don't read this book. (or, what responsibilities do YA authors have?)
Kate Nepveu has a post talking about a panel on taboos in fantasy, which made me think about my own personal taboos and how they've been violated recently.
I recently read this book Burned by Ellen Hopkins, a YA book about an adolescent girl who is part of an abusive family and is looking for love, and the ways that sex plays into both of those. The problem is not that it's a bad book. In fact, despite the part where it's in "poetry," it's actually a good book. More than that, it's a powerful book. First of all, it deals with powerful themes (abuse, teenage sex), and furthermore it is good at what it does-- it seared its message into my brain the way that the best YA-targeted novels do, like Chris Crutcher's (more on him in a sec!) did when I was a teenager, and I'm not even an adolescent now.
So why am I about to tell you NOT to read this book, that I would prefer you to avoid this book at all costs? Because it's riddled with inaccuracies of portrayal of something I feel rather strongly about, mostly implicitly but sometimes explicitly, and because I think the message is both incorrect and damaging (both to an external group and to its target audience).
My problems with the book stem partially from the fact that the main character, Pattyn, is Mormon. Okay, fine. She belongs to an abusive, repressive family. Okay, that's fine too, we all know abusive families exist, and many of them are religious, and many of them are Mormon. But Hopkins portrays all things Mormon in the book as contributing directly to her abuse problems and upholding her status as an inferior being who can happily be abused, which is just not right. (Pattyn, for example, must be skipping out on General Conference, which twice each year talks about things like how abuse is really really wrong and how men should not feel or act superior to women.) (And in addition, some of her theology is wrong wrong wrong: no Mormon would ever talk about being damned, as that for all practical purposes doesn't exist in conventional Mormon theology.) (Also, it irritates me NO END that she implies you can't read Harry Potter if you're Mormon. Ahem!)
To be perfectly fair, it's certainly possible that there are Mormon wards out there that fit this picture, bishops who are abusive in their own families and encourage it in others. Certainly there are fundamentalist sects that have broken off of the main LDS Church who are more likely to fit this picture (when you hear about polygamists, that's who you're hearing about, not the main church).
But this made me think about what YA authors owe their audiences. Generally, I am uncomfortable with the idea that authors "owe" their audiences anything except to write the book that resonates with their truth about the world (if you deny that truth, the book won't be any good). (On the other hand, authors also owe their audiences getting their facts right. I have stopped reading SF books, some of it fairly highly regarded stuff, that had glaring math/physics errors.) But YA books are (maybe?) a special case. Books like this, books about teenagers in a teenage world, are what teenagers read to make sense of a time where everything is in flux and they're forming lots of opinions about the world for the first time. And to me it's the worst kind of irresponsible to take a kid who is forming ideas about the world and hand her ideas that promote utterly false and restrictive thinking, especially about the Other, the one not like oneself, the one that lots of adults, much less teenagers, don't know how to handle except through fear and suspicion. Because if I weren't Mormon myself, this book would totally have convinced me that Mormons as a whole were creepy and lame and kind of evil, really-- and that is false.
(Contrast, for example, Martha Beck's book Leaving the Saints, where she talks about a possible real-life case of sexual abuse by her father, who was very prominent and well-respected in Mormon circles. I'm fine with that, it not being a YA book, as I feel like adults can read it and form their own opinions about Mormonism and about Beck's story. I suppose this is slightly hypocritical of me, as certainly I was reading non-YA books as a teenager, but, well, there it is.)
Another thing that really, really bothered me: Pattyn has sex as a high schooler, which is central to the plot and which she justifies because it's looooove, see! Now, I'm not saying it's bad or evil to have sex in high school (unless you believe it's a sin, which I do, in which case it's a sin for oneself). I do, however, believe that it's extremely inadvisable in many, if not most, cases; for one thing, I think that one ought to be capable of dealing with any negative consequences, like STD's or pregnancy or severe emotional fallout, whether it means appealing intelligently to parents or getting an abortion or adoption or whatever. I certainly knew people in high school who, I am confident, could have dealt (maybe did, who knows) with such things. (Not me, but this isn't about me.) Pattyn doesn't fall in that category, not by a long shot.
But... it's not the sex I object to, it's that Pattyn never connects actions and consequences together. Even though the sex basically precipitates all sorts of other bad things happening in her life, she never acknowledges any responsibility. I mean, I'm being completely unfair, because obviously she has severe problems what with the abuse and all, and obviously the last thing she is emotionally capable of doing is taking responsibility for her life. But... still. The message I strongly, powerfully, got was, It's great to have sex with someone if you love each other no matter how immature you are and anything that goes wrong as a result is the fault of evil religious people who are probably Mormon and hate sex. (Well, the Mormon hating sex thing is true. I could give another whole rant on that, but Dorothy Sayers already did it brilliantly in her essay "The six other deadly sins.") I guess if Hopkins really believes that, then I can't fault her for writing a book that says that, though. But it does make me want do dis-recommend her books as much as I can.
Contrast Chris Crutcher's books, also about troubled adolescents. I will read anything this man writes, basically; although his books worked a lot better for me when I was a teenager, I like his style, and he writes in a way that is very true to me. Let's see, I can think of at least one teen pregnancy and one abortion, and several abuse cases. I can also think of several really, really awful bigoted abusive religious "Christian" people in his books.
But... to me Crutcher is an honest writer. He doesn't hide behind making whole groups of people villains. Just because some religious people are maniacs doesn't preclude other religious people being pretty cool. Religious teenagers may be utter hypocritical pricks, but some of that may be due to normal teenage anxiety and does not necessarily make them evil for the rest of their lives.
The high schooler with the kid (in (I think) Chinese Handcuffs) absolutely thinks she made the right decision, and I'm fine with that where I'm not with Pattyn, because Stacy's accepted responsibility for what has brought her to the place she's in.
Also, Crutcher's characters grow up, and learn things about themselves and the world around them that they didn't know before. They learn that in most cases the dreaded Other isn't, maybe, so much Other as they had believed; in some cases, the Other really is evil, and they try to help change the world. I really like these books, because he writes with compassion.
I don't know. That's where I draw the line, at what emotionally sets me off, but I'm not entirely comfortable with it, since I know it's not entirely consistent.
I recently read this book Burned by Ellen Hopkins, a YA book about an adolescent girl who is part of an abusive family and is looking for love, and the ways that sex plays into both of those. The problem is not that it's a bad book. In fact, despite the part where it's in "poetry," it's actually a good book. More than that, it's a powerful book. First of all, it deals with powerful themes (abuse, teenage sex), and furthermore it is good at what it does-- it seared its message into my brain the way that the best YA-targeted novels do, like Chris Crutcher's (more on him in a sec!) did when I was a teenager, and I'm not even an adolescent now.
So why am I about to tell you NOT to read this book, that I would prefer you to avoid this book at all costs? Because it's riddled with inaccuracies of portrayal of something I feel rather strongly about, mostly implicitly but sometimes explicitly, and because I think the message is both incorrect and damaging (both to an external group and to its target audience).
My problems with the book stem partially from the fact that the main character, Pattyn, is Mormon. Okay, fine. She belongs to an abusive, repressive family. Okay, that's fine too, we all know abusive families exist, and many of them are religious, and many of them are Mormon. But Hopkins portrays all things Mormon in the book as contributing directly to her abuse problems and upholding her status as an inferior being who can happily be abused, which is just not right. (Pattyn, for example, must be skipping out on General Conference, which twice each year talks about things like how abuse is really really wrong and how men should not feel or act superior to women.) (And in addition, some of her theology is wrong wrong wrong: no Mormon would ever talk about being damned, as that for all practical purposes doesn't exist in conventional Mormon theology.) (Also, it irritates me NO END that she implies you can't read Harry Potter if you're Mormon. Ahem!)
To be perfectly fair, it's certainly possible that there are Mormon wards out there that fit this picture, bishops who are abusive in their own families and encourage it in others. Certainly there are fundamentalist sects that have broken off of the main LDS Church who are more likely to fit this picture (when you hear about polygamists, that's who you're hearing about, not the main church).
But this made me think about what YA authors owe their audiences. Generally, I am uncomfortable with the idea that authors "owe" their audiences anything except to write the book that resonates with their truth about the world (if you deny that truth, the book won't be any good). (On the other hand, authors also owe their audiences getting their facts right. I have stopped reading SF books, some of it fairly highly regarded stuff, that had glaring math/physics errors.) But YA books are (maybe?) a special case. Books like this, books about teenagers in a teenage world, are what teenagers read to make sense of a time where everything is in flux and they're forming lots of opinions about the world for the first time. And to me it's the worst kind of irresponsible to take a kid who is forming ideas about the world and hand her ideas that promote utterly false and restrictive thinking, especially about the Other, the one not like oneself, the one that lots of adults, much less teenagers, don't know how to handle except through fear and suspicion. Because if I weren't Mormon myself, this book would totally have convinced me that Mormons as a whole were creepy and lame and kind of evil, really-- and that is false.
(Contrast, for example, Martha Beck's book Leaving the Saints, where she talks about a possible real-life case of sexual abuse by her father, who was very prominent and well-respected in Mormon circles. I'm fine with that, it not being a YA book, as I feel like adults can read it and form their own opinions about Mormonism and about Beck's story. I suppose this is slightly hypocritical of me, as certainly I was reading non-YA books as a teenager, but, well, there it is.)
Another thing that really, really bothered me: Pattyn has sex as a high schooler, which is central to the plot and which she justifies because it's looooove, see! Now, I'm not saying it's bad or evil to have sex in high school (unless you believe it's a sin, which I do, in which case it's a sin for oneself). I do, however, believe that it's extremely inadvisable in many, if not most, cases; for one thing, I think that one ought to be capable of dealing with any negative consequences, like STD's or pregnancy or severe emotional fallout, whether it means appealing intelligently to parents or getting an abortion or adoption or whatever. I certainly knew people in high school who, I am confident, could have dealt (maybe did, who knows) with such things. (Not me, but this isn't about me.) Pattyn doesn't fall in that category, not by a long shot.
But... it's not the sex I object to, it's that Pattyn never connects actions and consequences together. Even though the sex basically precipitates all sorts of other bad things happening in her life, she never acknowledges any responsibility. I mean, I'm being completely unfair, because obviously she has severe problems what with the abuse and all, and obviously the last thing she is emotionally capable of doing is taking responsibility for her life. But... still. The message I strongly, powerfully, got was, It's great to have sex with someone if you love each other no matter how immature you are and anything that goes wrong as a result is the fault of evil religious people who are probably Mormon and hate sex. (Well, the Mormon hating sex thing is true. I could give another whole rant on that, but Dorothy Sayers already did it brilliantly in her essay "The six other deadly sins.") I guess if Hopkins really believes that, then I can't fault her for writing a book that says that, though. But it does make me want do dis-recommend her books as much as I can.
Contrast Chris Crutcher's books, also about troubled adolescents. I will read anything this man writes, basically; although his books worked a lot better for me when I was a teenager, I like his style, and he writes in a way that is very true to me. Let's see, I can think of at least one teen pregnancy and one abortion, and several abuse cases. I can also think of several really, really awful bigoted abusive religious "Christian" people in his books.
But... to me Crutcher is an honest writer. He doesn't hide behind making whole groups of people villains. Just because some religious people are maniacs doesn't preclude other religious people being pretty cool. Religious teenagers may be utter hypocritical pricks, but some of that may be due to normal teenage anxiety and does not necessarily make them evil for the rest of their lives.
The high schooler with the kid (in (I think) Chinese Handcuffs) absolutely thinks she made the right decision, and I'm fine with that where I'm not with Pattyn, because Stacy's accepted responsibility for what has brought her to the place she's in.
Also, Crutcher's characters grow up, and learn things about themselves and the world around them that they didn't know before. They learn that in most cases the dreaded Other isn't, maybe, so much Other as they had believed; in some cases, the Other really is evil, and they try to help change the world. I really like these books, because he writes with compassion.
I don't know. That's where I draw the line, at what emotionally sets me off, but I'm not entirely comfortable with it, since I know it's not entirely consistent.