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This commenter's post is deeply objectionable for a number of a reasons, but the cherry on top is the dishonest framing of the evidence provided. The link to the comic which was provided displays that this book was available in a CITY'S PUBLIC LIBRARY, not some middle school where it was part of the curriculum. Of course the argument that a public city Library should contain zero material for an adult audience is absurd and I believe hardly anyone would defend it (though I'm happy to be proven wrong), which is why I believe this argument which could be defended on truthful merits was ignored instead for this dishonest framing.
Furthermore, a link to an article shows us the news that some female teachers rape their young male students. This is deeply horrible behaviour that deserves to be condemned, but I'd like to ask the obvious question, which is: what is the rate of teacher rape you are asserting (de facto by not mentioning other professions) is so much higher than other positions that come into contact regularly with children? Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join? If so, the evidence has not been provided. In the lack of that evidence, it seems a strange leap to assert that teachers are some uniquely dangerous creatures immune to societal condemnation (especially when incredibly disparate things like rape and allowing a graphic comic to remain on a public library shelf are lumped together)
I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry. Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves.
I stand on the null hypothesis that public libraries, until very recently, also agreed with me.
Would you like to defend or justify some sort of reasoning for the change?
So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.
Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.
Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.
I extend to people the presumption that if they are engaging in the discussion, they have at least looked at the most salient examples of the topic, and so stating that I have “actually looked” at the examples could only be read as a veiled accusation that the other person hasn’t.
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It’s a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library. Again I stand on the null hypothesis that until very recently, essentially every library in America agreed with me, and it is the change that has to be justified.
That being said, you bring up a good point. Flowers in the Attic and Gor shouldn’t have been in your school library. It shouldn’t have been in mine.
The sewage was already lapping around our ankles when we were kids, but that’s no excuse for letting things get worse. And yes, on the way back to having no metaphorical sewage flowing through our intellectual and spiritual lives, we have to pump the sewer back down to just around our waists, and then our knees, and our ankles, and so forth.
There are things that can be sexual but not pornographic, but those things are, culturally, well prior to Playboy.
Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.
TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.
Good to know!
I am a tiny bit confuzzled about "it's only a drawing of a blowjob so it's not, you know, erotic" but then that's because I am not ten years old today, and can't parse out "this is someone trying to have sex in line with a particular sexual fantasy but please read it like it's a medical description in a textbook and not about sexy times" from "this is a depiction of sexy times".
Erotica is meant to arouse. It's meant to be erotic. Obviously porn is erotica. But not all naked pictures are porn, IMO.
With the caveat that literally everything is "erotica" to someone, I have a hard time imagining anyone finding the specific scene we're talking about in Gender Queer arousing or stimulating, and it seems pretty obvious to me that that was not its intent. You can take issue with all kinds of things (like its suitability for children), but I think a lot of people are performatively clutching pearls about kids reading about sex.
Well, if depictions of a sexual fantasy are not meant to be arousing (and the author is trying to show that for her it was arousing as a fantasy, whatever it was like in reality) then to quote Gilbert and Sullivan "Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”
Have you read the page in question? Did it strike you as erotic? Did it strike you as something meant to be arousing? Did you look at that panel and think it's something a teen is likely to jerk off to, or that the author thought of it as something to jerk off to? Because to me, it looked more like teens trying out a "sex fantasy" that turns out to be weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing, which was the point of that sequence. But maybe it did something different for you. I'll take your word for it.
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