“Real life” young adult fiction—I am summarizing a huge and diverse set of books, but I think accurately, the bad books far outweighing the good—conveys several destructive assumptions to the kids who read it.
• Kids have horribly difficult lives, even if they have every comfort and pleasure in the world. Their families are dysfunctional, their parents self-absorbed or distant, their peers cruel, and their schools Darwinian. The best parents may love their child, but they just don’t understand her problems (the main character is usually a girl). In some cases, though not all, added to these problems are bad skin and hair, and the like.
• Families are rarely “havens in a heartless world,” but a trial that for obscure reasons must be endured, though evaded if possible, on the way to adulthood. Some siblings are kind, but most are either unconcerned (if older) or annoying (if younger) or else an ally in resisting their parents, and some are their parents’ favorites. The child’s real family is her set of friends. In a few stories, the main character may admire someone else’s parents or family life, but almost never her own.
• No one understands them, the people in authority over them least of all. The authorities do not see what the child actually experiences, and the child has little or no hope they ever will, which makes their advice and guidance laughably useless. You will, however, find more sympathetic teachers in these stories than sympathetic parents, and many more wise teachers than wise parents.
• Kids are alone to handle their problems, though they may have friends to help, and sometimes a sympathetic but often powerless teacher. Even then, sometimes their friends and teachers fail them or turn against them. Trust is dangerous.
• Girls are strong but often cruel and manipulative; boys are soft and stupid, though they can be physically brutal. Many of the girls’ books include one kind and supportive male, though he is sometimes a homosexual or at least “sensitive.” Attractive boys are rarely trustworthy, though such a boy sometimes becomes devoted to the girl after he has slept with her, and she feels empowered in dropping him.
• Talking explicitly about bodily functions, especially menstruation, is a sign of maturity and realism. Doing so embarrasses parents, because they are not as open and natural, and by implication mature, as their children.
• Sexual activity is not governed by any form of morality, at least any morality that can be formulated as a rule or law. It is at best wise or unwise, not right or wrong. Social standards are irrelevant. No one saves herself for marriage, unless she will see the pointlessness of this by the end of the book.
• But giving up your virginity is still treated as somehow special, governed by feelings that giving it up to this person is, somehow, right and to that one wrong. Virginity is something to be treasured and given up only to someone for whom you have some kind of affectionate feelings. It’s a morality of a sort, but not one that gives the child any criteria by which to measure those feelings. (Virginity is defined in the Clintonian way, with other sexual behaviors treated as if they weren’t exactly sexual.)
• That said, other sexual encounters are not governed by even a vague morality, but simply by calculation of the pleasures and costs involved, if engaged in freely and at the appropriate age. Your body is to be saved or spent in much the same way you save or spend the money in your bank account. To the extent sexual activity involves an exclusive commitment to someone else, it is a tool to be used in getting or securing that commitment, though not a very good tool.
As a rule, sexual activity is mainly recreational. It ought to be “safe,” though safety is almost always defined as protection from disease and conception, and sometimes from relational complications or emotional harm (always underestimated).
via Touchstone Archives: Bad Books for Kids.
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