Betrothal, isn’t it, not marriage? (From distant memory…)
I have read the WuBC and I can’t recall any sex at all. There’s a bikini-clad Lolita figure at the beginning, but no hanky panky, and the rest is weirdness and horrendous, awful WWII violence. (Maybe there’s some analogy I missed, or maybe the girl in question has a filthy mind…)
Love that the girl who objects isn’t objecting to the violence, either.
Underage kids have no trouble getting into R rated movies if they want to, and that’s not a law, it’s the way the movie industry operates. That aside, how do you think most 16-year-olds feel about that rule? I know how I felt about it when I was 16 - and it’s the same way I feel now.
No, they’re married between acts two and three.
There’s definitely sex in there, although it gets tough to figure out what’s going on. The way I remember it, he has sex with a woman in the “hotel,” and I think something sexual happens with Creta.
There’s a link to some excerpts in the OP. The phone sex part seemed pretty racy to me, certainly racier than anything I was ever assigned to read in high school.
I don’t know – from that passage, the book seems pretty inappropriate to me for a high school class.
I know there’s pretty explicit sex in Wild Sheep Chase. And it seems typical of his work. But at her age, I was getting the unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels as school assignments, and I don’t think it’s any worse than that.
Good author, though, strongly recommend.
Here’s an excerpt from the NY Times excerpt:
–
“Then let me help you,” she said. “I’m in bed. I just got out of the shower, and I’m not wearing a thing.”
Oh, great. Telephone sex.
“Or would you prefer me with something on? Something lacy. Or stockings. Would that work better for you?”
“I don’t give a damn. Do what you like,” I said. “Put something on if you want to. Stay naked if you want to. Sorry, but I’m not interested in telephone games like this. I’ve got a lot of things I have to-”
“Ten minutes,” she said. “Ten minutes won’t kill you. It won’t put a hole in your life. Just answer my question. Do you want me naked or with something on? I’ve got all kinds of things I could put on. Black lace panties . . .”
“Naked is fine.”
“Well, good. You want me naked.”
“Yes. Naked. Good.”
Four minutes.
“My pubic hair is still wet,” she said. “I didn’t dry myself very well. Oh, I’m so wet! Warm and moist. And soft. Wonderfully soft and black. Touch me.”
“Look, I’m sorry, but-”
“And down below too. All the way down. It’s so warm down there, like butter cream. So warm. Mmm. And my legs. What position do you think my legs are in? My right knee is up, and my left leg is open just enough. Say, ten-oh-five on the clock.”
I could tell from her voice that she was not faking it. She really did have her legs open to ten-oh-five, her sex warm and moist.
(Mods – I hope this excerpt is small enough to be OK)
I was forced to do this to this book as a high school English teacher, after whining from 12th grade girls escalated to a complaint to my supervisor. There’s one big reason I stopped teaching high school.
Aren’t 12th graders 18 or so?
What RitterSport quoted (thanks, btw), which is apparently as far as Ms. Mercado read before saying “Ew, gross” is hardly as graphic as anything in Judy Bloom’s “Forever”, which I recall being very popular among girls in my school during 8th grade.
From the link in Thudlow’s post:
She’d rather not try to imagine “it”… sex… at 16…
I’m glad she wants to be able to live with herself, because with an attitude like that, no one else will want to live with her.
Ah, that’s interesting. The OP just goes to a comment page, and a much more detailed version of the article is here.
<<Nevermind - the OP already posted this>> The selection there is the whole first chapter, and I admit I forgot about the phone sex thing.
Right, but Forever, while the cause of many giggles (and a comment from my 7th grade Spanish teacher that it’s the kind of book where, if you drop it, always opens to that page), was never required reading.
Hey, I don’t think the book should be banned or anything, or removed from public libraries, but it’s on the racy side to be required reading in my opinion. I don’t think we read anything that racy in high school back in the '80s.
It’s an IB course, though–the coursework is supposed to be advanced, about on par with the first year or two of college. If she doesn’t want to do advanced work, I am sure there is a regular English class available.
They’re high school students. They’re adults. I dropped out of high school mainly because I was fed up with being treated like a child. It sickens me to see a high schooler asking to be treated more like a child.
I think the minister would rather white it out. And you don’t even want to know what he would use to do so. Let’s just say, it’s not store-bought white-out; it’s homemade.
In any case, if we start setting a precedent that a student can choose not to read a book because she’s offended by the sexuality in it, then students can claim to be offended by all sorts of things, just to get out of reading a book they find boring. Students could claim to be viciously phobic of Russian women and therefore should be exempted from reading Anna Karenina - who’s to say that their phobia of Russian women is less psychologically-jarring than someone else’s phobia of sexuality.
If I were an English teacher, one of the key concepts I’d try to get across to my students is that words are ultimately just words. I’d have them read Ballard, Delany, Keshner. They’d read about semen-stained leatherette seats in crashing convertibles, 11-year old cocksuckers and dick cheese recipes, and singing karaoke through the thin, straight pubic hairs of a Filipina prostitute sitting on your face. They would learn that all words are ultimately just combinations of letters, which are ultimately just marks on a page. (Why the fuck does Firefox’s spellchecker not recognize the word “combinations?”)
Clearly I’ve read so much injurious literature that I’m now inured to sex in books and had completely forgotten that bit.
I’ll be in my bunk.
The phone sex reads like a letter to Penthouse.
When I was in 9th grade literature the first half of a semester was taken up entirely by Greek mythology. One girl in the class pretty much spent the entirety of that section in independent study. Knowing what little I did about her I have a strong suspicion that her parents objected to the course content on religious grounds. She ended up with her own reading, her own assignments, and when it came time to have class discussion and lecture on Greek mythology she went out into the hallway. So far as I can recall she ended up passing the course and making it into the 10th grade. Should the school district simply have decided to fail her?
You probably wouldn’t be an English teacher in most high schools for very long. Not that individual teachers set the curriculum for their courses anyway. Nor do I believe most lovers of literature would appreciate your characterization that words are just a combination of letters on a page. Literally (heh, see what I did there?) you’re correct but they represent ideas that have far more meaning that just words on a page.
Minors are compelled to attend public schools. Even if you can legally drop out at the age of 16 many states pass laws designed to punish them for doing so. No drivers license being the only one I can think of off the top of my head. I suppose we can’t cater to every single individual that doesn’t want to read an assigned book but can’t we be a bit flexible?
I’m pretty sure you’re joking but teachers are not really the adult guardians of their student. If that were the case they wouldn’t require students to get their permission slips for field trips signed by parents or guardians. I’m sure if I tried to get a teacher to sign mine she would have just told me to get it signed by my parents.
Odesio
The issue is not whether or not this book is an acceptable book for the college level High School class for which it is assigned. Neither this student nor her parents are objecting to its being the book for the class as a whole.
The issue is how to handle a student who is preparing for college, taking a college level class, and who demands an individualized curriculum for their particular preferences and sensitivities, who demands to be sheltered from exposure to that which they consider to be objectionable thought.
Odesio if that girl was in an elective college prep class, do you think she would have been well served by opting out of Greek Mythology and getting some make work independent studies instead? Was her education even served well by allowing her to opt out in 9th grade in a required class? It seems to me that the school could have decided to require that she complete the material that is the curriculum of the school. If she (or her parents) refused then they would be the ones who decided that she would fail.
Some flexibility yes, but how far? This young woman is not required to take that class; for her to demand that its curriculum be modified specifically for her does seem a bit much, even if I could see a great teacher responding to an articulate and polite request.
It’s still not clear to me why she’s objecting to the book. See below:
If it’s because she objects to the subject matter, then tough titties. If she reads a lot, surely she knows that characters in books do all sorts of objectionable things. But if, as the latter paragraph suggests, it’s because she’s a reader with a vivid imagination and has trouble with the images it conjures up in her mind, I’m inclined to grant her a little more leeway. It’s one thing to require someone to know or read about something; it’s another to require them to experience it, even vicariously. I’m still not sure she should be exempted in this case, but this sort of objection could well be valid. Should a high school student be required to read scenes of graphically-described torture? What about rape or molestation (which could be particularly disturbing if the student had been raped or molested herself)?
And yet, they can conjure up vivid images and vicarious experience.
I was 16 throughout 12th grade. I had skipped a grade, and was a year younger than my classmates. I wonder if a similar thing is true of this girl. In any case, intellectually advanced does not necessarily mean emotionally advanced, or socially advanced or sexually advanced.
Such trust in authority figures!
Maybe this is a side debate, but I’m left wondering if it’s okay for high school kids to read about sexual abuse (like my senior year class did in The Bluest Eye) but not about sex.
Thudlow she was not being required to take that class. She could have dropped it and would still have graduated High School; she risked the optional IB program that is supposed to be for advanced students ready to tackle college level material in a mature manner.
In any case the updated link now states that she will, like Odesio’s 9th grade classmate, be allowed to read something different instead.
And I do not have a problem with a teacher allowing for that at their discretion with knowledge of the specific ways and wherefores of the objection. If the administration is forcing that upon the teacher then this is a very bad decision. I can say however in any case that if I was an admissions dean at a halfway decent college I would not want this student in my program. No matter what her GPA, class rank, and test scores. College is not the place for people who want to put their fingers in their ears and go “LaLaLa - I’m not listening!” to anything they find uncomfortable or are “totally against”.