"Safe" YA?

When I was maybe thirteen years old, my grandma gave me a book by Judy Blume called The Girl with the Tiger's Eyes. Since I had enjoyed Superfudge and other of her works, I dove into the book pretty quickly.

And felt very betrayed. That story had more sexual content than many adult novels I have since read. I was stunned. These were not the experiences I had set out to read about. As an early teen especially, I wasn't even honestly that curious about sex. Perhaps that's unusual, but it really isn't my point.

I trusted YA as a genre to present stories with certain parameters, one of which was very limited sexual content. I am disappointed and even frustrated that those fences seem to be breached. Maybe I sound prudish, but honestly I don't care. I'm not saying sex has no place in literature. I'm just saying I don't want to read about it in YA. I do not want my daughter, at fourteen, to learn about giving oral sex from a book she got in the YA section of the library. Or to believe, based on her literature, that casual and frequent sexual relationships are part of a normal, admirable teen experience. Especially when those stories do not accurately depict the consequences of those behaviors-- teen pregnancy. STDs.

For teens who are still figuring out who they are, what they believe, who they want to be, and who are often still learning to understand cause and effect relationships, I think some of these stories can be damaging and misleading. Yes, I know. It's fiction. This should be a clue. Yet how many times do we idolize and romanticize characters in stories, wishing our lives were like theirs?

I believe we have a responsibility to protect and teach the generation coming up behind us. I believe their literature should do no less.