#and again why are the pro-censorship crowd so fixated on kids having sex?

[fussystreetlight]

https://youtu.be/D_aRzXXCv4s

I'm referring to the comments on this video because they give me a headache. No one thinks more about sex, and kids, and "kids in sexual situations" than pro-censorship people do. I don't know why they think book banning is "making sure the Kama Sutra isn't in elementary schools" but...it's not. It's really not. (I also don't like how most of the commenters are acting like the other side is just blowing things out of proportion and making a big deal out of nothing so they can hurt kids because that's what they were told. The first part of that rhetoric can easily be used by certain people to commit or sweep atrocities under the rug. And the second part, that's just the typical anti-lgbtq+ rhetoric...)

Anyway, that's not really the majority of the stuff that gets banned.

I only know about book bans in America so I can't speak about other places. And this is the site I normally use: https://pen.org/

Some of the top banned books were:

Nineteen Minutes by Jodie Picoult:

"Sterling is an ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens--until the day its complacency is shattered by a school shooting. Josie Cormier, the daughter of the judge sitting on the case, should be the state's best witness, but she can't remember what happened before her very own eyes--or can she? As the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show--destroying the closest of friendships and families. Nineteen Minutes asks what it means to be different in our society, who has the right to judge someone else, and whether anyone is ever really who they seem to be."

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

"In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. At once a scathing satire, an ominous warning, and a tour de force of narrative suspense, The Handmaid’s Tale is a modern classic."

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison:

"In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment."

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie:

"Junior is a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot."

Yes there are some of Sarah J. Maas' books on the list, but they're trying to ban that from high schools (teens and toddlers are different age groups people, please stop infantizing teens).

Censorship isn't really about protecting kids from "books that predators will use to groom them" or "child molesters", it's not about not giving kids access to sexual content when they're too young for it, it's really not about protecting kids at all, and it's not about getting rid of "icky sex books" in general.

It's mostly about control and having power, especially over LGBTQ+ people and minorities. It's about the people in charge getting rid of any narrative that they personally don't like or silencing any voice that doesn't resemble theirs (anyone who's not a straight white rich man really).

And it's not about the fact that "well you can still get these books so banned books are a myth!" It's the fact that people are trying to make it harder for students to access these books. Books that can help them. Maybe they're going through a difficult time, maybe they're struggling with mental health issues, maybe their home life isn't great, maybe there aren't many other people in school like them. And these books have characters just like them, going through the same things. And it makes them feel less alone or helps them realize things about their situation and come to terms with it. But these helpful stories are the ones targeted the most. And it gets harder for anyone who's even slightly different to feel like they belong or that it's okay for them to exist and be themselves. Books being challenged and removed from libraries is about making people conform to what the people in power want them to be, and again, what they want them to be is what they can tolerate and use.

PS: some schools in Florida also had to take away and review dictionaries for "sexual conduct" because of a relatively recent bill (that seems to also be against teaching students important sex ed, "along with requiring schools to teach that "reproductive roles are binary, stable and unchangeable"). But also the Bible is apparently still allowed, despite having all that stuff people claim to dislike.