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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Would the legislators intervening be permissible in your view if the legislators believe that the librarians are doing a poor job at curation?

An example of this is the right's claim that many of these banned books are almost pornographic in nature and inappropriate for almost any age. From the right's perspective, the legislators are intervening because the librarians are failing at their curation and safety job.

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Yes, that would be a perfectly reasonable legislation. The burden would be on the legislators to clearly articulate their viewpoint, and provide reasonable justification for why those materials are inappropriate for any age.

Currently, some of the 850 "suspicious titles" they are "looking into" include books like We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures [1]. This does not lead me to conclude that their chief concern is safety and curation.

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[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-mat...

Safety? Absolutely! But safety of what? Their own ideas and ideals at the cost of everyone else's.

>> An example of this is the right's claim that many of these banned books are almost pornographic in nature.

I'm pretty sure illustrations of people having sex and an illustration of a younger child giving an older child oral sex falls into that category:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FBdP1kYXoAA_c0T?format=jpg&name=...

People lost their minds when a woman read several pages from the book "Gender Queer" by Maia Kobabe.

What’s the context of those images? It seems perfectly appropriate for highschool.

I've seen people downplaying the contents book using arguments like "these kids are already looking at porn, so who cares?" Whatever, I don't have an issue with that. Been there, done that.

But how about this one? What if you're one of the many kids who want to but can't get laid in high school? Seeing teenage sex normalized by the school itself could lead to all kinds of additional insecurities.

If you’re a teenager who is having an emotional, strongly negative response to seeing fictional acts of sexual behavior in a comic because you can’t have actual sex, that is a perfect opportunity for you to reach out to adults in your life so you can have a clearly sorted talk about how to have a healthy relationship with sex and intimacy.

It takes two to tango.

Precisely, and being comfortable with yourself not having sex is very important. It affirms others have their own agency not to have sex with you and also can teach you ways to love yourself without depending on the dopamine of sex. If you have a strong, overwhelming, negative emotional response to other people having sex, just because you’re not having it then that’s a real issue that can be addressed through whatever support network you have to work on whatever you have in yourself that the actions of strangers having a good time doing something unrelated to you somehow harms you.

Does it normalize it? Lots of art contains sex, even explicit sex and representations of rape. Having some event be part of somebody’s story does not automatically promote that activity.

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