The headline above was the title of the panel I had the pleasure of moderating at the Loft Literary Center’s Children’s & YA writing conference last weekend (April 25-27). The other panel members were: Kirstin Cronn-Mills, Molly Beth Griffin, Dawn Klehr, Juliann Rich and Elizabeth Wheeler. Between the six of us, we read scenes about sex, sexual identity, and gender identity and covered a pretty broad spectrum of GLBT (though we may have been a little short on the Q).
Below are the stats that I cited at the start of the panel, plus some bonus stats:
From the Teen Lit Lab studies — 250 teens surveyed n 2009 (read the whole Sex in Young Adult Literature paper here):
- 13.4% of girls said that the general level of sexual content in teen novels underestimates their level of sexual activity
- 32% of male respondents suggested that sex in YA Lit was most often tamer than what they personally experience
- 46% say that, in general, YA books overestimate the level of sexual activity they engage in
When teens were asked to rank (in order of importance) the reasons they read YA fiction with explicit sexual content:
- ‘‘To be entertained’’ was the number one reason across all age groups (14-18)
- Exploring situations they’ve not yet encountered was most often listed as the second most important reason
- 20-25% of all teens responded that they read YA literature with sexual content to ‘‘get frank information about topics they might feel uncomfortable asking a friend or adult about.’’
- Teens were similarly unanimous in selecting the least important reason——‘‘to become sexually aroused’’
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