YA: How much sexual content?

I don't include it usually, at all. The reason is - it's all on the news here, constantly, every day. Detailed reports of every type of sex crime, in public, on TV at MacDonalds - everywhere. They revel in it, and this has turned me off writing about it bigtime.
Right now its this CBC scandal... every 15 min. there's details. How can kids not see this? They do, so trying to conceal it in fiction seems fairly pointless.
 
I think it should be included only if it is necessary to the plot and true to the characters, handled with a certain amount of sensitivity, and definitely not too graphic or ... um, anatomical.
 
That's right, there was always a sensible way to write up all these personal relations, leaving a bit to the imagination. Nothing duller than blatant smut trilogies. Not like I would know about that, much.
 
Meanwhile ...
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30275449
USA is staggeringly bad for Developed world and UK one of worst in Europe.
Is it partly due to sexulisation of advertising, writing, and Adultization of Teenagers?

Young Adult OUGHT to mean 18 to 28. In reality it's become a euphemism in English Speaking Developed World for Teenagers (13 to 19 or even 10 to 19).

There is a difference I think between portraying or accepting or explaining or educating about Hetrosexuality, Gay, Lesbian, BDSM etc and promotion of them, either generally to wrong age group or in wrong way.

I don't think it's the job of Fiction writers to Educate (that becomes preaching and selling under false pretences), though fiction can incidentally be educational. But I think it shouldn't deliberately send the wrong "messages" to young people either, about violence, crime, theft, honesty, honour, respect, sex, drugs, self mutilation etc.

The primary aim is surely to entertain and give some escape from some harsher realities that some people experience. Thus as a side effect it can promote people to think about their situation instead of going along with peer pressure, consumerism / advertising pressure and also avoid destructive total despair.

This is why I think some books supposedly for YA are unhealthy. Are they even really entertaining, or does feed the dark thrill of watching a despised weakling getting bullied or an inadequate teacher getting ragged?
Are some books (that may even be successful) actually "bad" for many adult readers? I don't want censorship, or books banned from Libraries or Amazon, book stores etc, or even the Rating system used on Films and slightly on games (those often don't work, or at least need simplified and reformed, also USA, UK, Ireland rate video and films on quite different basis).

But I'm not going to write stuff that inappropriately promotes stuff, or is so dark that once the thrill of reading has worn off you feel sick or tainted. It's not just about Sex.
 
How about Philip Pullman as a comparator? His YA books (His Dark Materials trilogy, the Sally Lockhart series) deal with children growing up in confusing circumstances. The stories include quite deep consideration of emerging sexuality and the characters' awareness thereof, but not in a gratuitous way, and without any frank sex at all.
 
Ray McCarthy said:
His stories as far as I can see, have a nasty agenda and are dishonestly written.
One of my three least favourite current authors
Click to expand...
Pullman does tend to polarise opinions and I can see why. I have to say that my reaction is diametrically opposite to yours: a refreshing and very humane take on children dealing with difficult, ambiguous, and often hypocritical adult situations.
 
Philip Pullman is also bigoted, and his bigotry is a major agenda in his writing. I find his treatment of Sex and Children malicious*. He deliberately creates the hypocritical adult situations to promote his anti-religious agenda. I was very disappointed in the book I bought (Northern Lights / His Dark Materials) more than any in 30 years. If it had been a food Item I would have returned it as "gone off", or a radio as "not fit for use".
I have vast quantities of better books.

I also don't like Terry Goodkind (too much explicit torture in The Sword of Truth.) and G.R.R. Martin (too much explicit violence explicit sexual violence).

I read fiction to be entertained, not lectured at in faked situations, nor is gratuitous torture of children or bullying of young people, gratuitous descriptions of violence, especially of an organised nature against women, entertainment.

I shan't buy or read any more of their work.

(* or do I mean pernicious?)
 
From Wikipedia regarding Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth (my emphasis)
Robert Eaglestone described the books as a "depressing read" due to the overarching cynicism of the series, with a weakness being the heroic characters are only likable in comparison with utterly murderous villains. Eaglestone notes that Goodkind brings "a sense of evil that is genuinely disturbing, deriving from twentieth-century monsters like Hitler and Jim Jones" to the post-Tolkien epic, also noting that Goodkind's use of sadomasochistic imagery was interesting, generating a genuine sense of perverse.[19]
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Goodkind

IMO, life is miserable enough, and I don't need to read Fantasy to have Ayn Rand's views.
 
I liked Pullman very much as well. I'm not sure what exactly you mean about hypocritical adult situations (and, as demonstrated earlier in this thread, I completely missed any mention of sex at all...)
 
I'm on the fence with him. I thought the world in book one was fabulous, I liked the darkness of the coming of age storyline, liked the mucked-up parents (any betas will nod sagely, I do like my complex families), and feel anyone who can write a character as good as Lee Scoresby should get a doff of my hat and the time of day.

Then I read book two (but forgave it for the Scoresby and Hester's last stand scene) but got less forgiving when book three was woeful. I also think his agenda (against the church, primarily, and creationism*) was very obvious and distasteful...

But I think there is place for torture and other horrors, including death of children and rape**, in fiction. It just needs to be done well.

* not that I'm a creationist, btw.

** and I've used both, be warned oh readers... But I thought about both long and hard and only one of them is in my YA work (so far...)
 
Perhaps above a certain amount is inherently gratuitous, depending on the overall tenor of the story?
Motive (of Author) and presentation I think count for a lot.
 
I didn't like Dark Materials. I made it through Northern Lights because I was on an aeroplane with nothing else to do. But I didn't find his agenda any more obvious than CS Lewis was in Narnia.
 
Some people are more sensitive to some things. It's a pain actually, because it means much less TV, cinema, radio, Films, books, music can be enjoyed.
I'd argue that what is in Narnia is there because of what was in Lewis, I'd argue that in Pullman's case it was deliberate decision. Both my arguments are backup by the writers own comments.
 
So Pullman wasn't an agnostic/ atheist? That surprises me, but I haven't read interviews with him.

I liked the world in His Dark Materials -- the daemons and the dust were both really clever. I loved Lyra.

And oh the power that is Google. I like this (and I agree with it, pretty much, which may be why I liked Pullman so much):

I know full well that the total amount of the things I know is a tiny little pinprick of light compared with the vast unlimited darkness that surrounds it – which is all the things I don't know. I don't know more than a tiny fragment of what it's possible to know about this world.
As for what goes on outside it in the rest of the universe, it's a vast darkness full of things that I don't know. Now, somewhere in the things that I don't know, there may be a God.

But if we come down – like coming close up with a camera – getting closer and closer to this little pinprick of light, so that it begins to expand and gets bigger and bigger until we find ourselves inside it... I can see no evidence in that circle of things I do know, in history, or in science or anywhere else, no evidence of the existence of God.

So I'm caught between the words 'atheistic' and 'agnostic'. I've got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.

So maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he hasn't shown himself on earth.

But going further than that, I would say that those people who claim that they do know that there is a God have found this claim of theirs the most wonderful excuse for behaving extremely badly.
Click to expand...

source: http://www.surefish.co.uk/culture/features/pullman_interview.htm
 
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