We need a new story!!!

[sebbie]

I confess that I'm a bit lost here as I was not thinking of heading in that direction at all. I was thinking of moving this in the direction of how a young person learns about his own body growing up in the current world with all its fears and restrictions. I was definitely not thinking about writing details describing sexual contact between individuals underage or not regardless of gender. As I indicated, I couldn't compose a suitable story line of that sort anyway.

i guess maybe one option is to just stop the story line where it is now.

But, young people really do need accurate information in order to understand what is going on. Growing up, my main source was encyclopedias and other old books. But currently, schools are so sensitive about having anything in their libraries that would be regarded as sexually explicit by any possibly-somehow-offended parent that they have cleaned out any of these materials as well.

I can go on Amazon and find any number of recently-written paperback books written by authors directed to teen youth with the expressed objective of providing underage youth with positive information about human sexuality along with details about how sex works in both sexes. Some of these books are quite good, but also would be considered by many people to be quite explicit. And the underage kids who need the information are not going to be able to flip out a credit card and somehow privately order a copy of what they want to read and have the book delivered to their home without their parents finding out. Their parents might think the book is explicit as in offensively explicit.

Nor are they likely to have the courage to go to their parents and say "I need you to order me this book because I have questions I am too embarrassed to ask you" So all sorts of questions go unanswered---questions where accurate information is very much needed. The youth are forced to rely on bits and pieces of information mainly picked up from peers who are equally uninformed.

Alternately, some of this same educational information is readily available on the Web, including some Web sites purposely set up to provide detailed sex information for young people. But then schools are so sensitive to the notion that students should not be able to search the Web and find "sexually explicit" materials that they use electronic screeners to prohibit students from finding ANY site that discusses sex or sexuality regardless of purpose or intent. The sites designed for sex education get screened out the exact same way a pornographic site would get screened out. For example, searching on even a simple term like "masturbation" would likely get screened no matter what.

I now feel badly about the sexual education mess we have gotten ourselves into where adolescents cannot now find any reliable source of information related to sex without someone calling out that this could somehow be interpreted as a form of "sexual abuse". Are even parents comfortable now living in a world that labels any detailed sexual information as a form of sexual abuse?

The young people are back to pretty much stuck relying on peer friends for information, and we all know how accurate that is.

Swim team escapades are an ok story line I guess but have almost nothing to do with the story line I was thinking of here, which was related directly to the dilemma young people seeking information about sex and sexuality now find themselves in. This has never been easy for young people, and quality information has never been as accessible as it should be, but things are getting worse in this regard not better.

OK, so Jimmy finds a book, a book in a dusty corner of the school library no adult seemed to know was there, and somehow didn't get tossed in the last "purge" of materials from the school library that the school board decided was to be banned because it was "sexually explicit." Can Jimmy ever get access to a computer to search terms he wants on the Web without having them screened? That is a related story line. Maybe the book will prove useful in coming up with terms that the school screener doesn't catch. Or, maybe not.

Sebbie