Sexual Propaganda Comes to Young Adult Fiction

I don’t want my son reading about fragility and unhealthy sexuality

Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash

Dear Coddling Movie Community,

It’s interesting and disturbing how the same types of narrow mindedness pops up in so many parts of our culture. 

In today’s essay, first-time contributor

LB

(who’s also member of the Coddling Movie Community) writes about her fascinating, frustrating, and very personal encounters with the world of Young Adult fiction.

You won’t want to miss it.

All the best,

Ted

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When I was growing up as a Korean-American in the 80’s and 90’s, there weren’t many characters in literature or film that looked like me. There was Claudia Kishi from The Babysitters’ Club series who was Japanese. It was the only book series I actually bought as a kid because she would be on the cover… sometimes. Then there was The Joy Luck Club about Chinese families. Seeing myself in books and on-screen did feel empowering and validating. I didn’t feel so invisible.  

In that sense, I am all for representation in literature and movies. What I am not for is throwing in characters to please a DEI panel. I’m also not for publishers and libraries promoting certain books to push a certain agenda onto everyone. If it’s a well-written character with flaws and vulnerabilities, one can connect with the character on a universal and human level no matter their pronouns or checkboxes. That exhibits how we are all more common than not. But when the reading audience is children, we should be more cognizant of what values we are portraying in literature. 

I currently moderate a writing group and a book club. Both are composed of Asian-American writers and readers. The books we pick cover all genres—memoir, historical fiction, YA fiction, and scifi/fantasy, but are always by Asian-American authors. It’s only been within the last few years that there are enough new books by Asian-American authors that we have several to choose from each month. The list is actually growing faster than we can read. The number of diverse books written by diverse authors increased four-fold between 2014 to 2022. For this, I am grateful. 

Besides our monthly book club picks, I also read other books on my own. Lately I’ve read a lot of YA fiction, which is not my preference but my friend has her own YA manuscript on submission currently. So we talk about recent titles that are out and I read some of them. The last handful of books have definitely shown a change. 

YA fiction is actually geared for high schoolers and maybe middle schoolers. All the main characters are typically in high school. Granted, many adults read YA fiction, but the important point is that all the characters tend to be minors. The books where the main protagonist is an actual young adult, 18+ years old, go into a category that is considered “new adult.” 

After recently completing one YA title, I lamented with a friend that it was the third book in a row that I read with lesbian sex and nonbinary characters in it. I told her that if I were a 15-year-old girl, I’d probably want to become lesbian too from reading these books. Thankfully, I haven’t been a teenage girl in over thirty years so I won’t be switching identities because of a few books. 

However, I can certainly see how my 13-year-old self would read these and wonder, “Gee, maybe I should try to be in a relationship with a girl? It seems like it’s so cool and all the cool girls are doing it. I don’t see any examples of girls with boys in the books I read… I don’t see any examples of boy characters who I would want to date in a book.”  

These were all titles published this year:

Book 1—was actually the third book in a YA series and took place in Taiwan.

The characters are all Asian-American high schoolers. Overall the story was enjoyable, but I kept getting distracted by a side-character who was nonbinary. (The fact that she was nonbinary had no impact on the story whatsoever.) It was confusing when the author kept using “they” instead of “she,” even in the regular prose and not just within dialogue. 

When the protagonist introduces the nonbinary friend to her immigrant Chinese mother and says “You can use they/them for [Name]” and the mom replies “Sure honey. I don’t understand it but I’ll use whatever [Name] wants,” my eyes rolled out of my head. I don’t think any immigrant Asian mother would respond so kindly. The reality would be more like “What is wrong with your friend? I think you should stop hanging out with her. Is she crazy?”  

Another side-character was gay and of course a scene had to be included where he was dancing/kissing with a guy at a club. Again, that incident made no difference to the main storyline. This author’s first two books did not include any nonbinary or gay characters in the story which makes me wonder if she was influenced or pressured by mainstream publishing to insert these characters.  

Book 2—was a YA Sci-fi/ fantasy.

The book cover would appeal to a middle schooler with its Japanese anime warrior figures. I’ve actually read another book by this author which was a historical fiction on the Japanese internment camps so I was looking forward to this book. The first few chapters had a Star Wars/ Mandalorian feel to it and I thought maybe I’d give it to my 11-year-old son to read. By the half-way mark, there was no way I would let my son read this book.  

Nearly all the characters were 12-17 years old. They were raised as fighters similar to the Jedi because they held special powers. Anyway, one of the fighters had to be nonbinary with a they/them pronoun all throughout which is confusing for me as a reader. This nonbinary character was also a drunk. And another character (only 17-years-old) was a lesbian who was known to be a womanizer. 

She carried a love ‘em and leave ‘em philosophy throughout the book. She had sex with two different characters. She had a tryst with her second lover when they were supposed to be preparing for battle to save the village. What does casual lesbian sex have to do with non-humans fighting off an evil group of bandits trying to take over a village? Please make it make sense. 

Book 3—was another YA fiction.

The main character is a senior in high school, who is a multi-racial lesbian with a drinking problem. She has a dysfunctional romantic relationship with another girl and they have a lot of sex. The main character’s best friend seems more straight edged, but by the end of the book the best friend starts dating a “Ze” and considers trying out “they/them” pronouns for herself to see how it feels. 

This was a debut book and I do believe this story rang the most authentic of all because it seems this is the world this author lives in. The story was infused with a lot of victimhood narratives and racist blaming but was there any real growth or transformation of the main character. Nope—she still hates white people even though her mother is white.    

Now I didn’t pick up these books to specifically read about LGBTQ characters. I thought I was just picking up your standard YA fiction. The book covers and book flaps in no way indicated any romance, same-sex or otherwise. I do see those covers at the library already. You know it’s a romance because of the cover style and if you see two guys or two girls on it, you as the reader can choose it thinking you know what to expect. I didn’t appreciate all the gender ideology and sex inserted into the story with characters that are minors… children! 

For all the hoopla about college students (actual adults) requiring trigger warnings for standard books required for classes to avoid offense or “trauma,” where is the consideration for our children under 18? 

Why is all this sexuality imposed on young readers? 

If some of the lesbian sex scenes I read in those YA books were of a boy and girl, they would scream date rape. Or at the least, that he was a misogynistic jerk that treated women like objects. Whether it’s boy-girl or girl-girl, the examples in those books still show an unhealthy relationship between two people.  

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Related

• “Why Do You Only Write About Gay Men?” My high school taught girls to fear straight men

• Teenagers and the Social Cachet of Victimhood: I’m a Trauma Survivor, but That’s Not My Identity

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When Diversity Isn’t Diverse

As an aspiring writer, I subscribe to newsletters from bookstores and literary groups for minority author events and writing courses. You can clearly see the encouragement of LGBTQ spaces for writers and readers, especially young ones. There are no events for others. So if you are a young writer and want to meet other young writers, you kind of by default join a group full of “diverse” individuals. 

One independent bookstore is promoting a Young Adult book group weekly meetup. They specify it is for 13+. They state “YABG is a space for the curious young reader interested in a curated, intentionally diverse and broad selection of books…. Come join the fun! Pizza is served and parents are welcome (but not required) to attend.” When you look up the book that YABG has chosen for September on Goodreads, the following tags for the book are: horror, young adult, fantasy, lesbian, LGBT, Queer, Fiction. None of these descriptors are on the actual YABG event RSVP link. 

In another recent literary newsletter specifically for Asian-American writers, here are two events featured for this fall: Meet up and Book Swap for Trans, Intersex, Nonbinary & Gender-expansive People and A Bicoastal Trans Kinship Reading.  

Is current literature and the literary industry influencing the recent gender dysphoria stats? 

According to Jean Twenge, the number of people treated for gender dysphoria has increased dramatically, especially for Gen Z. I wonder if all these instances of sexual LGBTQ and nonbinary references serve as suggestive experiences to the reader that subconsciously influence (brainwash) their mind. Google and Youtube have been known to do that for nearly everything to manipulate our behavior. It seems now the publishing industry is also on board as well. Should I be surprised that one of the mothers in my writing group casually mentioned that her highschool aged daughter has a new girlfriend. “Well, she used to have a boyfriend, but now she is dating this girl,” my friend stated matter-of-factly.

This essay is not about book bans or censorship. But I would like to highlight that one of the main articles in this month’s free Bookpage library magazine is titled “An Unlikely Activist” about a Southern librarian who is fighting against book bans because they “almost always targeted LGBTIA+ stories.” She goes on to say “I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand in silence while we lose another kid because of something our community has done to make them feel less than.”  

You know who feels less than everywhere, especially at public schools and libraries? Boys and Men. 

Both settings seem anti-boy, especially anti-heterosexual boy, so basically the majority of boys in the world. According to Richard Reeves and his research, in 2022, four times more males died by suicide than females. And the trend is not changing. Teachers and librarians are standing in silence while we lose our boys. Where are the contemporary books that encourage young boys to rise to the challenge and overcome obstacles on their hero’s journey without the need for sex and sexuality issues incorporated into the story.  

The same issue of Bookpage has a middle grade book featured. 

It’s about a 13-year-old boy spending the summer with his guy friends and doing standard middle-school boy stuff like biking, gaming, and checking out an old abandoned house where a ghost lives. The book cover looks very innocent with its cartoon drawing of four boys on bikes. I would have picked it up for my son. Unfortunately, one of the twists for the main character is that he harbors romantic feelings for his best guy friend and hides the notebook where he divulges these feelings into the haunted house. 

My son is 11 and a voracious reader. He loves sci-fi/ fantasy, especially if it’s at least a five book series. I find that I have to look for books that were published before he was born to safely steer clear of current gender ideology brainwashing which is infecting all genres. I want him to read about characters that are brave and inspiring and serve as good role models for how to overcome challenges, not characters that serve as propaganda.

I don’t need him to read about how to change his name or how girls have sex with each other. If this was all that was available for him to read, he would stop reading. His love for reading would fizzle. The world of video games would suck him in instead where all our other lost boys are residing. The only place where boys feel they are celebrated is in virtual reality.   

Some may bristle that I’m homophobic and trying to shelter my son from LGBTQ people. This is far from the truth. My sister-in-law is a white lesbian married to a black woman. We recently lived with them for nearly two years while we were moving to a new state and our house was being built. 

My son is the first person to experience that families are made up of all types of people. When we met up for brunch last weekend, our table would have been approved for a commercial. There is my eighty-one year old father-in-law who escaped Germany when he was 11, my mother-in-law, her lesbian daughter and her black wife, their foster kid who is Hispanic/Black, my part-Korean son, and me. I’m not sure how more “inclusive” we can be.  

I want my son to have endless examples in literature of the strong human spirit, not examples of fragility and unhealthy sexuality. At his age, he would prefer to read about male characters that are like him—smart, resourceful, and funny. Readers, if you have any book suggestions for him, please let me know. As for my own reading list, I’ll steer clear of current YA for now.