Book Banning and How I've Come to Know and Appreciate Formulaic Sexual Literary Climaxes

At the therapeutic boarding school I work for, I have been elected as Fräulein Fahrenheit451 and when my girls approach me with baskets and boxes of hodgepodge novel collections both literary and trashy, both beautiful and perverted, both Boxcar Children and vampire romance, I can't help but feel like I am a foot taller and forty pounds thinner, with a sharply pulled back bun that makes my eyes stretch wider to further scrutinize, judge, accuse, and condemn.....the better to damn you into silence with, my pretty *cackle cackle*

It's an unfortunate position, and one that I gladly procrastinate by writing 2008 Holiday Goal Lists while the books on my desk continue to pile and pile. The math teacher I share a room with occasionally asks me how would I like it if he stacked protractors and graphing paper all over the desk. Well, I'd like it very much, sir. I think protractors are funny and nostalgic. But he would never get away with it. Girls have cut themselves with blunter objects, and thus the protractors get locked away on Weldon's side of the desk when math class is over.

I enjoy banning The Clique series (Sealed with a Diss, Bratfest at Tiffany's, Best Friends for Never) or any books where the biographical information on the authors include how they worked for bikini magazines at Laguna Beach before hosting various crap MTV programs until they realized their true calling in life: writing young adult trash fiction. I'll ban those all day. Send 'em my way.

I also don't have a problem banning most fantasy romance novels where super sexy werewolf bad boys with depressing pasts are suddenly smitten into borderline repentance and submission to the pale, frail, wonderfully misunderstood high school virgins who want so badly to find release from their "lame" responsibilities to family and community. Far better for the girl to drink the blood of the undead and chase adventures so long as she gets to sleep with the werewolf before she graduates. (Some of these are pretty graphic, too...I read a passage where a girl had to drink the blood leaking from the dying vampire's mouth as she made out with him in order to rid him of the poison he had unknowingly drank. It's beyond macabre...this is past Poe's burying still-beating hearts beneath the floorboards...it's out-and-out Elizabeth Bathory bleeding out her victims and taking baths in their blood to get aroused.)

Which brings me to my point: I am getting damn good at figuring out these cheap formulaic smut frameworks. Hand me a questionable grocery store aisle fiction book and I'll flip right to the bedroom scene. Go about 3/4 of the way in, just before things start to wrap up. Everything before that is just foreplay. Guaranteed if the main character girl meets a boy in the first or second chapter and the author describes anything about his build or his emotions or either of their lips or makes any kind of reference to water or food, they'll be sucking face or doing the deed for the novel's climax. It's getting depressing, really. I feel like Freud when he first realized everything must just come down to sex after all. All of the "problems" or "crises" in the stories are just subplots. It's not really about the spaceship looming closer and closer to the earth's atmosphere or the fact that the vampire boy faces an immortality of drinking other peoples' blood--the real issue is that all the characters are sexually frustrated and issues can't be resolved until there is some type of physical release.

My job is to decide which releases are appropriate for my at-risk teenage girls, most of which have had the type of ecstasy-influenced sexual experiments that I will never have, even if I do end up jumping in the sack with somebody someday. The making out descriptions are embarrassing, but pretty PG on average. I've had to submit myself to crap like this: "we were a wheel of tongues and fingers, and my joy was at its peak"--ugh, it's more of a turn-off than anything. I laugh when they try to get me to approve Nora Roberts' smut. I am an expert at WheresWaldo-ing her sexy scenes. And not because the whole book is full of sex either. They are literally a hundred and fifty pages of slow, painfully boring foreplay that eventually leads into these awful sexual release chapters that make me blush head to foot and I can't stop reading them once I find them because I am so curious of both the act itself and the Dirty Danny Tanner way she writes about it. It's so.......domestic. And nasty. All at the same time. It's like watching a Murder She Wrote episode where Angela Lansbury has to go undercover as a sex slave to catch Mr. Moorehead in confession for killing a prostitute that was also his daughter. I swear that was in a book I just banned. Maybe not.

Some banned books I keep on my desk so I can read them. I flirt with Clockwork Orange while the girls do their freewriting exercises. Some books I approve wholeheartedly but nobody confesses that the book is theirs because they didn't really want to read it in the first place. I have been thoroughly enjoying and fully approving Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I have to be careful with that one because it makes me laugh aloud. If no one takes responsibility for it by the time I finish it sometime next week, I'm just going to lend it to some of my favorite students who will appreciate it.

Book censorship is a drag. I hate letting smut go through just because it's PG-rated smut while I have to censor Sylvia Plath, Chuck Palahnuik, and Alice Walker for the maybe obvious reasons that some girls are not mature enough to separate the truth from the characters. Where we might read questions, they might read justifications. Where we might find open eyes and understanding, they might find allies and blind faith. The Bell Jar triggers real bell jars, The Fight Club triggers real fight clubs. The Color Purple gives them possible good reasons to experiment with each other in secret bathroom meetings (something we already have a problem with this week).

I feel so pessimistic about the literature I find my girls enthralled over. J.K. Rowling was great. I refuse to read Stephanie Meyers, though I certainly have enough friends who say her books are comparable--though certainly more shallow. When I was a teen, I actually enjoyed the books I read in English class--I devoured Ray Bradbury, John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Samuel Beckett and Chaim Potok. That's why I became an English major. So I can't empathize completely with these girls who need more stepping stones to great literature. More Goosebumps series or whathaveyou.

So.....................maybe I'll write my own book for teenagers. Maybe. And I can tell you right now, it won't have anything to do with wizards, vampires, or boxcars. Well, maybe a train will be involved. Definitely ghosts. And the climax WON'T be a make-out scene. I'll throw the romance bit in there for kicks I suppose, but I refuse to write a novel that can be graphed out to mimic the formula for a roll in the hay. Although, if I do have a romance scene, it will definitely take place on a haystack. That's hot.