‘Is there a hierarchy of depicting Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll in Young Adult literature?’

Ask Alice is an online column produced by the #LoveOzYA team, and written by our Secretary, Alice Boer-Endacott, who has published several young adult fantasy novels and a non-fiction essay.

Ask Alice is designed to unpack all aspects of the Australian young adult literary scene, so if you’ve got a question, go ahead and Ask Alice!

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about sex. And if that line pulled you in, boy does sex really sell. I’ve not been thinking of the deed per se, but about the number of narratives in mainstream popular culture which feature relatively explicit sexual content (think Fourth Wing, A Court of Thorns and Roses, Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon). This feels like a relatively new thing.

As George R R Martin, author of Game of Thrones (who is also involved in its tv prequel, House of the Dragon), so succinctly pointed out, “I can write a scene and describe in detail a penis entering a vagina, and there will be a portion of the audience who get very upset about that. But I can write a scene about an axe entering a human skull and nobody will complain about that. Generally speaking I’m much more in favour of penises entering vaginas than of axes entering heads. People seem to accept the violence much easier than they accept the sex.”

When it comes to content aimed at a younger readership, this remains true, but often with a greater degree of gatekeeping and censorship. This is especially interesting to me as there seems to be increasing levels of (relatively) graphic sexual content in the books theoretically targeted for younger people. A quick note: I’m generally referring to consensual sexual encounters, here, as this is a different conversation again if we broaden this definition.

While there is a separate and interesting discussion to be had about whether there is an increasing need for books explicitly labelled as New Adult, I’ve been musing on why there is so little concern about the prevalence of other content which might be deemed problematic – I recently saw Deadpool 3 which was replete with violence and profanity, and was uncomfortably surprised by the number of children under 12 in the cinema. Thus, after that typically long preamble, we arrive at this month’s question: Is there a hierarchy of depicting Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll in Young Adult literature and if so, why? 

To help me answer this month’s question, I reached out to the amazing Carey Secondary Library team (who have a great Instagram profile), and Dr Rachel Hennessy, a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

To the question of whether some content is more acceptable for younger readers than other content, the Carey team noted, “we think that profanity (within reason) is the most acceptable, followed by sexual content and then violence. However, we believe that violent content seems to be more readily accepted than sexual content in wider society. If profanity has been noted, it may be something we flag with a year 7 reader […] Australian vernacular seems to contain more swearing than UK/US and this is echoed in YA books. This is the way teens speak to each other, so realistically the odd swear word here and there is to be expected.” Rachel observed, “I think there’s a general consensus that publishers don’t often gatekeep as much when it comes to depictions of violence (the easiest example being the explicit violence in The Hunger Games, which seemed rarely to raise an eyebrow) in comparison to depictions of sex.”

Across my research, I struggled to find a particular rationale for why there seems to be such stigma around sex in particular. One blog I found (which I’ve declined to link to because I’m not comfortable platforming a lot of the content within it) claimed they differentiated between allowing their teenagers to read sexual content and violent content. Their reason: reading sexual content was likely to elicit a physical response. In fairness, they emphasised they were also considering the maturity level of their children as part of determining what they let their children read, which is something I fully support. However, this reasoning about differing responses to different content is still worth unpacking.

First, the empirical. Is it actually true? I spent quite a while searching. I couldn’t find any research into whether readers – younger or otherwise – have different neurological or physical responses depending on the content they read. Rachel echoed this, saying, “I’m not aware of any empirical research into how younger readers receive sex versus violence in writing for young people.” That’s not to say readers might receive different content differently. However, I think it’s worth challenging the claim, as if we’re saying one kind of content is more acceptable than another, the claims on which we base this differentiation need verified supporting evidence.

We might not have an immediate response to reading graphically violent content in the way that we can when reading sexual content. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect us. While not necessarily inciting us to become more aggressive (this literature review confirmed as much about video games), descriptions of bloody stumps, oozing wounds, and aggressive behaviour can nevertheless be disturbing to read.

The second challenge to this claim: is it actually a problem if younger people were to have a physical response (ok, let’s call a spade a spade: get a little bit aroused) to reading depictions of sexual content in a way they might not have when reading depictions of violent content (which would be, I suppose, the urge to punch someone)? I’m inclined to agree with the Carey team’s observation, “Some of the violence depicted in YA is very graphic and this worries us more than sexual content as it can be very confronting especially if in a realistic context.” I could just as easily argue that the representation of graphic violence dehumanises people and desensitises readers to particular actions which are not acceptable. Violence is something that we as a society claim is never acceptable, so it’s curious that there seems to be a general lack of concern about graphic depictions of it.

By contrast, as the Carey team observed, “Sexual content that is depicted as part of a healthy, consensual relationship is very acceptable! YA books portray teens and this is what teens do. We believe that is better for young people to read about sex than to google it.” They made the other prescient observation, “perhaps parents mistakenly believe that if their children do not read about sex then they will not do it. Young people should be guided by the age of the character in the book and be aware that they will be doing age-appropriate things that they may not be ready for yet. Books are a great, safe way for readers to explore the world before living the reality.”

The Carey library noted their approach to sexual content in the context of “an increased market for romantasy: sex sells!” is to bear in mind “these books [such as Fourth Wing, or A Court of Thorns and Roses] are not necessarily written with a YA audience in mind. When considering if a book is suitable for a YA audience, we question why the sexual content exists, especially as we consider where our readers are at in life and experiences. It matters that it’s part of the development of the character and not just there as shock value.”

The key here seems to be that whatever the content is, it needs to be in YA books; presented in a way that a younger set of life experiences can use to meaningfully help build their understanding of the world, and how they might move through it. This is a vital distinction. YA books by the definitions we ascribe to YA as a genre (I’ve said before I classify YA as a genre) feature characters whose ages are similar to those of their readership. As the Carey team noted, they therefore depict sexual experiences which are generally characteristic of people around those ages, which allows the intended readership to relate to them more easily, and use them as tools to begin navigating these experiences and the associated concepts.

I didn’t really consider how important this point of nuance was until Rachel drew my attention to the Icebreaker controversy. Icebreaker is a 2022 romance novel more appropriate for a New Adult readership due to the characters being university-aged. However, it has been seemingly marketed toward a young adult readership due, in part, to the cover design – indeed, readers as young as 11 and 12 were requesting to read this due to its status as a BookTok ‘enemies-to-lovers’ sensation. As this article points out, “the publisher’s decision to commission a cartoon-style illustration for a sexually explicit novel is interesting” as “cartoon romance covers are reportedly a trend that […] deliberately or otherwise, also evoke YA [young adult] fiction.” This is concerning because the behaviour, sexually graphic content and behaviour of the characters is something a younger reader who is still wrapping their head around questions of sex, sexuality, and consent, might struggle to healthily unpack. “F*ck me like you hate me” is a line, apparently from the book, that’s been living rent-free in my head since reading this article last week. The kind of content in this book is therefore something I’d worry about younger readers consuming not because it’s sex, but because it presents questionably consensual and complex, arguably problematic, dynamics as ideal, desirable, and romantic without flagging this.

Yet while violence might be fine, and sex might sit in a ‘too much and too restricted’ space (drugs are quite hard to find any information on; I’ve also not come across a lot of YA books which explicitly discuss or depict drug use), it’s worth noting there are other subjects which can manage to cause a stir. Rachel also sent through a link to  this Conversation article which explores an attempt to ban Gender Queer, a graphic novel memoir which, as the title suggests, explores the author’s experiences in coming out as non-binary. Something the article points out, which I didn’t know, was that “Australia has a long history of book banning and before Gough Whitlam’s government in the 1970s, was one of the most censorious countries in the English-speaking world,” deriving primarily from Christian organisations and churches organising movements to ban particular books (which at one time included Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World).

This is something of which I often have to remind myself: I grew up and operate in a relatively liberal sphere. That’s not representative for other parts of Australia. Indeed, as the Carey library staff noted, “people from conservative backgrounds may want to restrict what is available. We are lucky that we work in a very liberal school with no mandates on the types of books that we are allowed to shelve in the library.” In this context, there are concerns about and restrictions on depictions of sex, violence, or drugs. However, what flies under the radar are the efforts to restrict other type of content. This was something many of us unpleasantly discovered at the start of this year when the owner of Robinsons bookshop called for books with “no wheelchair, rainbow or indigenous art, [and] non indig aus history.”

As often happens, I’m ending this column in a very different place to where I expected. However, I’ve found that questions of appropriate content and content restriction are rarely neatly confined and straightforward discussions.

People seem to get a bee in their bonnets about sexual content of any kind. Yet when sex is depicted in a consensual, respectful way that is relevant to the life experiences of the readers, there seems to be little compelling reason to curtail it. However, this approach comes from a perspective which believes restricting content should always be approached with caution. There are efforts to curtail content on grounds informed by a more censorious worldview. Understanding what might drive how we determine the level of comfort with sex, (drugs,) or rock n roll [violence], seems to be key to informing how we then treat that content.

My eternal thanks to the Carey Secondary Library team and Dr Rachel Hennessy for their time and generosity of responses.