The New Book-Banning Movement: Scrubbing Schools Clean of Diversity, Profanity, and Sexual Content

The New Book Banning Surge

Recently, some parents here in Stillwater, OK, have started following a national trend of trying to get books pulled from school library shelves for being inappropriate. Banning books from school libraries has seen an unprecedented rise in the last year or two, and the evidence indicates that targets for removal are disproportionately books that feature diverse characters and themes, especially books by or about LGBT+ persons and people of color, and books that wrestle with issues of race in America.

Accordingto Education Week, in the recent wave 41% of books banned from school libraries feature people of color as protagonists, 22% are books that address issues of race and racism, and 33% are books with LGBT+ themes.

If diverse books were not being explicitly targeted we wouldn’t expect these numbers, given how recently school libraries have started diversifying their collections to include these minority voices and perspectives, and hence what a small percentage of the total collection these books represent.

 

Co-Opting Parents with Concerns about Sex and Profanity

But many parents are brought into the book-banning fight not by an explicit appeal to diversity but by appeal to worries about sex, violence, and offensive language in the targeted books—with sexual content and offensive language being especially significant in getting parents energized.

So, for example, the far right group Moms for Liberty has been at the forefront of efforts to ban books from schools, and they use the strategy of extracting passages with sexual content or profanity from the books they want banned and calling these passages to the attention of parents in the hope of triggering outrage.

Among their tools for pursuing book bans is the creation of a book-rating resource for parents, called BookLooks, that rates books based on content, especially focusing on sex and profanity. Books that score a 4 or 5 on a 0-5 scale of increasingly objectionable content are then lifted up as targets for banning. (It is worth noting that violence and drug/alcohol use are part of the rating system, but what puts you into the 4 or 5 category is sexual content alone: a book with extreme and explicit depictions of brutal violence but no sexual content would be rated as a 3.)

One big problem, of course, is that only a small number of books—out of the huge number available in public school libraries—have actually been rated. Based on the disproportionate degree to which diverse books are the targets of bans, one can assume that selection of which books are read with enough care to discover the “objectionable content” appears to be guided by things that have nothing to do with sex and cussing and everything to do with limiting diversity on the school library shelves.

But even if that is true, the sex and cussing are highlighted, and many parents who are swept up in the book-banning movement are drawn into it by concerns about sexual content and profanity. When more egalitarian-minded parents and teachers and librarians point out that there are many books not targeted for removal that have just as much foul language and sex, these parents happily declare, “Remove them, too!” (This was the immediate response of one Stillwater parent in a Facebook discussion thread about the local book-banning efforts here in town.)

In other words, because a desire to limit diversity and representation in school libraries is an obviously problematic reason to deny our kids access to books, objections to sex and cussing have become a driving public justification that can drum up the support of parents who wouldn’t be keen on a call to “eliminate diversity and representation in our public school libraries!” Bigots can work behind the scenes, looking for objectionable content in the diverse books—and since parents don’t have the time or energy to read all the books in the school library, the effect is that parents concerned about limiting access to sex and cussing will call for the banning of the identified books, books with diverse themes and authors, while letting similarly sexy and cussy books remain on the shelves.

In short, parents concerned about sex and cussing are being co-opted to serve the agendas of operators behind the scenes who are motivated by different aims. But here’s the thing: even if parental worries about profanity and sex in books weren’t being co-opted for the purpose of removing diverse books from our shelves, there are still reasons to question reliance on sexual or profane content as a basis for deciding what books should be available to our children.

 

My Parents’ Policy—and its Effects

When I was growing up, my parents had the following policy with respect to my book-choices: they raised their eyebrows slightly when I came home with genre fiction. Which I did a lot, in spite of their raised eyebrows, because (my parents’ snooty preference for literary fiction notwithstanding) there are lots of great books in genre fiction.

In short, I was given carte blanche freedom to read whatever I wanted to read. Usually it was fantasy and science fiction novels (JRR Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin were favorites). I loved Kurt Vonnegut. Sometimes I read something as weighty as Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev...or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

Did I end up reading books laced with profanity? Yes. Sexual content? Yes. Explicit violence? Oh yes. Great, thought-provoking literature? Yes. Stories about people very different from myself and those I grew up with, with perspectives on life radically unlike that of my community? Yes.

My parents didn’t care what I was reading. They cared that I was reading. And what was the effect of their hands-off policy? I almost never cuss, despite the cussing I read in books growing up. My sexual life is extremely tame, even though that wasn’t always true of the characters in the books I read. As far as I can recall I have never committed an act of physical violence since childhood (I believe I punched someone once when I was three and another time in junior high), even though there was lots and lots of violence in the books I read.

If there’s one really obvious effect that my childhood reading habits had on my life, it’s this: I was very successful in college and graduate school, and today I’m a college professor who still spends a lot of time reading and writing. Less obvious, perhaps, but just as real and more important: my prolific reading, especially of fiction, has had an impact on my capacity for empathy and compassion, my ability to imagine myself into the circumstances of people quite different from myself.

Now I’m not saying we should put soft porn novels in our grade school libraries. But I am saying that a fixation on sex and cussing in our high school library collections is a misguided fixation, one that could deprive our children of things with enormous value for their lives--and as such do them harm.

 

Profanity

Let’s start with foul language. Apparently BookLooks, created by Moms for Liberty to serve their book-banning efforts, gives a count of the number of cuss words in a book, using that to help determine where to place the book on the 0-5 ratings system. But how important is the amount of profanity?

When it comes to cussing in novels, so much of the impact it will have on readers depends on the broader context. Who is doing the cussing in the book? Someone the reader admires and wants to emulate? Someone who’s a jerk? Or someone the reader feels sorry for? Is the cussing happening because the author is trying to honestly represent the character—something the teen reader will likely recognize, because they know people in real life who follow the same pattern of cussing? Or is the cussing happening gratuitously, as a way to spice up the story and make the characters seem more dangerous? All of these factors will affect how the cussing in the book affects teen readers.

And let’s be honest about two things. First, we all hear cussing in real life, because there are people who cuss. Some cuss a lot. If you want to protect your kids from cussing, maybe try pretending that the COVID quarantine is still ongoing and hope your kids believe you and stay home. You certainly don’t want them sitting in a school cafeteria. Ever. But you’ll need to control your kids’ viewing habits, too. If your kids have access to TV or internet it will take a lot of effort to shield them from foul language. Books are hardly the main thing to worry about here—and in great books, the exposure to cussing is far more likely to have an important pay-off, in terms of deepened empathy for others or a broader understanding the human condition, than will the cussing they encounter in school hallways every day.

The second thing is this: We all know really good human beings, people with big hearts, who cuss. And we know some truly nasty people who are cussing-teetotalers, with never a salty word escaping their lips. The correlation between good character and cussing is…very thin, verging on nonexistent. Sure, we want to encourage people to avoid giving needless offense. But guess what? A novel in which a good person who cusses a lot ends up giving needless offense might just teach that lesson—and would be banned under policies that only care about how frequently cuss words appear in the text.

 

Sexual Content

So what about sexual content in books?

Here’s a small confession: As a teenage boy I thought a lot about sex (the sex I never actually had). I tried to get my hands on dirty magazines (there was a kind of black market of dirty magazines among my peers—magazines pilfered from trash cans or stolen from some father’s or older brother’s stash—the 20^th Century equivalent of working around parental internet controls). But I also was lured by the promise of literary depictions of sex in books.

The promise that a book contained a sex scene was often enough to get me to read it cover to cover. But the books I had access to which promised such scenes were good books. My parents didn’t have porn or erotica on their shelves, and neither did the public or high school libraries, even if they had books with sexual content.

I ended up reading a lot of great fiction—powerful literature with important themes, works that moved and transformed me—because I was hunting for the promised sex scene.

The scenes are long forgotten (if they were there at all--I sometimes got bad tips, such as when I read Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front in junior high on the promise of a sex scene). The big themes and the true-to-life characters and their struggles to belong, to find meaning, to figure out who they were and how they fit in, to rise up against challenges and confront injustice—those things stayed with me. They made me a wiser person than I would have been. A better person.

Again, I’m not saying we should be leaving soft core erotica lying around for pre-teens to read. And I don’t mean we should deliberately use the promise of sex scenes in books to lure kids into reading. What I’m saying is that some sexual content in a novel with literary merit is not the sort of thing we should be especially worried about, because that is not the sort of thing that will damage teenagers who, even if they aren’t having sex, are already thinking about sex, already obsessing about sex, already finding ways around parental controls on internet and streaming content, etc.

In my own childhood, there was only one time I can remember stumbling into something in a book that fired up my “prurient” interests. It wasn’t in any of those significant works of literature that deal honestly with human struggles, sometimes including sexuality (the kinds of books school librarians are apt to put on high school shelves).

Instead, it was in a cheesy teen romance I filched from my older sister, a book that involved no sex at all—what today would be classified as “clean” YA (young adult), since it avoided all the forbidden things: no drugs or alcohol use, no sex, no cussing. Just lots of kissing, kissing described in a way that fired up my teen hormones. When I encountered a sex scene in a serious work of literature, the deeper themes had me so absorbed that it never occurred to me to wallow in the sex. That wallowing happened with the shallow book, the one with no big ideas or important human truths to distract me from the way the depictions of kissing made me feel.

One of the scenes I read as a young adult had a profound effect on me. I can no longer remember the book, but the scene was one in which a young woman is the victim of date rape (although I think it was written before that concept was part of our shared vocabulary). It was just explicit enough to make it clear what was happening, but the weight of the writing was on the psychological experience of the girl—her anguish, the horror she felt at what was done to her by a guy she’d been attracted to, someone she’d chosen to trust, the psychological forces that kept her from refusing more forcefully, and her perverse guilt and self-blame in the aftermath. For the first time in my life, I—a straight white teenage boy obsessed with sex—found myself imagining what it would be like to be the victim of rape. I was crying in empathy with the girl’s experience.

Would I have become a date rapist had I not read that scene? I certainly hope not. But reading that changed me, making me more vividly aware than I had been before of just how utterly crucial it was for both parties to a sexual encounter to be fully, completely consenting, with no hint of ambiguity or uncertainty. It was the kind of thing that, after you finished reading it, exploded any notion some guy might have that silence was consent, or that someone who stopped saying no and just lay there had changed their mind.

Just yesterday, I read another scene a bit like the one that impacted me as a kid (although different). I read it while researching for this essay. Where did I read it? It was an excerpt from the book The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed. It was the main excerpt that the BookLooks rating site extracted from the book as an example of objectionable content. Moms for Liberty is using this rating as a rationale for seeking to have the book banned from school library shelves. (I now know the next book on my to-read list, one I'll almost certainly be passing it on to my teenage children.) 

A world where more kids read books like this is a world where sexual assault victims will have more allies, where more social and personal forces will be marshalled against the forces that spit out rapists--a world, in short, where our children are safer and better off.

The point is this: if you care about your kids’ healthy emotional development and growth as a person but what you focus on is whether a book contains sex, you are focusing on the wrong thing. What matters the most for your child’s emotional and spiritual and personal growth is whether the book offers insight into the human condition and understanding of other people, whether it encourages empathy with struggles your kids have never faced as well as identification with struggles they know well (except they now feel less alone in the struggle, less isolated and less likely to fall into despair).

The Value of Good Books, Sexual Content or Not

Good books offer insights into the human condition and opportunities for cultivating greater understanding and empathy towards others. In short, good books increase our wisdom. Sometimes the wisdom is wisdom about sex, the sort of wisdom I want my teenage children to have. But even if the wisdom is mainly about something else, I don’t want my children to be deprived of that wisdom because of a sex scene. In good books—the kinds of books our school librarians are trained to look for and add to school collections—if there is sex it is not gratuitous and disconnected from the story. Rather, it is integral to a larger story and as such can offer insight into the significance of sex, the risks of sex, and its  place in the broader context of human life.

Lousy books, by contrast, can lead us to wallow in the very shallow waters that encourage fixation on superficial desires, including sexual ones—even if they assiduously avoid explicit sex.

Our teens are going to be thinking about sex whether or not there are books in the library that have sexual content. But if there are good books that do, that may help them think about sex more wisely.

Many teens will be having sex whether or not there are books in the library with sexual content. But if there are good books with such content—books that are honest about teen sexuality, its consequences and impact on the lives of those who choose it—they may make better sexual choices than they would have otherwise.