Advocates of literacy like to repeat some form of Joan Didion’s famous adage, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” And they’re right. The only problem is that lately, they seem to be talking about all the wrong stories.
“The stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we hear and read and absorb along the way in life, these are essential elements that make up who we are,” actor LeVar Burton recently intoned in a podcast with failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “That’s what’s so confusing to me about this whole issue of banning books … is that it just doesn’t make sense, and so I’m trying to look at the underlying cause, and what I keep coming back to is that this is a power play. It’s an effort to exercise control.”
Burton, who once hosted the PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow, is right about stories but wrong about book bans. The same goes for his literary-minded peers. The last full week in September is Banned Books Week, meaning that librarians and politicians are busily declaring that we are approaching Fahrenheit 451 levels of intellectual catastrophe. This tradition has been with us since the 1980s, but it has taken an interesting direction in the past few years.
Book banning ain’t what it used to be. These days, the majority of objections to children’s literature come from parents concerned about sexual content, something even the Washington Post admitted last year. Just take a look at the most-challenged titles.
According to the American Library Association’s top 10 banned books of 2023, some include profanity or mention of drugs, seven include “LGBTQIA+” content, and all 10 of them are purported to be “sexually explicit.”
Sure, parents may object to their children reading about sex in the school library, but that’s not the first thing the anti-book banners will mention. Fighting book bans is just about defeating “censorship”! It’s also a great way to rake in cash.
Banned Books Week is supported by over 20 organizations, including the ALA, GLAAD, and PEN America, according to its website. Penguin Random House helps fund the project. Perhaps not coincidentally, at least two of this year’s most-banned titles were produced by the publishing house.
One of these titles is Let’s Talk About It: The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human. The book includes the chapter headings “What is … sexting?” and “What are … kinks, fantasies, and porn?”
One panel of the graphic novel features a teenager bewildered by the mysteries of sex: “And what about kinky people who do these things that are TOTALLY sexual, but it’s not, like, SEX-sex — like, uh, like spanking or being tied up with ropes and dangled from the ceiling???”
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The next page includes the names of various sexual acts that are unprintable here, much less appropriate for 14-year-old high school freshmen to read.
When people such as Burton opine about the “fallacy and irresponsibility” of book bans, remember that they are either willfully ignorant of the type of books that are drawing parents’ ire, or they really believe these books belong in the hands of children. Either way, the great American literary institutions are attempting to mislead us all in order to seem more relevant. If only they could let the books speak for themselves.