flimsy excuses.
Seems just as reasonable... So no, not clear at all.
These bans are happening in high school. Be honest with yourself and admit what you already know: High schoolers are horny. Restricting them from books that discuss sexuality in a realistic way, combined with "abstinence only" sex education still common in these places, makes it more likely that their first exposure with sexual media is actual hardcore pornography, and I don't feel like I need to explain to you why that's bad.
You can’t just drop sexually explicit images in a book then cry afoul when parents and taxpayers don’t want it in their public schools. They didn’t allow hustler and playboy and they’re trying to not allow this. They have a pretty consistent standard unlike the groups that advocate for such material to be made available to kids and teens.
How do you expect anyone to take you seriously with such a blatently dishonest comparison?
If I post the blowjob scene from Gender Queer here u/dang is going to ban my account, but you’re free to google it and say whether or not it’s more explicit than a woman baring her breast.
While we’re at it, how un-feminist and objectifying to imply that a woman’s body should be overly sexualized. Isn’t treating men’s and women’s nipples differently how we train kids to objectify women? If anything we need more Playboy in schools to destigmatize a women’s bare body. #FreeTheNipple
If Riley Reid put out a graphic memoir about tearing down taboos in sex and confronting “slut shaming” you wouldn’t advocate for it to be in schools.
If you’re trying to claim I’m making some sort of false analogy or moral equivalency then you should try to answer my original question: what is the limiting principle? Because if it’s as weak as “it’s a memoir that’s about discovering identity” it’s not only a weak argument that few would agree with but it opens the door to a lot of other stuff that you’re already trying to rule out.
What if Playboy helps some boys discover their straight identity? Is that not worth discovering? Some young girls might find Playboy helpful in discovering their lesbian identity. Wrap a story around it and it’s apparently good to go for schools.
It is unclear what harm you believe Gender Queer might cause to teenagers.
The problem you've highlighted with defining what porn is is not a new debate and as you've admitted we'd be here all day - and likely still not agree on a definition. The problem with your definition is that what people find arousing is a pretty wide spectrum and would include things that are not traditionally regarded as porn.
Going back to our thought experiment, at what point would my theoretical graphic memoir of Riley Reid no longer be porn? What would the words to picture ratio have to be? You can make this same argument about Gender Queer; does the inclusion of the illustrations add any significant value to a memoir about someone discovering their identity?
As far as whats appropriate for minors in a public school setting, society decided a while ago that once sexually explicit material is included, there is no countervailing interest. This is a pretty black and white standard that until recently all parties found agreeable. If you are advocating for changing that standard, you'll have to defend why children/teens/minors have more of an interest in seeing illustrations of a minor boy performing oral sex on another minor boy than seeing an adult woman in the nude. Claiming it not being porn can be argued both ways for both.
Because what I’m seeing on social media is parents at school board meetings reading NC-17 level books that are in their elementary school kids classrooms.
Is that not a thing? I mean, I only see it on social media, so it could me disinformation?
Is it disinformation?
Can you be specific?
> Can you be specific?
Here's an example.
https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/knox-zajac-reads-aloud-from-po...
So we have plenty of experience that says seeing the occasional sexually explicit photo or drawing doesn’t harm kids.
The whole problem is that people have not properly been taught about sex, because educational institutions have for years, in different areas, been hamstrung (like with all the "abstinence-only" education in areas like the bible belt), and parents aren't the best sexual educators (because on a personal level, they don't want to even think about that sort of thing). Cue the trope of the angry father telling the daughter "you're not dating until you're 30".
The vast majority of people over the last 60 years have been taught more from some form of pornography (whether it be the stack of Playboys under Dad's bed, or the teenager screwing with the horizontal and vertical hold on their TV to try to watch Skinemax, to today's young people having access to internet porn). Some of us came out ok, but some people (depending on which porn they learned from) didn't.
The problem with education being too centralized, is that it results in a choke point for power grabs and indoctrination, if we're not careful. Perhaps sexual education should be totally independent from the rest of secondary education?
I don't think school library book banning is the biggest threat to free speech today; it's mass internet censorship.
I would also hate if a school wasn't allowed to talk about the holocaust because a german student's dad felt oppressed, and I also hate that the southern states seem to be hell bent on continuing to spread propaganda about the civil war to keep the lost cause myth alive.
Just because a parent THINKS "being gay" is sexually suggestive doesn't mean that it IS. The world is full of black people, trans people, women, gay people, weird people, dumb people, straight people, sad people etc, and it is morally reprehensible to not teach kids to respect them as fellow human beings just to please someone who has a closed mind. Some day little timmy might have to go to work with someone who doesn't fit into your tight knit idea of what a normal person is, and we shouldn't saddle timmy with your poor opinions about who deserves the pursuit of happiness. You either think every human deserves a basic amount of respect and dignity or you don't.
We literally had to go to court in this country just to teach kids that evolution is a thing. This is just more of the same.
there’s plenty of things you don’t want kids doing or acting out because they aren’t mature enough yet to know what they’re doing, it’s also OK to disagree on topics of morality, freedom goes both ways
But categorically, actually being gay is. By any dictionary, the word “gay”classifies a very specific sexual preference. Sexual preferences are fundamentally sexual in nature, and parents absolutely have the prerogative to gatekeep the kinds of content their children are exposed to, especially sexual content. I realize you might have your objections to this but it doesn’t make it any less true. The law is clear on this fact.
Please, go on. Tell us all just what you intend to do with those children.
^ Its an entire meme now of parents reading these books out at school board meetings and being cut off due to the inappropriate nature of the works.
Gender Queer - has images of kids performing oral sex https://theiowastandard.com/shocking-images-from-book-gender...
All Boys Aren't Blue - includes sex scenes - https://youtu.be/ag-ByyDXhUQ
Lawn Boy - includes sex scenes https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/video-sucked-eachot...
This Book Is Gay - a book with sections that teach and advise kids about anal sex, oral sex, and hookup apps https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tampa-school-sex-book/
Come on, folks, censorship is when you use coercive power to completely prevent access to a resource, not when you curate a list and it doesn't happen to make the cut.
Does it belong to people selecting books in these school libraries even when it goes against the wishes of the parents?
While no one should be able to censor what book adults can read, the school libraries are tricky.
It was easier to have a consensus on what society at large was finding acceptable when the viewpoints in society converged. Now on one had we have parents who things taking their kids to drag shows is open-minded and surgical sex change in kids should be unconditionally supported, on the other we have various religious groups with their own dogmas.
What we expose the kids to obviously does have an influence (at least statistically) on what they will think in the future. So there's a big political power in controlling it.
So do we just limit everything to subset super-majority finds acceptable?