The Washington Post tells us today about Jennifer Petersen, a Virginia mother who's a serial book challenger. She has so far challenged 73 books in the Spotsylvania school district, all for sexual content. The Post confirmed that this had nothing to do with race or sexual orientation: Petersen objects to any book containing graphic descriptions of sex.
Why? A couple of years ago she attended a school board meeting where parents denounced a couple of books for their sexual content:
Petersen, too, was alarmed. If children under 18 read about sex, she worries, they will be more likely to engage in unsafe sex or fall victim to sexual predators.
Hmmm. YA literature has generally gotten more graphic over the past couple of decades. Here's the result:
To the extent we can measure it, both teen sex and risky teen sex have gone down. There's no telling what's caused this, but if sexually explicit books are producing more teen sex of any kind, it sure doesn't show up in the numbers.
As it happens, I have my own pet theory about this. I've perused current YA books from time to time, and they are bleak as hell. If I were brought up on a diet of this stuff I'd probably swear off sex forever. Neither side in this debate realizes it, but I suspect the combination of graphic sex and disturbing stories has contributed to less sexual activity, not more.
I don't suppose very many people will buy this theory, but give it some thought! It might grow on you.
And just so you know, here's an estimate from the American Library Association of the spike in school book challenges over the past couple of years. Please don't blame me for the hideous shadowing on the numbers.
"I've perused current YA books from time to time, and they are bleak as hell."
Yep. I dunno if your theory is right, but I'm ready to believe The Giver or Hunger Games are lowering libidos.
🤣
I blame you for not using your Photoshop skills to remove the hideous shadowing on the numbers.
It boggles my mind that someone in their 40s or thereabouts thinks that being exposed to sex as a teenager leads to promiscuity. Were they living in a cave when they were a teenager in 1995?
I've been thinking about this for a while, too, and I also have a theory of my own. I suspect you might like it, Kevin.
The decline of environmental lead in the country over the past several decades has not only been a widely documented factor in the large reduction in violent crime over this period, but the lowered impulsiveness and greater avoidance of high-risk behavior resulting from decreased exposure also has brought about a similar decrease in teen sexual activity.
What do you think? 🙂
I think this is part of it.
I blame the ready availability of porn on teenagers cell phones. The crude production values of most porn is enough to turn one off sex.
You might have the right device, but the wrong reason:
It's not "crude production values of most porn", but the sheer availability of porn that may have an affect. If I'm 15 and can readily access porn on my phone, masturbation is that much more marginally appealing than trying to have real sex.
FTR, I don't think this is The One True Cause of this.
And everyone in porn looks like they'd rather be anywhere else on Earth.
You need to be more selective about the porn you watch. The porn I watch involves characters who engage not just willingly but eagerly. If the participants don't convincingly project eager enthusiasm, I stop watching. (Yes, I know they're actors; the eager enthusiasm might well be fake, just like the emotions projected by "mainstream" actors and actresses.) So far, I'm not short of porn I'm willing to watch.
So... just not going to mention COVID at all, huh? How do we know the 2021 number, which is the latest in the series apparently, isn't an exogenous blip? Yes, there's a slight downward trend there if you squint, but there's no guarantee that wasn't just noise. The only thing making it look like a trend for sure is 2020-2021, and there's nary a mention of COVID here.
COVID had a gigantic impact on dating for young adults (going all the way up into the mid-20s, as has been highlighted here in a previous Kevin post about college sex - IIRC). There's no reason to think that it impacted high schoolers any differently, and perhaps maybe even more so?
Serious blind spots in this post.
What do you mean? The number of adolescents currently having sex has been going down for 35 years.
“ Among all young women aged 15-19, the proportion currently sexually active in 1995 was 40%, slightly but not significantly less than in 1988 (43%).”
https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/1999/09/trends-sexual-activity-among-adolescent-american-women-1982-1995#:~:text=Between%201982%20and%201988%2C%20the,from%2032%25%20to%2038%25).
There are alway blips up and down that could look like statistical noise if looking at a short time frame, but the general trend line is obvious looking at the data over the past 40 years. It was going up until the mid 1980s and then has been coming down steadily ever since.
I think "protecting the children" is a cover story, just like it is for bans on gender-affirming care. I think it's only a few people doing this, but they are amplified by the internet. They learn about more books and they get more attention to.
They see themselves as culture warriors, defending traditional morality by whatever means they can do that. Many of them grew up in bubbles where there was, in fact, very little discussion of sex when they were teens, I suspect.
That bubble did not help them adapt to the world. They are going to, instead, try to turn the world into their bubble. This will not work. It never works. They are gonna try though, and it's going to make the rest of us miserable. Which is kinda the strategy.
"I think 'protecting the children' is a cover story, just like it is for bans on gender-affirming care."
I'm not sure it's particularly useful to assess the sincerity of these fringe weirdos; I for one would be hard pressed to care less about what goes on in their heads. The reason that we hear about them and have to deal with them is that there is a fringe weirdo-shaped hole in our media and legal landscape, and anybody filling that hole gets attention.
So, whether Jennifer Peterson comes by her wackiness naturally or does it because it makes her feel like a Big Lady, the result is the same. And I'm skeptical enough about human psychology that I doubt there's any real difference between somebody adopting a behavior because they Believe in it and somebody doing that behavior because they get a psychological reward for doing it, anyway.
Conservative nutcases banning books and leftist nutcases canceling people are doing the same thing: trying to prop up their own social status by appointing themselves the morality police. It's pathetic and I have no respect for it.
The Jennifer Petersen's of America are probably why teens are having less sex. No teen wants to become like her or any of the other selfish mommies.
The ubiquity of smartphones has made accessing internet pr0n easier than ever and teenagers can, ahem, blow off steam whenever they want and consequently aren't spending so much time having actual sex. Also, as cmayo, pointed out, Covid really cramped their style for a couple of years -- no hanging out at the mall, going to movies, going over to her parents' empty house after school, etc.
My experience is that exposure to porn does not help "blow off steam"; instead, it makes one MORE eager to actually experience what is being seen.
"As it happens, I have my own pet theory about this. I've perused current YA books from time to time, and they are bleak as hell."
I don't think this is a new phenomenon. I've long wondered why every single book for teens has to be so dark. I suspect that it's more about what adults think kids should be reading and the whole idea that exploring "issues" about society is what good literature should do and all that. Frankly I think the main thing books like this do is teach kids that reading is a drag.
Here's Elon Musk after a couple of bong hits,
https://twitter.com/greg_jenner/status/1707376704174313936
Should have taken that intro to thoughts to think with class after all.
She has so far challenged 73 books in the Spotsylvania school district, all for sexual content.
Why is this idiot allowed to do this, as if no one else has any rights at all?
"As it happens, I have my own pet theory about this. I've perused current YA books from time to time, and they are bleak as hell. If I were brought up on a diet of this stuff I'd probably swear off sex forever. Neither side in this debate realizes it, but I suspect the combination of graphic sex and disturbing stories has contributed to less sexual activity, not more."
This is (mostly) true. These books that get challenged aren't turn-ons, and usually the sex/drugs are part of a cautionary tale.
But I don't think what explains the numbers. I think the truth is, few kids check out books from their HS libraries, and most of them only when they have to, and very, very few kids ever check out these books, either because they aren't particularly interested or unaware of them. So the idea that these books have any sort of effect on our kids is pretty absurd. (In our district, of the 4 books that were "challenged", I think one had been checked out once.)
But for the challengers, this is just an avenue to attack schools and start moral panics against them, usually hoping to make schools less hospitable to LGBT+ students and to some extent minority students, to make teachers too scared to go anywhere near remotely controversial topics, and in hopes of bringing in quasi-parochial content into schools.
Has Jennifer Peterson read the Old Testament?
+10
How does the trends compare to other countries, particularly those that are more liberal than the US? While I also agree with all the other possibilities people have mentioned, I also think there is a "familiarity effect" at play.
I grew up close to the Mexico - US border and I remember that because legal drinking age was 18 in Mexico, not to mention that drinking laws weren't that heavily enforced in Mexico to begin with, a lot of high school kids would cross the border on weekends to go party in Mexican nightclubs and would get absolutely wasted. Not saying the Mexican kids didn't drink, but you could tell that they were more of the "social drinkers" kind of types, were they drank at a slow pace and the drinking was more of a side thing to just having fun with friends. On the other hand, the majority of the American kids were drinking like there was no tomorrow. They were there to drink and get wasted before anything else just because that's something they couldn't do at home. It was the allure of doing what was forbidden, or rare for them.
I think something similar may be at play here in some degree. While in the past finding a nude magazine under your older brother's bed was seen as winning the lotto, with the internet, sex ed classes, and in general more exposure to sexual activities in media, and acceptance in practice, it has perhaps moderated a bit the urge to be as active as possible.
I think this is more a longstanding cultural problem rather than a product of drinking laws. Southern European cultures - France, Spain, Italy, Greece - have healthy drinking cultures that emphasize and encourage moderation, while Northern European cultures glorify drinking to excess as a badge of masculinity. Mexico is descended from Spain and the US is descended from England in this regard. We have stricter laws around alcohol precisely because our culture does a much worse job of getting people to drink responsibly.
There are certain people (maybe they lean more conservative, maybe not) that seem to think any demonstration of a thing is fundamentally encouraging it. I know someone that claims the movie Trainspotting encourages drug use. Was it the dead baby or the guy getting AIDS that you thought made the strongest argument in favor of using heroin? Seems like the way these book banners think about the world.
By trying to keep kids from knowing anything about hazardous stuff, they make the problem worse. Sex predators go after ignorant kids who know nothing about sex and take blatant advantage of the fact that they know nothing to tell them lies.
Knowledge is power. Forewarned is forearmed. Tell your kids the truth about sex and tell it to them well before puberty.
You're neglecting to consider the fact that they never saw the movie.
The causation runs the other way. Kids are reading more graphic books precisely because they are having less actual sex. They are using erotica to fill the hole that the real thing isn't filling.
I don't read Young Adult if I can avoid it, but the ones that make it to movies are pretty dystopic.
Always possible it would be lower absent that.
Meh.