Abstract
This is a transcript of the opening keynote for the <em>Let’s Talk About Sex in YA</em> online conference organised by colleagues at the University of Cambridge in May 2021. It considers the suppression of sexual context in US and UK YA publishing before the 1970s in relation to attitudes to youth, virginity, and patriarchy, and looks at the effects on adolescent readers of the lack of age and experience-appropriate reading material they could consult. Attention is also paid to the changing social context: the late 1960s and 1970s were decades when sexual liberation was widely promoted, including for young people, on the one hand but regarded as a challenge to authority on the other. Finally, it looks at how this context has continued to shape YA fiction that represents and writes about sex.
Highlights
Is it possible to write a sexual piece [for children] that is so objective and compassionate that the turn-on is lost in deeper emotion in the reader? [...] If it is pornographic, would it be harmful to young readers? (Westall, Correspondence n.p.)These questions were put to Nancy Chambers by the British children’s writer, Robert Westall, in 1978
In Abstinence Cinema, Casey Ryan Kelly identifies attitudes to virginity as indicators of ideological struggles active in society at any given time (5). His interest is in what can be learned from how American popular films present virginity, but YA fiction, which is addressed to an age group for which loss of virginity is relevant, is even more sensitive to ideological forces that focus on this area
Based on information volunteered by two colleagues my age, published recollections (Mills), a survey conducted by Robert Carlsen, an American teacher visiting England in 1976, and a study by the British librarian, Margaret Marshall, I have created a snapshot of the kind of material that dealt openly with sex which young adults appropriated from adult shelves in the absence of a literature of their own
Summary
Is it possible to write a sexual piece [for children] that is so objective and compassionate that the turn-on is lost in deeper emotion in the reader? [...] If it is pornographic, would it be harmful to young readers? (Westall, Correspondence n.p.). Based on information volunteered by two colleagues my age (one of whom wishes to remain anonymous so I have called them Girl 1 and Girl 2), published recollections (Mills), a survey conducted by Robert Carlsen, an American teacher visiting England in 1976, and a study by the British librarian, Margaret Marshall, I have created a snapshot of the kind of material that dealt openly with sex which young adults appropriated from adult shelves in the absence of a literature of their own. This is far from a scientific sample, . My colleagues and I were all white, heterosexual, and cisgender girls growing up in reading households, though the fact that two were raised in working-class homes, one was from a military family based in Kenya, and I come from a middle-class home in New England, gives some diversity of background and experience
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