sex, romance, and adolescence
on childhood as a rhetorical device
This week’s a doozy. Lots of additional reading and citations in the footnotes because I tried to keep the bulk of the reading uncluttered. Audio version of this essay coming later this week <3
Part 1: Threads Discourse
This week’s Threads discourse kicked off when the author of a young adult novel published a graphic advertising her forthcoming YA romance fantasy novel. In most ways, it’s a typical advertising graphic, but readers and creators zeroed in on the point on the right side of the image: “yes, there is smut.” The reaction was swift and sizable. For the better part of a day, my feed was full of posts about 1) how inappropriate it is to characterize sex featuring teenagers as smut, 2) discussions of what smut constitutes, and 3) impassioned statements about how characterizing a YA novel as smut was offering ammunition to book banning efforts.
I… had a reaction to this. See the threads linked here, here, here, here, and here.
The responses to those threads largely disagreed with me. Folks doubled down on how messed up it was for adult women to be writing sex scenes between minors, how completely distinct smut is from healthy, developmentally appropriate sex, and how irresponsible it is to be “titillating teens with sex,” a phrase that feels plucked from a Mormon family guidebook on raising children who will later be found googling what soaking is.
This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this disconnected from bookish community because of some strangely regressive views on sex and sexuality. Last year, after St. Martin’s Press sent out PR boxes containing vibrators and lube to influencers, some of whom were not aware they were on PR lists for the publisher and hadn’t agreed to receive PR, there was a flurry of discussion around the implications of foisting sex toys onto non-consenting adults. The book being promoted was a queer adult romance novel by the very popular queer adult romance novelist Casey McQuiston, and all influencers involved were adults (as far as I know), but social media was still speckled with concern to the effect of: “What if I opened this PR box in front of a child! That’s so inappropriate!”1
I was, until recently, unaware of the actual shape and design of the vibrator in question, but without much information or context besides the meta-conversation about how inappropriate it was, the visual in my head grew bigger and wilder by the day. I was expecting a Hitachi wand with “jorkin my penits” engraved on the side. What I discovered was a dark green Beauty Blender in a tasteful brown cardboard case labeled “personal massager,” from Maude, the lifestyle brand. The lube was in a small, dark bottle labeled “organic personal lubricant.” I’d walked past the vibrator no fewer than 200 times when I walked into the C-Town at the end of my street when I lived in Brooklyn, shelved prominently just above the flowers. It is prominently, unavoidably visible to all customers, located in the entryway. The first time I squinted at it while retrieving a grocery cart, I thought it was a tulip bulb.
Far be it from me to defend a publisher from criticism. SMP merits much critique (see the footnotes), and it is absolutely annoying or frustrating to receive mail you haven’t agreed to receive. It isn’t my ministry to tell people not to be angry about something. I do, however, find it hard to lend credence to the idea that the existence of this PR box constitutes material harm, and think that it behooves us not to construct hypothetical harm to defend our beliefs. When people started inventing scenarios of influencers opening PR packages in front of abusive intimate partners and being harmed, then attributing the fault of that imaginary, nonspecific harm to a marketing professional and not, say, the intimate partner, all I could think was that somewhere, we’d lost the plot badly. Also, the tenuous or wholly invented linkage of queer adult sex and sexuality (fictional or real) to harm against children is a tale as old as homophobia itself, and one that I watched supposed “allies” skate right past in their crusade.
Both cases represent a concerning trend I’ve best seen observed by Eleanor Stern on TikTok, wherein adults online seem increasingly unable to experience the world without bringing a hypothetical child’s gaze and experience into the conversation. I wrote about this a little a few Substacks ago when I explained the components of a moral crusade, but I feel the need to come down harder on this because it is dangerous. It is dangerous. Not to mention, most offensively of all, it’s erotophobic loser behavior.
Adults on the internet persist in pointing to isolated instances where teenagers are potentially being exposed to corrupting and dangerous sexual material because they feel they are protecting children. Never mind the fact that:
no one who is talking about this book is the target audience for the book
teenagers of all ages seek out sexual material (whether or not they are actually having sex) because it is developmentally appropriate for a teenager to be curious about sex and pleasure
it is probably great that the sex in the book is probably pleasurable, consensual, and exciting
healthy, developmentally appropriate sex portrayed in fiction can also be arousing or titillating to read
concurrently, teenagers are being assigned books featuring sexually explicit themes and content in school, and none of those sexual themes are likely to be consensual, pleasurable, or exciting
many of the people talking about this probably read books like Vampire Academy and House of Night in middle school and were, consequently, exposed to arousing sex scenes and scenarios themselves
it is actually not possible to neatly discern the “intent,” of an author as far as producing “titillating” content, and the quest to do so inevitably turns into nonsensical thought policing and straight up censorship
it is morally neutral to experience arousal, even as a child or adolescent
teenagers have access to considerably more problematic sexual material than any sex scene they are coming across in a 300 page novel
Part 2: Social Constructions of Childhood
None of these material realities of a teenager’s life or adult Poster’s lives need to be considered in order to scold others about the way that calling a YA novel smutty is dangerous and corrupting because people don’t care about material realities. People are more interested in deploying childhood as a rhetorical device than they are in actual children, no matter their purported political allegiances. This is a theory I found pretty robustly supported in the literature on childhood studies. Take this quote:
Childhood, the invention of adults, reflects adult needs and adult fears quite as much as it signifies the absence of adulthood. In the course of history children have been glorified, patronised, ignored, or held in contempt, depending upon the cultural assumptions of adults. (Walther, 1979, p. 64)2
Understanding that quote fully requires a brief detour into Foucault, which I will attempt to simplify. Contemporary teaching on sex and sexuality in the public school system, when it exists, tends to reference sexuality as a fixed set of natural properties, rooted in biology.3 We are human, so we experience desire and attraction. It supports our evolutionary need to reproduce, continue our species, and exist. It is an immutable and inevitable reality.
Foucault, from the discipline of history, positions sexuality as constructed, an idea emerging from the accumulation of multiple discourses formulated on the individual, interpersonal, cultural, and societal levels. Biological and evolutionary discourses are also manmade and so they are constructed, not inevitable, uncontestable, or immutable. While scholars like Freud write about how childhood is inherently and biologically sexual, Foucault writes, instead, about how the contested ground of sexuality and childhood is the ground upon which institutional “devices and discursive strategies have been deployed,” (Foucault, 1976, pp. 29-30).4 It’s from that place that we can understand the work of scholars like Gayle Rubin, a feminist anthropologist who presented her conceptualization of the charmed circle5 of acceptable sexual behavior at the famous 1982 Barnard Conference of Sexuality, which is largely recognized as the beginning of the Feminist Sex Wars. Without distracting us too much from the purpose of this Substack, the divisions between sex-positive and anti-pornography camps made clear by the Feminist Sex Wars have profoundly shaped contemporary feminist discourse, so it’s worth looking into further.
Okay, so the idea of acceptable and unacceptable sexuality is socially constructed, an accumulation of several discourses. What does that have to do with a YA romantasy? Well, the thing we’re talking about is sexual discourse. It’s a discourse about what constitutes acceptable sexual material for teenagers and adolescents. To that end, there actually isn’t a scientific or academic consensus on what kind of sexual material children and adolescents can and can’t cope with across age group. In lieu of that, moral crusaders have a tendency to suggest that all minors should be denied knowledge of sex and sexuality altogether (or on extremely restrictive terms). The double bind of this is that sexualization and predation of children and, in particular, girls, is contingent upon their innocence and naiveté. That naiveté is both the site of desire for predatory adults and an impediment to children’s abilities to make sense of violations to bodily autonomy and report those violations appropriately.6
Okay, the obvious rebuttal: I don’t have issues with teens reading or knowing about sex. I want teens to read safe, appropriate, healthy representations of sex. Give them comprehensive sex education.
But children and teens are not exclusively engaged in and surrounded by uncomplicated, healthy sexual dynamics. Don’t they deserve to see that represented in their literature? Must literature for adolescents be exclusively didactic and exemplary? Aren’t adolescents capable of discerning fact from fiction? Aren’t adolescents entitled to an erotic imagination? Doesn’t the emphasis on ‘safe, appropriate, healthy,’ also reinforce hierarchies of domination wherein the experiences of adolescents are sanitized and flattened?7
The academic literature on teenagers and sexuality confirms a few things: that teenage girls are taught to see sex and sexuality as dangerous and punishing, and that desire– the active want for something– is male and monstrous. From astonishingly young ages, teenage girls are taught to prioritize the preferences, desires, and habits of boys over cultivating their own sense of desire, their own erotic imaginations, their own sense of exploration and playfulness and embodied joy. The reality is that a smutty book, whether it includes a threesome or pegging or light bondage, is likely not the source of that early disembodiment. It’s a broader world that sees girls experiencing pleasure and feels fear. It’s a broader world that would rather see girls ignorant and vulnerable to exploitation than knowledgeable, imaginative, and resistant to predation.8 As the scholarship says-
Children are mostly constructed as lacking agency, and these constructions have functioned to keep children marginalized and dominated. On the other hand, no matter how childhood is constructed, we cannot deny that the adult carries the memories and experiences of his/her childhood; further, it cannot be denied that the experiences s/he has as a child have a profound effect on what kind of subject s/he emerges to be, thus the child is also the self. Childhood is that from which the subject emerges (Zhao, 2010, p. 242)9
And this is the thing about it. Discussions of childhood are always about the ways that adults construct childhood for other adults, and so we are trapped in cycles of discourse about what is right “for the kids,” when really we are speaking about a more abstract and contested vision of childhood. It’s the ultimate rhetorical stopping point, the thing that you can’t argue against. Don’t we all want what’s good for the kids?
Part 3: Book Banning
So now we come to the last part of the case I saw made online: distinguishing between sex scenes written for the purpose of a teenage audience, in YA novels, and “smut,” a thing that evidently means something to the effect of sex scenes written for the purpose of an adult audience,10 is a key method of resisting book banners, who will point to the word “smut,” and use it as confirmatory evidence that certain literature is corrupting the youth and therefore should be removed from schools, libraries, archives, etc.
I don’t even totally know where to begin with this. I am not of the belief that any language will be specific or innocuous enough that book banners will be persuaded not to ban books containing what they deem to be objectionable or pedophilic or pornographic content. You can call it smut, you can call it healthy sex, you can call it developmentally appropriate, you can speak to its instructional value. Chances are, a book banner will still say that unless it’s sex between man and woman, under the covenant of marriage, devoid of pleasure (for the woman), and for the purpose of reproduction, (or, better yet, not sexual at all) it is likely deviant, corrupting, and evil.
If a book is banned because it was advertised as smutty and book banners think that books with sexually explicit material is inherently pedophilic, objectionable, and pornographic, doesn’t the fault for that banning lie in the hands of book banners, who hold sexually regressive views and deranged political agendas, not the author, who is writing perfectly acceptable material for the upper YA audience that this book is advertised towards? Or, is the problem that the author wrote sexual content that is titillating for an audience of older teenagers? Because if you believe the latter, I’m not even sure how you got this far into this Substack.
Funnily enough, widely held practices for disrupting book banning encourages parents and community members to 1) read the book being considered for banning, 2) make detailed points about the book’s merits and value, 3) come to school board and town hall meetings prepared to make a specific, personal, attentive case for why it’s nonsensical that the book is being painted as obscene and pornographic.11 It renders this particular argument about “smut” as ammunition for book banning particularly silly, because none of us have read the book!
For what it’s worth, I read all 42 published reviews for Bitten by Jordan Gray on Goodreads. Repeatedly, reviewers praise the writing quality, the palpable feeling of female rage that Gray is able to convey, the angst, the tension, the love triangle. Several reviews mentioned that this would be appropriate for an upper-YA audience and named comparable authors who write in YA like Kerri Maniscalco or Richelle Meade. Not one earnest early reviewer mentioned anything about how explicit the book is or how sexual its overtones are. One person wrote “I have been haunted by a particular corset tying scene ever since. 👀” and that was just about as close to a sexual allusion as anything got. The reviews make the book sound like a fantasy-paranormal spin on Divergent or Shatter Me– series that nearly every girl my age read or knew of. There are three 1-star reviews, all published on Jan 25th, the day the discourse around this book blew up. They all say some version of the same thing: the comp books are to zionist authors (SJM and Rebecca Yarros– perhaps a valid critique?), the book is advertised as SMUT, and that they would never read this book.
The day after this discourse, a TikTok blew up referencing the way that women who read exclusively erotic fiction are porn addicted. Mutuals of mine reposted the TikTok. A couple of weeks ago, a friend of a friend in my real life casually mentioned how she thinks it’s weird when people overwhelmingly read erotica and romance. I won’t even lend energy to this because other people have done a better job of deconstructing how this talking point is straight out of the evangelical anti-sex agenda, but I do feel a persistent sense of dread when thinking about all of this. Everywhere I look, conservative backlash to feminist progress and activism is rearing its ugly head, and no one– especially people who firmly believe they could never have a conservative thought–is immune to its effects.
Every time an adult has a conversation about what is “appropriate for childhood,” without citing a source, consulting an expert, or speaking with a specific child in their charge; every time someone posts about how it’s dangerous for “minors to have access to problematic material,” and the problematic material in question is a book; every time someone invents an elaborate hypothetical sexual harm and positions it as a widely held reality; every time someone medicalizes sex and sexuality, I know that conservatism is infiltrating our brains. It’s especially insidious because sometimes that conservatism wears a fashionable hat and a cashmere scarf and comes disguised as “good intentions” and “responsible marketing.” That conservatism knows how to say words like leftist and advocacy and abolitionist and progressive. But saying a word is just saying a word. It doesn’t mean you understand it. It definitely doesn’t mean you believe it.
Concurrently, the now defunct organization Readers4Accountability, was releasing statements about how this constituted a breach of safety for influencers and substantiated the need for a broader, ongoing press boycott of SMP books. How receiving a personal massager was of comparable severity or even topically related to the inciting incident for the boycott, wherein anti-Palestinian, zionist, and racist sentiments from an employee charged with influencer relations went unaccounted for by the publisher, has still not been explained persuasively to me.
Walther, L. (1979) The invention of childhood in Victorian autobiography, in G. Landon (ed.) Approaches to Victorian Autobiography. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
For more reading on how Western thought is unable to divest from biology as the primary lens through which we understand bodies, gender, and sexuality, I highly recommend Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s book The Invention of Women, which I read sections of for a philosophy of gender and sexuality class.
Quote comes from a book called An Introduction to Childhood Studies, edited by Mary Jane Kehily, which I read for this essay. It’s free online!
Rubin, G. S. (2002). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In Culture, society and sexuality (pp. 143-178). Routledge.
This was originally read in 1982, but was rereleased in 2002. it’s a great, short, accessible read and readily available for free online.
In addition to the previously mentioned reader on childhood studies, much of this section of the essay was informed by the following references:
Piper, C. (2000). Historical Constructions of Childhood Innocence: Removing Sexuality. In E. Heinze (Ed.), Of Innocence and Autonomy (1st ed., pp. 26–45).
Zhao, G. (2011). The Modern Construction of Childhood: What Does It Do to the Paradox of Modernity? Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30(3), 241–256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-010-9213-8
Robinson, K. H. (2013). Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood: The contradictory nature of sexuality and censorship in children’s contemporary lives. Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203117538Robinson, K. H. (2020). In the Name of “Childhood Innocence”: A Discursive Exploration of the Moral Panic Associated with Childhood and Sexuality. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 113–129. https://doi.org/10.3316/ielapa.601354235410178
I liked this article from a librarian in 2010 about literature for teenagers exploring sexuality. Free online!
Wood, E. (2010). Pushing the Envelope: Exploring Sexuality in Teen Literature. Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, 3. https://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2010/11/pushing-the-envelope-exploring-sexuality-in-teen-literature/
Tons of readings on this stuff, start with Male in the Head by Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu, Sue Sharpe & Rachel Thompson (free online), or Deborah Tollman’s work Dilemmas of Desire.
Don’t love the gender stuff in this quote, but it’s from 2010 so I make allowances.
Smut is not an agreed upon industry term. You could ask a hundred people and you would receive at least 70 different definitions of the parameters and criteria for smut. Books do not have a factory setting where, if the words “cock” and “pussy” are used, they suddenly receive a sticker with the word “smut,” on it. It’s a term that rose in popularity in fandom spaces for fanfic tagging purposes and on social media as content moderation systems cracked down on words like ‘sex,’ and ‘erotica.’ No matter how confidently someone expresses their definition of smut (“titillate,” the SAT vocab word of the week) there is nothing in academic or publishing literature to suggest that “smut,” has a consensus-approved meaning. See: this visual from Buzzfeed books that features a book from an author who only recently started including open-door sex scenes (and with the caveat that Jesus-loving peers could skip the sex scenes if they felt called to) but also features an unforgivably boring book about a woman exploring sexual relationships with distant family members. They are all referenced as “smut,” by a major media company. As a funny side note, when I was looking into Google trends data on usage of the term “smut,” there was a curiously high rate of usage in the state of West Virginia. Turns out, smut also refers to a kind of coal dust, and in 2005 (when usage peaked) there were a few high profile discussions of coal mining rights lol.
Consulted a few different sites on this but this one was particularly informative: https://uniteagainstbookbans.org/
this essay titillated my brain.
Gonna name my cover band “Erotophobic Loser Behavior”