THE HARDY BOYS DIDN'thavewetdreams by Lorna B
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Volume I Number 2 November 1972 Sex Information and Education sREPORT Council of the U.S. THE HARDY BOYS DIDN'THAVEWETDREAMS by Lorna B. Flynn, M.A.* Let’s face it. /‘I/ probably develop into a rea- Today’s fictional twelve-year-old girls begin to men- sonably attractive woman as I grow older. struate, and the event is not always the culmination of the 1956 I may marry a worthwhile man and have a novel: “Harriet the Spy” in The Long Secret3 gets her period happy, stimulating life and scads of darling and goes right on trying to solve her mystery. For Margaret children. But right now at eighteen, I’m not in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,4 who “just wants to what is known as ‘date bait.” be normal,” getting her period is the sign that all will be OK. A third example is Abby in Somebody Will Miss Me, who was so sheltered by her grandparents that she was not expecting Naturally / told him. But ! didn’t ask him to the event. When her friend’s mother explained menstruation marry me. I told him I was pregnant and was to her, Abby’s world view changed: 1969 going to get an abortion and didn’t want to A woman! Suddenly everything else was forgiven, get him involved or to think I was forcing forgotten, in the rosy glow of that thought. Her body him into anything or pressure him. .2 was busy doing things for her.5 Today’s fictional male adolescents are also sexual. Fol- It is no surprise thal hone.st treatment of sexuality is part lowing the lead of John3Donovan’s award winning book /‘/I of today’s iic?tion for teenagers. Ten years ago Henry Miller’s Get there. It Better Be Worth The Trip,6 several deal openly Tropic of Cancer had just been published in the U.S. (It had with teenage homosexual experiences. In the Donovan book been published in France over twenty years earlier.) Today it and in Barbara Wersba’s novel, Run Softly, Go Fast’, a brief is only one of many adult novels dealing openly with explicit homosexual experience very usual to adolescents is blown all sex. As indicated by the quotations above, novels for adoles- out of proportion by adults who panic because of their own cents have also changed. If they did not deal with the sexual ignorance. However, neither book revolves around the experi- aspects of their characters’ lives, one wonders how widely ence. Sticks and Stones8 is set in a small town and has a read they would be. Young people have access to adult fiction “Children’s Hour” type of plot about a teenage boy who be- like Portnoy’s Complaint and The Godfather. Shouldn’t they comes close friends with a young man who had been dis- read about sex on their own level? charged from the military service because he was a homo- Many adults denigrate today’s fiction for adolescents be- sexual. The teenager is not aware of this part of his friend’s cause they feel either that teenagers should be reading “the past. In The Man Without a Face,9 a homosexual relationship classics” and nonfiction, or that they are old enough to read between the protagonist, Charles, and his tutor, Justin adult literature. This does a great injustice to both books and McLeod, is implicit. readers. The preteen and early teen years are, as we all know, Other books about teenage boys deal with heterosexual a time of great physical and emotional growth. Today’s fic- interaction and with reaching puberty. Thirteen-year-old Tony tion written for this age group offers a wealth of guidance and in Then Again, Maybe / Won’t’0 spends his evenings watching reassurance not available to them in adult fiction. It also the girl next door undress and experiences his first nocturnal offers a vehicle for communication, between parent and child, emission when he dreams about her. Dan in Getting It All To- among teenagers themselves, and in classroom discussion. A getheP has a lot of trouble letting a girl know that he likes sizeable group of teenagers do not read nonfiction-even the her, and Angela and Buddy in June Jordan’s His Own Where12 excellent books about sex. These young people especially can have a beautiful and touching physical relationship. These profit from fiction which includes discussion of sexual con- situations are a far cry from the novels which were popular cerns. From it they (and teenagers who do read nonfiction fifteen years ago. The teenage Hardy Boys, for instance, never as well) can learn facts as well as healthy attitudes about sex- even thought about girls. uality. They can also learn how to recognize in others some of The degree of sophistication of the reader is the deter- the characteristics of unhealthy sexual attitudes. mining factor in which novels will be most appropriate and useful in value formation. Books like Andyj3 which reflect a “wait ‘till marriage” ethic do so in a way which is not too *Ms. Flynn is Publications Officer of SIECUS. “preachy.” What’s important here is that not too many year; Continued on page 2 I I j SPEAKING OUT The panic button type of approach to educational pro- staff, rarely in consultation with behavioral science faculties, grams in sexuality has been evidenced in various educational much less the students themselves, such a “course” might institutions ever since the beginning of SIECUS. At first it was consist, as in one case, of a series of 18 weekly lectures that, the “Sex education is the ‘in thing’ and we’ve got three months in addition to the usuals of birth control, abortion and preg- to write a K-12 curriculum, how do we do it?” type. SIECUS nancy, and homosexuality, also included such supposedly was flooded by these requests in spite of our continued warn- “with it” topics as vaginal politics, sex and racism, and as- ings that such a project ought to take three years, not months, pects of male and female liberation. and to involve the best minds in the entire community. Later Additionally, because this kind of program is built around the demands became the “Tell us how to produce sex educa- lecturers (some of them deliberately chosen because they are tion that will lower high school VD and pregnancy rates” type. regarded as “far out”) who are “big names” that will sup- Then came the right wing opposition smoke screen that posedly “pull in the students,” the lectures can be wildly dis- sent high school programs temporarily underground, and at- organized as to sequence of topics-and decidedly expensive. tention shifted to the college level-but again in panic button I would liken this approach to offering an advanced course in fashion. At first interest centered on contraceptive informa- Leninism and Marxism to incoming freshmen who have never tion, then the abortion question. Then, as surveys revealed had a course in world history. the abysmal ignorance of college students of the most elemen- In answering such requests, SIECUS points out two prime tary facts of sex and reproduction, colleges and universities factors: how much homework needs to be done by all those just becoming awwre of the need began their planning. It cen- concerned with planning-not just for the one year but on a tered around two types of programs: a three day symposium, continuing basis-and the necessity of involving students not or a series of weekly lectures with outside “experts” brought only in the planning but in continuing interaction and small in for both types. group discussions. This year there is a new note being sounded: the “Let’s Mary S. Calderone, M.D. meet the students where we think they’re at” type. Often Editor planned by the office of student personnel and the counseling Continued from page 1 does not fit naturally into the story or within the character ago, an author wanting to promote premarital abstinence development are worse than those which omit sexuality al- would not have written a teenage couple into a situation together. where they must make a conscious decision to postpone inter- Fiction for teenagers is keeping up with the changes and course. In the same book, the “control” couple has inter- needs of today. Where sexuality is part of a book, it is almost course, the girl gets pregnant and they have to get married in always geared to helping adolescents deal with their present a very depressing ceremony. A parallel book is My Darling, concerns. The recent novels discussed here are only a few of My Hamburger, quoted above, in which Liz ends up having an the many books now available which treat their characters as illegal abortion. We await the next step in the evolution: a whole, real people. Authors, editors and publishers must be responsible couple who decide to have intercourse, and go to a encouraged to continue this healthy trend, and to make these Planned Parenthood clinic first! books available in inexpensive soft cover. Communication with the young being a major concern to- References on page 70 day, parents should not pass up any opportunity to read some of the new fiction for teenagers to find out what the real con- cerns of young people are. They might be shocked by Barbara Wersba’s moving novel in which a boy runs away from home Sk33JS REPORT Volume I, Number 2 and lives with his girlfriend in Greenwich Village, but the November, 1972 book is really about the generation gap and a young man’s The S/ECUS Report is published br-monthly with volumes inability to communicate with his father.