As an aside, I find it amusing that Shakespeare is never banned on the grounds of sexual content. Perhaps people don't pay attention in English class?
Funny enough, I always assumed this same thing of the people who were trying to get Mark Twain books banned for the misuse of language =)
People who don't read books are always the ones who are the most afraid of the ideas contained within them, I suppose.
That said, I've been trying to find an example of a book in the "book ban" discussion that contains problematic graphic sex content. I've tried looking and so far everything has turned up pretty empty.
Nobody thinks the book causes that sexualization. The point is that it’s an implicit sanction from parental and teacher authority.
Not long ago, I was 13. At that age, I read books like Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, and A Clockwork Orange. The very fact I now have to type that I knew that sex was a natural part of life perhaps speaks to the deterioration of our educational standards. Regardless, even I understood then that the sexual perversion of those works weren't their raison d'étre. I'm grateful I had an English teacher who guided me in that respect. Likewise, I earnestly hope others have similar instructors, who don't define a work by its depictions of acts of reality, however sordid they may be.
We were reading out loud in class the prologue for Romeo and Juliet... and the teacher would occasionally pause the reading to explain the text.
A more full account of the events is in https://everything2.com/user/m_turner/writeups/Shakespearean... which I wrote when it was closer to the present and more fresh in my mind.
So yes, at least one class of Generation X high school students got every joke in Romeo and Juliet.
> ... wrote when it was closer to the present and more fresh in my mind.
The thought came to me -- being now at an age a few years greater than yours -- that my own collection of memories on similar events has been fading, and those from youth of course being irreplaceable.
Solution: Write them down, only those I'd want to savor again in years ahead. In the form of notes, at least. The act of writing slowly -- over the course of nearly a year now -- puts a light on others in the dusty attic.
Next step is to work up the more amusing and less private of them into anecdotes, for sharing with trusted friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2
> According to E2's "Site Trajectory", traffic has dropped from 9976 new write-ups created in the month of August 2000, down to 93 new write-ups in February 2017.
https://everything2.com/node/superdoc/Site+Trajectory and https://everything2.com/node/superdoc/Site+Trajectory+2
(It looks like its down to a small core of people)
The key is to record it somewhere. Be it Storycorps ( https://www.npr.org/series/4516989/storycorps ) or a second brain ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188418 ). Spin up a Wordpress blog and write there (aside, one of my projects is digging through the files from a hard drive of a laptop a bit ago where I wrote using Apple's blogging / web hosting software.
Writing without care of who (if anyone) reads it - for the sheer sake of writing - feels like a dying art form at times.
Oh, wait.