Thoughts on "Young Adult" Fiction

To this day, my favorite job ever was working as a data entry clerk. I spent 20 hours a week while I was in college and grad school typing in the metadata for books in the general interest section of the ASUC bookstore, which meant I spent 20 hours a week leafing through catalogs of books for both academics and a lay audience, including an extensive section of children's books. 

Some time between then and now—I'm sure the internet could tell me but I don't feel like looking it up—the publishing industry invented the category "young adult" or YA, for short. They are books meant for ages from tweens to actual young adults. The books are often genre bending stories that might otherwise be difficult to shelve in a brick-and-mortar store.  In the US at least, the fact that they are marketed to minors means you can talk about murder, torture, and all manner of horrifying dystopia—so long as nobody fucks. 

One of my enduring interests is the way that the culture views sex. People hit puberty an average of five years before they become legal adults in the US, and there is a peculiar, self-contradicting obsession with the sexuality of people who are biologically capable of sex and reproduction, but not yet legally or emotionally mature. In the interest of protecting them—quite necessarily!—from an evidently inexhaustible supply of Republica—uh, predators, the reaction is often to pretend like they are always and forever victims who do not have agency or libido. I often wonder whether the adults who cry about 17-year-old children* being exploited remember what it was to be 14 and horny. And if they don't, if they are in the position of never ever talking and listening to their own pubescent offspring. 

A response to the criticism that YA fiction contains no sex has been to say that children's books are not FOR adults, and so should not contain sex. The children and their books should be left to their chaste innocence.

Allow me to retort: Maggie told me she knew of a cadre of girls who had made a pact to lose their virginity—at the eighth grade semi-formal. Forget prom and the despicable movie 🐓Blockers. These girls were claiming to be set on—with absolutely NO practical probability of—having intercourse at 13. 

Please, tell me again about how "young adults" aren't interested in sex. 

FWIW, my child, who knows that her body belongs to her and her alone, and that sexual feelings are part of being human after a certain age that no one else can chose for you, wondered aloud if they were planning to do it in the backs of their parents' SUVs as they were being driven home, all being too young to drive themselves anywhere. 🙄

Naturally, none of this is to say that children do not need to be protected, but as with so much of life, everything is contextual. Fending off fundamental biological urges for five years is a lot to ask. Forty-five-year-olds scheming to get with perfectly legally-consenting 20-year-olds is kinda gross. A non damaging space somewhere in between would be ideal.

And all of this thinking on my part comes about because I am writing a book that would comfortably fit into the YA category—alternate history with a magical element—except that I will not back away from sexuality.

Eh. There are no more brick-and-mortar stores, so who cares where it would be shelved...