Where "sexually suggestive" usually means "mentioning the mere existence of sexual orientations other than 'heterosexual'".

If you think books talking about a kid having gay parents are sexually suggestive, the problem is with you, not the books.

Of course. Except the books being removed from school libraries are more like "Gender Queer", which includes a page showing two minors giving a blowjob and doesn't cover anything. Why do you think minors need hardcore porn in the libraries so badly?

this

Any reasonable person can agree with literal porn being banned. What percentage, exactly, is porn out of all the books being banned?

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.

> We both know that the vast majority of these books aren't banned because people don't want any mention of LGBT+ people or topics. They're being banned because they contain obscene sexually explicit material in them.

Seems just as reasonable... So no, not clear at all.

The fundamental dishonesty of these book bans is conflating books with sexual content with "hardcore pornography".

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.

What’s your limiting principle here? Should schools also carry old Playboy magazines? They’re less sexually explicit than drawings of two underage kids blowing each other. Are the straight kids not horny? Should there also be straight porn in schools?

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.

> Should schools also carry old Playboy magazines?

How do you expect anyone to take you seriously with such a blatently dishonest comparison?

Yeah nice try, buddy.

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

Yes, a blowjob is more explicit than a bare breast. This is not relevant to the topic currently being discussed, which is about how dishonest it is to compare a depiction of a sex act in a memoir about coming to terms with one's own identity and sexuality with pornography.

You’re hiding behind it being a memoir as if that’s a meaningful distinction or somehow the interest in discovering identity outweighs the harm in having sexually explicit material in schools.

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.

My "limiting principle" is "not being porn." I'm not going to try to fully define porn, otherwise I'd be here all day, but I think one obvious requirement is that it is designed primarily to cause sexual arousal. Based on the excerpts from Gender Queer that I've seen posted to support its ban, this is a test that it plainly fails.

It is unclear what harm you believe Gender Queer might cause to teenagers.

In the words of Sandra Day O'Connor "I know it when I see it."

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.

Are you saying there aren’t any age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in school?

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?

> reading NC-17 level books that are in their elementary school kids classrooms

Can you be specific?

> > reading NC-17 level books that are in their elementary school kids classrooms

> Can you be specific?

Here's an example.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/knox-zajac-reads-aloud-from-po...

Is there evidence sexually suggestive material has a negative effect on kids? Which specific books did you have in mind anyway?

Do you really want to be the person playing devils advocate with showing porn to children?

He asks a good question. Back before the internet it was pretty normal for some kid now and then to manage to swipe one of his dad’s issues of Playboy or Penthouse and share it with the other kids in their neighborhood.

So we have plenty of experience that says seeing the occasional sexually explicit photo or drawing doesn’t harm kids.

Can you give an example of sexually suggestive writing that you would classify as "porn"? "Explicit" is quite different to "suggestive".

Hmm, seems "porn" really does mean something different in the US...https://news.artnet.com/art-world/florida-western-civ-fired-...

We could also argue whether teaching about the "benefits" of dog eating would have negative effects. The goal of such "educators" is to uproot the morals early and normalize the abnormal things.

What’s wrong with eating dogs?

Sex is abnormal now? FWIW I don't see any need to push descriptions of sexual activity into kid's faces, most of them are unlikely to find it terribly interesting anyway and there's something to be said for the fact that we can enjoy a short period of our life without being unduly influenced by sexual desire. But the idea that we need to ban books from school libraries just because they hint of a more complex adult world where sexual impulses are part of life (even in ways that inevitably affect the children who live with and around them) seems very hard to justify.

Obsession with sex is abnormal, just like obsession with food. I'd buy the "complex adult world" argument if the schools equally taught about the dangers of meth addiction, with graphic depiction of those addicts to explain where those "impulses" lead. Right now it looks like the books are trying to whitewash those impulses, make them look good even.

Isn't there a lot of literature about how kids exposed to sexually explicit material go on to do risky sexual behavior as teens and do them earlier? Also about abusers literally grooming kids for sex by showing them porn? Pretty sure all this was standard discourse at least since the early 2000s.

I didn't ask about sexually explicit material though - "explicit" and "suggestive" are quite different. My expectation is that most kids (below the age of 12 or so) wouldn't even recognise a lot of sexually suggestive language for what it was anyway.

They're banning sexually explicit books aren't they, so I'm talking about that.

The only book I saw mentioned that may be considered sexually explicit was one about a boy suffering rape and incest. I'd accept it's probably not appropriate for a school library to have a book like that freely available to students of all ages. But I don't get the impression that's a representative sample.