sex, sex, sex, that’s all teens ever think about

I am a child of the 70s, mostly. I remember the latter half of the 60s as well but my generation pretty much came of age during the tumult of The Decade That Ate Its Young, that alternate (and perhaps more politically accurate) name of The Me Decade. There are many things we have now that we didn’t have then. Technology is obvious. The possibility of an African-American or a woman in the White House seemed far-fetched back then. Oh, and we didn’t have books written for and marketed to our specific teen demographic. The term “young adult” didn’t exist as a category of fiction, and when it was used by an adult it was used pejoratively. To be a young adult was to be one step above a delinquent.

Somewhere in all that we still managed to learn about sex. We didn’t really learn all that much about it in school, and our parents weren’t really talking about it, so we picked it up exactly where our parents were afraid we’d pick it up: in books. No, they didn’t think of it like that, they would say we “picked it up off the streets” like some sun-warmed blob of chewing gum. The irony was that those “streets” of books we learned about sex from were often in our own homes.

I was just learning the complicated and confusing joys of puberty when I discovered that some photos in the National Geographic held a strange fascination over my attention. I’m not even talking about the random shot of a semi-nude tribal woman dancing, but certain faces of young women just slightly older than myself. They could be Irish teens waiting on a low stone wall for a bus, or Japanese women modeling Western fashions in Tokyo, so long as they were a few years older I found myself having wondrous strange thoughts about and imaginary conversations with them. I scoured the three or four most recent issues in our house until I felt I’d exhausted myself over these images, then had a sudden realization: there were boxes and boxes full of back issues in our garage! One Saturday afternoon, when no one else was home to witness, I went into the garage.

And lo! like a beam from heaven in the form of a bare and yellow 60 watt bulb, I discovered a box of paperback books that contained the twin volumes that would forever change me: Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House and Dr. David Ruben’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex: But Were Afraid To Ask. Vonnegut is a subject I’ve spoken often about and is no concern to us here today. No, it’s that other book, that grail of information spilling out of its chemically bleached pages like a pulchritudinous serving wench exploding out of her Elizabethan bodice. That’s the stuff.

So full of vivid medical descriptions of body parts and how they work! So full of explanations of mechanics that made no sense to me! So full of information that was… totally unsexy!

Here was the perfect book, I thought, that would do what no adult dared to do: tell the truth about everything. And it turned out to be what I didn’t want. So much what I couldn’t use or apply. So unhelpful. If you’ve only had urges and strange sensations and never had a girl or boyfriend, never been on a date, never even kissed, the whole of a book like Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex was as lost as the acts of the son of Judah.

A few years later it seemed like there was another chance to really get the inside scoop on this sex thing when kids started bringing copies of The Illustrated Joy of Sex to school. We even understood the irony of passing that book around in biology class while our otherwise-preoccupied teacher showed us sex-ed films from the 1950s (Emergency Childbirth ring a bell for anyone else?). This time ’round we had less medical babble and more pictures. Yeah, pictures! That’s what we wanted! Skip this foreplay stuff, this weird section called “Pickles,” show us what we all pretended we knew how to do since we were ten, since the day we found our first copy of Playboy in the bushes and took it home to hide under our mattress. Now, finally, we could see it all, we knew everything about sex, and we were happy.

But we weren’t. Something was missing.

Books had given us something we wanted, information in its most clinical and mechanical forms, and we were grateful because they were at least filling in the gaps created by our parent’s ostrich-like behavior, but what we wanted and needed was something that bridged the gap. Explaining that our “urges” and “changes” were natural didn’t help us understand our feelings at all. They didn’t help us figure out what was normal in terms of communicating with the subjects of our desire, what was appropriate and inappropriate in terms of social and private behavior. We were as lost as if given a destination, a road map, and a car without wheels.

We needed more books.

We needed books that told us, showed us what it was like to live these awkward moments. We needed books that explained the emotional trajectory of first kisses and fumbled make-out sessions. We didn’t want first- or second-hand accounts from kids fumbling around aimlessly on their own – accounts we often dismissed as made up but accepted as truth simply because we had nothing else to go by. What do you do when your crush is unrequited? What do you do when a casual friendship flares up in the heat of the moment and turns into a carnal Lust Monster?

Kids today, they don’t know how good they’ve got it. Not only are there Young Adults books, but you can find them about pretty much any topic. Abuse. Drugs. Death and the afterlife.

Sex.

You can find books about teens wanting, and having, sex. You can read about their desires, and how they go about achieving those desires (or sometimes failing to), and learn a whole slew of lessons without ever having to emulate the characters at all! Imagine! Just like a mystery where you don’t have to murder anyone, or a horror novel where you don’t have to be hunted down by some vengeful spirit or madman, or like some historical epic where you don’t have to fight in a war or suffer from some (then) incurable disease, you can read about sex and interpersonal relations and decide for yourself how to use that information! Amazing! Books are amazing!

And so, while adults continue to wring their hands over the problem of whether or not there is a case to be made for “raunchy” books for teens, we must remember that adults have a long and storied history of this hand-wringing, silence-peddling, censorship-pushing nonsense. Adults will always try to “protect the children” and youth will always find a way around their overbearing protections. The chemical and biological sex drive is there and, for the teen caught in the maelstrom of these awkward and sudden changes, no amount of protective censorship will keep them from seeking out answers. Fortunately for teens today there are plenty of sources Unfortunately, there are still adults out there trying to limit that information.

I say, be young, young adults! Think about sex all you want! Be defiant and delinquent! Read everything and judge for yourself!

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the first poems i ever bought

I was seventeen and working my first job at Mann’s Village Theatre in Westwood, California.  My friend Carlos had put in a good word for me and I was hired after a brief five-minute interview in the lobby.  Minimum wage as (as it is now) about the price of a bargain matinée ticket and without revealing how much that was let’s just say that my first week I worked 28 hours and made $65 before taxes.

It was an awesome experience, that first paycheck, that heady allure of money coming in a steady stream.  I had no bills, no sense of saving money, no financial responsibilities except to keep putting gas in the car.  I had that brass ring of capitalistic happiness, disposable income, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Well, I did.  I mean, now I could eat out anywhere or anytime I wanted.  I could stop borrowing friends records and recording them and start buying my own vinyl.  I could hang out at the mall and buy cookies the size of my head – 3 for a dollar – or hang out with friends after school and eat pizzas.

Then I discovered bookstores.

There were the big bookstores around Westwood which made perfect places to hang out during breaks at work.  You could use a fifteen minute break to wolf down a falafel or softball-sized carrot cake muffin and spend your entire meal break later at the bookstore looking at all those books piled everywhere. I discovered so many books that were important to me in those early days of reckless spending, a dozen or so I still own several decades later, but the oddest in retrospect was the first book of poetry I ever bought for myself.

I have to clarify, because I did own a collection of Edward Lear’s work, and I know there were other books that were either gifts or books that entered the house that I assumed as my own, but there was one distinct book that I consciously picked up, read parts of, and purchased with little more going for it than a random page test reading.

It was Charles Bukowski’s Play The Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin To Bleed a Little.

Bukowski is either the best or the worst poet to put into a teen boy’s hands.  This was in the late 1970s and his reputation was only starting to bubble to the surface of the mainstream, so I found very few people I could talk to about Bukowski’s poems.  I had a sense there were some who would be put off by his crudeness, his portraits of lowlife and barlife, people who found little they liked in poetry because they thought poetry was hard, or was like a secret society where you had to know to rules to “get” what was on the page.  I’m talking about my teenage peers here, not the adults who (then and now) really wouldn’t have appreciated a teen reading this stuff.

The poems didn’t speak to me so much as they spoke with a single-minded clarity I hadn’t been exposed to before.  They rang with a sort of ugly truth that felt more relevant than the Beat poetry I had recently been exposed to.  Kerouac and Ginsberg were noodling jazz, all filigree word salad, Bukowski was a bell buoy in choppy seas.

I’ve read more Bukowski but I only own one other book by him, the biographical novel Ham on Rye.  Sometimes I feel like I should own more but I find that out of every collection there are only a couple poems that work for me and the rest I could live without.  Also, I’m slightly afraid that owning other collections of his poems would diminish the impact of this one book, my first, in a way that would take away its specialness.

Specialness.  What makes it special?  Was it that I bought the book with my own money, or the fact that buying poetry felt like a sophisticated act?  I certainly didn’t brag about it, about owning a book of poetry, though I’m sure my teenage self did casually mention to people about this “weird poet” I’d “heard about.”  I do think there is something to be said about its first-ness and I wonder if the cumulative effect wasn’t what kept me tangentially attached to poetry all these years.

I’m curious: what was your first book of poetry that you purchased for yourself?  How old were you?  Do you still own it?

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george carlin, lenny bruce, comedians, and teens

I had been planning a feature for Guys Lit Wire in September that discussed books by comedians that would serve as a sort of underground education for teens.  Carlin was among the lot, as was Lenny Bruce, a pair whose work spoke of language, challenged conventions, and faced the Supreme Court.

Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman are also in my notes as examples of conceptual humor and how it can change your view of the world without you realizing it.  Other things in my notes: Carlin and Bruce were linguists, Martin was a philosopher, Kaufman was a situationist and didn’t write a book – should he be included? Pryor?

Comedy appeals to teens because comedy is dangerous to an ordered society.  Comedy asks questions and challenges the norm by getting people to laugh at what makes them uncomfortable.  It isn’t as easy, as Carlin once said, as finding the line and crossing it; nor is it a matter of pitching funny with dirty (though it looks good on a bar graph eulogy).

Things have changed.  Check out how “liberal” TV was back in 1975 with this classic sketch from Saturday Night Live featuring Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase.  No way anyone would run this today. Why?  My guess is that we have allowed ourselves to be censored, censored from thinking or discussing these issues by pretending we’ve matured as a society.  There is a glimmer of change on the horizon in this respect, but the simple fact remains that the humor in this sketch comes from a sense of both recognition and discomfort from the audience. It’s been 30 years since this sketch first aired on TV, and the only thing that’s changed is that people are more afraid to say these things this openly than they did back then.  Or rather, they’ve gotten better at hiding their true feelings and this humor would be viewed, even by racists, under the cover of “My, how unenlightened people were back then. We find nothing funny about that now.”

Exactly.

What we find funny now is the scatological, the biological, the observational, and the excessive.  We can no longer be shocked (or so we think) and so our humor bends towards making fun of specific people and characters.  Carlin held a mirror up – to himself and society – and found the absurdity and humor in it all.  Lenny Bruce found the hypocrisy in post-war America. Today, the only person who I feel is carrying on in the same tradition is Chris Rock, and even there it sometimes feels like he’s preaching to the choir. Sarah Silverman comes off as a little too mean in her humor, though her shock tactics are very much in keeping with the big boys.

George Carlin had a good run and he taught me, when I was a teen, that words had meaning and that there were no bad words; bad thoughts, bad intentions, and bad people who would attempt to control those words and thoughts, yes, but no bad words.

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emasculating boys at guys lit wire, and an essay

Looks like things are getting a little warm over at Guys Lit Wire with regards to a recent segment aired on CNN’s Glenn Beck show. First, if you haven’t checked it out, go there now and read through the post and the comments. There’s no way I can summarize what’s going on, but it’s a fairly interesting discussion that concerns the idea of boys’ books and the need to return to what one of my high school English teachers once referred to as books “in the Hemingway tradition of the rugged individual.”

Among he comments you will note I mentioned writing an essay this semester providently focusing on three books that featured boys in the roles of protector over female characters. It was a difficult essay for me at the time — written under a deadline and not as organized as I would have liked — which is my lame-o way of saying that I probably should have gone back and edited it before doing what I’m about to do.

I’m posting it here.

So, adding a distant aside to the din on protective boys in teen fiction, here is the essay I wrote a few months ago. Warts and all. And it’s long.  And I have some follow-up comments at the end.  If you make it.

To The Rescue:
Three Portraits of Boys Protecting Girls in Young Adult Fiction
c. 2008 David Elzey

For this essay I had intended to examine the voice of boys, and was determined at the very least to come to some understanding, some grounding in what “works” with some writers. After searching through my recent reading I settled on three books that presented three different boys whose voices were strong and, in their own ways, unique.

Eric Calhoune in Chris Crutcher’s Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes presents us with a senior on a mission to save a fellow outcast who has lapsed into a catatonic state. Eric’s voice is has the bitter edge of the underdog, the fat kid who has learned how to channel his anger into subtle forms of revenge and self-deprecating humor. In Neal Shusterman’s Unwind we meet Conner Lassiter, a runaway boy put up for retroactive abortion by his parents at the age of seventeen. Conner’s is a voice in hormonal rage, a boy with a strong sense of justice but he’s too quick to anger when strategy would suffice. An it-could-happen future is the setting for the dead and the gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer, where a natural cataclysm forces Alex Morales to assume responsibility for his younger sisters. Alex’s voice is one bound by duty, tradition, and a strong undercurrent of faith; all other emotions are held at bay as survival becomes the driving force. All three boys are moved to act by external forces, all three challenged to question what they know, or were taught to believe, all three struggling to make the right decisions for those they care about.

Three boys struggling to make the right decisions for those they care about.

Until I’d made note of that fact I hadn’t realized how strong a link this was between these three books. For all three, the force that binds them and drives them is the desire to protect people they love, and all of those in need of protection are female. Is it possible that this desire to protect is something uniquely masculine, something boys struggle to acquire on their path towards discovering who they are as young men? Since strong female characters in literature are no longer considered rare or unusual, are contemporary boy characters still wrestling with the complex societal expectations of being the protectors of the weak? To varying degrees, the answer in these three recent Young Adult titles appears to be yes.

Pfeffer’s the dead and the gone is a parallel sequel to her previous book Life As We Knew It, taking place in the same months that follow when an asteroid knocks the moon from its orbit. The sequel is set in New York City where events are viewed from the perspective of seventeen year old Alex Morales. Alex’s father has just left for a funeral in Puerto Rico, his mother has reported for late duty at the hospital where she is a nurse, and his older brother Carlos is a Marine deployed to Texas. The initial effects of the moon’s orbital shift cause tidal waves and flooding that Alex will quickly learn have taken his parents.

In the initial hour of the blackout, before Alex completely understands how bad things are, he returns home from his after school job and immediately assumes assumes his role as the head of the family. His younger sisters, Bri and Julie, have already found a flashlight but he instructs them to use it to find the radio so they can learn about blackout. Failing that, his older sister Bri defers to Alex asking “Do you think everything is okay?” “I’m sure it is,” Alex said (5). Alex has already taken control of the situation and the parental role of the soother. Later, when his sisters wonder about their brother Carlos, and whether their parents are okay, Alex doesn’t hesitate to answer “We’re all fine. By Monday everything will be back in order” (11). In the initial moments of a calamity it is easy to hope for the best, but the full weight of responsibility is placed on him by Carlos when he gets a moment to call in before being deployed: “Look, Alex, you’re in charge now until Papi gets home. Mami’s going to be depending on you” (16). Alex’s sisters not only accept his leadership, they defer to him when they ask if they are safe. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. I promise” (17). Mighty big words, and responsibility, for a seventeen year old boy.

Alex is constantly reasserting his role, or being reminded of it by others: “Because I’m trying to protect you” (33); “Who died and made you boss?” (69 and 88); “It’s for the best, he told himself” (87); “I’m in charge… Until Papi comes home, and you’ll respect me like you respect him” (99-100); “I’m going to do what’s best for you… You’re my responsibility” (100); “…I have sisters to watch out for” (142); “Julie doesn’t talk about it, but you’re responsible for her now” (164); “…you’re thirteen years old and you can’t look out for yourself” (211). Though it isn’t stated outright, there is an undercurrent that Alex’s role as protector is cultural. A Puerto Rican boy going to a private Catholic high school would carry with him the traditions and expectations of both cultures. And the girls would likewise expect Alex’s protection as well.

Beyond his initial scrounging for food, securing their apartment, and making sure his sisters continue their schooling, Alex protects the girls in other ways. When he discovers that bodies of the reclaimed dead are on display he doesn’t tell the girls he has an appointment to make an identification because, if their mother wasn’t among the dead, “They could keep on hoping then, but he hadn’t figured out whether that was a good thing or not” (56). Later, when he has a chance to send his older sister Bri away to a convent farm in upstate New York, he not only makes the arrangements but doesn’t tell her until a few hours before the bus is to take her away (92-98). During a food riot Alex is forced to walk over other people and ignore a fallen infant in the street in order to protect Julie(128). And in two separate incidents Alex protects Julie from being assaulted on the streets (216), and from being traded in exchange for safe passage out of the city (225).

Alex’s stoicism is consistent throughout — “I can manage on my own, especially if I know Bri and Julie are safe” (230). Only after he is felled by flu (275) and loses Bri in a fatal elevator mishap (295) does Alex finally feel the full weight of what he has taken on. Early on he allowed himself a moment to grieve “when his sisters couldn’t see him” (40), and then nothing more until he is confessing to his priest about Bri’s death to relieve the guilt he felt so they could see “how inadequate he was” (303), for failing to protect her as he promised.

The severity of events, and the constant reinforcement of expectations, forced Alex to exist almost entirely as a protector. Bri, the older but weaker sister, and Julie, the stronger but naïve one, clearly would not have survived without Alex’s efforts. His every waking moment is driven toward finding ways to assure Bri and Julie’s survival. Alex’s position is never seriously challenged or questioned by his sisters, he doesn’t even question his role until the very end. The book’s message isn’t necessarily that in times of crisis all boys revert to a mere protector-of-the-weak authority figure, but for Alex, in this book, that’s all he’s allowed to be.

In another speculative future, Neal Shusterman give us an America following a second civil war fought between pro-life and pro-choice forces. The result of these “Homeland Wars” was an accord meant to appease both sides, a compromise that outlawed abortion on moral grounds but permitted parents to have children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen “unwound,” essentially allowed to be harvested for their body parts.

Into this world, teens who know they are scheduled for unwind many attempt to runaway, including Conner Lassiter, a boy with a temper and a strong sense of social justice. After a double escape from authorities, Conner finds himself on the run with two other unwinds – Risa, a ward of the state who has outlived her usefulness, and Lev, a boy whose unwinding is part of his family’s religious tithing. Shusterman tells the story from multiple perspectives with each of these main characters telling their stories as they cross and join paths.

Risa isn’t initially in need of saving, as Connor himself notes that kids from state homes “have to learn to take care of themselves real young, or their lives are not very pleasant” (46). It’s Risa who actually takes care of Connor and Lev when they are first on the run by suggesting they change their clothes and identities (45), then schemes to make it happen (55). What changes their relationship is when, in a moment of combined weakness and rage, Conner saves an unwanted infant from being “storked,” the term for an infant dumped anonymously on a doorstep (62). It’s a foolish move for kids on the run to slow themselves down with an infant, but it provides them with the unexpected benefit of looking like a young family. Later, as Risa assumes duties as a surrogate mother, they discover the baby is a girl, becoming the first girl Conner saves (66).

Posing as a young family brings out the first glimpse of Conner’s concern toward Risa. “You okay about the baby?” Conner asks after it has been taken up for adoption (116). And when they begin the first leg of their journey in an underground railroad for runaways he puts his arm around her. “I’m cold too,” he says. “Body heat, right?” and she doesn’t rebuff his advance (117). As Conner’s concerns toward Risa blossom her hardness towards him softens, and the stage is set for him to protect her.

Warehoused in an airport hangar, where the runaways await the final trip toward a sanctuary called The Graveyard, Risa and Conner become aware of the manipulative behavior of Roland, a hulking military reject who see Connor as a threat to his perceived role as leader (146). It takes some convincing but Risa helps Conner see “A kid like Roland doesn’t want to fight you, he wants to kill you” (147). Cornering Risa in order to assault her is Roland’s ploy to draw Conner into a fight, playing on the idea that Conner would naturally come to her rescue. Using reverse psychology Conner not only avoids the fight but saves Risa as well (151). “(E)ven with all his troubles, she sees Conner as a hero” (152). What began as a shared interest in preservation has backed Conner into the masculine position of defending Risa against an almost biological predatory male encroachment battle. It’s a cold world that has a variety of names for dealing with children as objects but no mention of the emotion love. It’s no wonder unwanted teens like Risa and Conner can’t recognize their mutual attraction toward one another, but equally odd that they naturally revert to traditional gender roles.

At The Graveyard, Risa, Conner, and Roland are separated into job camps, though they occasionally have contact with one another. The roles they assume follow traditional gender lines. While Roland is amassing an army of followers to overtake the operation (soldier), and Risa is busy becoming a medic (nurse), Conner finds himself becoming the eyes and ears of The Graveyard’s leader, a man known as The Admiral (leader/politician). Conner passes along his suspicions about Roland (222) but lacking proof The Admiral cannot take action. Preparing to confront Roland himself, Conner cryptically warns Risa to avoid The Admiral to avoid becoming a target if his interrogation of Roland goes awry (233). Then he leans in and kisses her “in case something happens and I don’t see you again,” and she returns the kiss “…in case I do see you again” (234).

Their romance solidified, Conner is still unable to protect her when Roland manages to turn all three of them into the authorities. The police promise to have them all unwound for events surrounding Conner’s original escape, but Conner insists Risa “had nothing to do with it! Let her go!” (261). Shipped off to a body harvesting center Conner is received as a hero among other kids who have tried to escape, a legendary figure among fellow unwinds, one who might be their savior. Reflecting on his short life Conner considers how “The whole day weighs heavily on him – the way the kids think he can somehow save them, when he knows he can’t even save himself…. His one joy is knowing that Risa is safe, at least for now” (276).

A terrorist group, that includes Lev who has become hardened by his experiences on the run, sets off an explosion at the facility that knocks Conner unconscious and sends Risa to the hospital (309). Emerging from a two-week coma Conner’s first thoughts are of Risa (317). In an odd twist, it was Lev who pulled Risa from the wreckage and saved her life. Once they recuperate, Conner and Risa return to The Graveyard where Conner assumes operation of the facility following the Admiral’s departure: Conner can finally channel his outrage against the system to protect and save as many unwinds as he can (332).

Conner has grown slowly into his role as protector, first out of a general concern borne of circumstance, then out of affection, finally with a sense of purpose. Risa doesn’t start out needing to be saved, but as Conner’s natural leadership becomes apparent she begins to trust him enough to allow herself to be protected. Protecting Risa is a very delicate dance, one that comes with her permission, but it is genuinely appreciated in the end.

From its title one might assume that Eric Calhoune deliberate attempt at Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes would constitute the oddest form of protection. While Eric does, indeed, spend a year trying to keep his weight up to prove to his best friend that he hasn’t changed (7), it isn’t until his friend Sarah disappears into a catatonic trance that he is moved to confront and protect her from the secret that has driven her to this state (138). The women surrounding Eric are not weak; his single mother is a respected newspaper writer who won’t stand for anyone manipulating her (164); his swim coach, Cynthia Lemry, runs a controversial class called Contemporary American Thought and has no qualms threatening administration from interfering with her instruction (213); and Sarah herself, badly disfigured by a burn incident when she was three, is easily the toughest character of all three books combined. That Eric must ignore Sarah’s direct instructions in order to protect her only proves that his desire to save her is stronger than any loyalty. “…I was her only friend. I’d rather have her hate my guts and be safe than love me and be alone” (180-1)

Sarah Byrnes is in a mental facility in a catatonic state, unable (or unwilling) to communicate with the outside world. The historical friendship between Eric and Sarah is seemingly uncomplicated as he initially presents his concerns to Lemry: “She’s my best friend and she’s dying. We became friends when I was as fat as she is ugly, and I promised her a long time ago that I would never turn away from her” (23). Unsure what put Sarah in the hospital, Eric is nonetheless determined to do anything he can to keep her from dying, to save her. This is tricky, as Sarah once made it clear to Eric that she considers outside help a weakness, especially help from adults (58). That Sarah will stand up to Dale Thornton, the school bully, and repeatedly take his physical abuse on principle is her object lesson to Eric in this matter (25-26) .

In junior high Dale accuses Sarah of lying when she claims her face was burned when a pot of spaghetti was spilled on her. In defending her against Dale, Eric initially misses a telling detail when he notes the rage these comments elicit (91). Sarah has never previously let anything people say about her looks have any effect on her. Sarah certainly doesn’t need Eric’s protection, or his defense, but in her anger and her inability to deny the accusation she opens a door for Eric to find a way to repay her unflagging friendship. As Eric begins to accept what is the truth – that her father inflicted Sarah’s burns – he becomes emboldened to action (99-102).

In order to save Sarah, Eric not only has to lull her into speaking to him in the hospital (138), and get her to confirm that her father is the one who burned her when she was young (142), he has to find a way to get Sarah safely away from her father (198). This proves difficult as Sarah’s father has threatened to kill Eric for his meddling (224). With the aid of his friend Steve, and through Lemry’s intervention, Eric is able to keep Sarah safe (201-204). But in a twist that echos Shusterman’s Unwind, it is another male character, the man Eric’s mom is dating, who subdues Sarah’s father and protects them all (284). Realistically, this makes sense because it would have been absurd to think a teenage boy could have taken on the homicidal maniac that is Sarah’s father, but to the extent that he could Eric did everything within his power to safeguard his best friend from harm.

Sarah isn’t the only girl Eric protects. For years he’s been mooning over Jody Muller, girlfriend of one of his swimming rivals Mark Brittain (78). When Mark and Jody move to drop Lemry’s class on moral grounds – Brittain is a holier-than-thou fundamentalist – Eric casually offers Jody liberation in the form a whispered joke: “If you ever want a boyfriend who encourages freedom of expression… dial 1-800-FAT-BOY” (104). The joke’s on Eric when Jody not only takes him up on the offer, but confesses that her unsupportive boyfriend got her pregnant in the past, forced her to have an abortion, and then denied it ever happened (147-153). It isn’t clear at first whether Jody is merely trying to deliberately hurt her former boyfriend by seeing Eric, but in the end Jody and Eric remain together. The simple promise of support is all it took to make Jody feel safe and protected enough to walk away from a bad relationship .

Though Staying Fat For Sarah Byrnes is the most realistic story of the three it follows the least conventional path of boys protecting girls. Eric’s evolution from wimpy fat kid to protector of women comes from his friendship with Sarah, the toughest person in the story who cannot see how best to save herself. In the cold-hearted future of Unwind the awakening of Conner’s protective nature matures when he is able to replace the rage he feels toward the world with his affection toward Risa. Having been a ward of the state, Risa is willing to relinquish her defensive stance and allow herself to be cared about, if not completely cared for. And in the cataclysmic landscape of the dead and the gone Alex has no other choice but to become the protectorate of his younger sisters. Through duty, family honor, and religious acculturation, Alex has little choice but to dedicate himself to making sure his family remains safe and alive to the extent that he can.

For two of these stories the boys in question – Conner and Eric – do not set out to protect girls who are clearly not weak, and in fact the boys have to work hard to gain enough of the girl’s trust in order to protect them. For Alex, his single-minded determination reads almost like a character flaw, an immaturity and weakness that prevents him from seeing little beyond his sense of preservation. Alex’s story almost becomes a game of trying to guess how and when he’s going to fail in his duties; for Conner and Eric it’s a only a question of how they will succeed.

In looking at the voice of boys what became clear in these books was a strong undercurrent of characters driven to protect the girls they cared about. Their voices, their thoughts and actions, are driven by a something that seems less like character and more biological in origin. Whether culturally influenced, bound by loyalty, or vaulted by circumstance, the boys in these books are pressed into service as heroes to the rescue.

Works Cited
Crutcher, Chris. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. New York: HarperTeen, 2003.

Pfeffer, Susan Beth. the dead and the gone. New York: Harcourt Children’s Books, 2008.

Shusterman, Neal. Unwind. New York: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing, 2007.

If you have read this far, I salute you, you rock. If you feel that in my essay I managed to leave out my opinions in the matter then you will have noticed the fundamental problem at the heart of what still bothers me about it.

Where I fail to draw a conclusion about the meaning or importance of this particular phenomena of (over)protective boys let me say that a very large part of me hates this portrayal of boys as saviors I can totally see where some boys might enjoy this. The idea of saving someone you love or are in love with may be the closest boys get to the kind of stuff that appears in traditional romance novels. We don’t expect that women who read romance novels expect to be whisked of their feet by some ripped Scotsman on a horse; likewise, boy readers might night see these male protagonists rescuers as anything more than a fantasy image.

But the question remains: has our culture really emasculated boys, and can it be corrected through reading, or have we finally pried the pendulum from the patriarchal extreme and brought it closer to center where it belongs? If books really had as much power as Glenn Beck and his ilk believe to alter an entire gender, then what’s his excuse?

Oh yeah, he probably didn’t read much as a boy. That would explain a lot of his inanities.

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Guys Lit Wire goes live!

Or is it hot when a wire has juice running through it? Anyway…

I don’t think it’s been any secret that a number of kidlit bloggers have been working behind the scenes for some time now (has it been six months?) getting ready to launch Guys Lit Wire. There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this announcement you’re either one of the many people involved or this is going to be, like, the fifty-first post about this. Nonetheless, today is launch day, the blog is officially open!

Guys Lit Wire!

The whole thing came about some time late last year, I believe, in the comments section over at Sara’s blog Read Write Believe. A bunch of us kidlit blogger types were hashing out ideas and fantasies about teen boys and books and ideal environments and then – WHAM! – the next thing you know there’s nearly two dozen bloggers scheduled to post reviews and interviews and whatnot every weekday for the rest of 2008!

Okay, so it wasn’t all like spontaneous combustion, it was the hard work of many people but primarily Colleen at Chasing Ray and Sarah at Finding Wonderland who did the heavy lifting. But the rest of us are in there, making lists and posting posts, talking amongst ourselves to make this the best dang thing of its kind. It’s serious, folks, we’re a dedicated bunch. Check out that contributors list!

And I say “we” because I am proud to be participating in the enterprise. Once a month I’m scheduled to share some of what I consider to be good stuff for teen boys, my first post will come a week from Wednesday on June 9th. What will my inaugural post be about? Well, you’ll just have to check it out then.

(hint: think NYC and dystopia)

No need to mark your calendar — you’ll be a regular to the site by then anyway, right? — but just in case I’ll be cross-posting with linkage so you can jump around and get lost in all that GLW goodness! Trust me, there are plenty of great people involved in this thing Head on over and read the contributors bios and you’ll see what I mean.

Right tasty!

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coming soon — a real live wire

While I sincerely doubt many of you, my fine readers, get all of your kidlit news from Yours Truly it may be possible that the following bit of news has escaped your attention in the kidlit blogosphere.

Guys Lit Wire, a new site launching in June, promises to provide you with everything you need to know in the world of literature for teenage boys.  Colleen of Chasing Ray has been been spearheading the effort which she described on her blog yesterday thusly:

There will be book recommendations, author interviews, literary commentary, a rant or two (I’m sure) and lots of other good stuff. The goal is to cover a ton of different types of books from across the literary spectrum so we can become a good resource to actual teenagers as well as anyone seeking to find books for teen boys. (And if the girls want to visit we are happy to have them, but boys are our target audience.)

I am happy to announce — nay, honored and privileged — to be participating in this new blog and sincerely hope I can hold up my end when it comes to adding my voice to the community.  I haven’t got a clue what I’m going to debut with but that deadline’s behind a few others I have for school right now so it can remain fuzzy.  But I promise you, it will be brilliant.  Both my post and the new blog!

Right now the group is shy a few contributors, and we could really use a few more guys.  C’mon, out of 21 of us there are only 3 males reading and writing about books for teens?  That can’t be right, can it?  Consider this a call to action.  If you or someone you know wants in contact Colleen directly (colleen(at)chasingray(dot)com).  And if you’d rather just support the effort please feel free to pass this news along to others.

For my part, if any of you have ideas or suggestions of some teen-boy-reading topic you’d like to see me mangle address, feel free to get in touch via comments.  Let me know if you’d rather communicate off-blog as well and we’ll make it happen.

I’ll keep you posted as June 1st looms.

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YA: a market, a genre, or a ghetto?

I don’t think I’m versed in enough of the history of YA to really pull this post off, but I’m charging ahead anyway.

The question beneath this inquiry is this: What would YA authors write if there was no YA market?

On the face of it this sounds like an absurd question. It isn’t as if kids are twelve years old one day reading Roald Dahl and E. L. Konigsburg, the next day they wake up reading David Foster Wallace and Joan Didion. Obviously there is a transition that is made, and that transition has its own market. But that market wasn’t always there, and the idea of being a writer who specialized for that market is also fairly new.

It becomes like one of those Imponderables of David Feldman’s, the question being who are the ur-YA authors and who did they think their audience was when they were writing their books? It wasn’t all that long ago that the chains finally realized they had enough books to actually create a Teen section (and then later did the market research to discover that a teen wouldn’t buy from that section unless it was far enough removed from the rest of the children’s books), and those early sections had a lot of crossover material. One day you found Pullman’s His Dark Materials series only in fantasy/sci-fi and the next there were different cover designs aimed at the YA market. The S.E. Hinton books were on a paperback spinner at the library one spring (the paperback spinner being the in-between step away from middle grade books) and by fall those books were on a shelf marked young adult.

Then over in regular literature you have To Kill a Mocking Bird and Catcher in the Rye. Why? Because they’re considered classics, classics born before the marketing age of YA. Yes, you can occasionally find Salinger in the YA section now, but before that Holden Caufield was just some kid in a book of fiction shelved among the S’s. Somewhere along the way we changed our thinking about audience and in time that influenced how writer’s perceived themselves within a genre based on age instead of subject matter.

Which I find curious. In a recent issue of Publisher’s Weekly Meg Rosoff talks about her identity crisis as her publisher has decided to pull her books from the YA world and throw her into the adult world. The advice she got initially as a writer when questioning how to write for teens was

“Write the best book you can write and I’ll find an audience for it.” In other words, you write. We sell.

which really throws a potential YA writer like myself into a tizzy when I consider the fact that I’m going to school to learn how to write specifically for that audience.

This isn’t the first time I’ve questioned the idea of the YA market. I remember pawing through the Gossip Girls books and their ilk and wondered, aloud, where they would be placed in a bookstore if they could be sent back in time 30 years. The answer was, obviously, nowhere because they are a product of their time. But with a little tweaking, and a format change to mass market with tawdry cover illustrations, they could slide in nicely in the romance aisle. Without naming names, there are many fine YA books that would fit into the romance aisle if the character age was bumped up a few years and the settings were job- and not school-based. To that end YA looks like little more than a training ground for genre. Fortunately publishers have taken the gestalt of the situation in hand and made sure that girls can transition from their YA candy into the “serious” world of fiction where shopaholics and Prada-wearing devils can continue to satisfy their habits.

What if — and this might admittedly be a stretch — but what if Phillip Roth were a new author and he just delivered his first manuscript entitled Portnoy’s Complaint to a publisher? And just for giggles lets say the publisher is the MTV imprint of Simon and Schuster who published the likes of teen-friendly Stephen Chbosky. Isn’t it possible the book would find a home in the YA section? After all, it isn’t any more risque than the American Pie movies that teens gobble up at the box office.

So where’s the line, when does a book or an author fall to either side of the teen/adult divide? If we call an author YA are we somehow relegating them to a ghetto of a market that is limited in scope and size? Like Holden Caufield, teens know phonies where they see them, and to them a market aimed specifically to their demographic smells fake, to say nothing of the adults who won’t look twice at YA because, well, it’s for juveniles after all.

Teens like to resist, and they’ll go looking for what resonates with them and against whatever it is they feel like rebelling against. I did it, I ran for the adult books when I was in my early teens, but I did so in an age when the books aimed at a teen market were typically stories about troubled kids. Books that had that Afterschool Special vibe about them. Does anyone remember Kin Platt? Where are his books today?

Don’t think I haven’t pondered the irony that I seriously want to write for this target audience.

Right now, today, my feeling is that we need less marketing and more education about books that are out there. I’m not falling into hand-wringing over the demise of book review sections in newspapers because it’s been clear for a long time that books don’t bring in the same ad revenues as other media (like movies) and that’s the lifeblood of newsprint. Reading about books is often dry and listless, so I’m not even sure that publications devoted to books is the answer either. Book trailers may eventually develop into a formidable marketing experience but I think nothing short of a revolution in the world of publishing akin to the rise of rock-and-roll is going to bring the audiences around. What is necessary is the impossible: authors who can make the act of reading as sexy as a music video with the appeal of American Idol. Let me tell you, it’s going to take a lot more than a poster of Orlando Bloom hanging in a library.

Trying to tap into what kids want or might like isn’t going to work. We need to let adults — young and old — know what is out there and let them decide for themselves. The teenager, as a demographic and a force in the market, did not exist until the 20th century and they were defined for the most crass of reasons: to make money. Teens have become culturally literate enough to recognize this and modern marketing has had a tough time trying to keep their competitive edge while remaining valid and authentic to the market. Eliminate the market altogether, let’s see what happens.

What would YA authors be without the market? What they’ve always been: writers. What would teens be without YA books? The same readers they’ve always been.

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