Guardian interview with Juno Dawson

Sorry, my mistake: Titchmarsh came 2nd.

If some bearded celeb like the one pictured claimed to understand teenage girls, discussed their 'perky little breasts' or speak for them in any way, people would be most disturbed.

I feel exactly this way when 'Juno Dawson' does it. Disturbed. I think that's a highly appropriate reaction.

But then, I live on the right side of the looking glass.

What’s that award for badly written sex scenes, the one Alan Titchmarsh won a few years ago? Sounds like this one would be worth a nomination.

I'm not especially anti-drugs, I'm not prudish, I believe in openness around sex. Kids aged 12 shouldn't be reading about drug-fuelled sex parties

I agree, although it appears we are not allowed to pursue this subject in any great depth without being monitored.

Yep. My son is 10 and picking up YA stuff.

This book (these books) are specifically being sold to, marketed to, and targeted at YA, which is, generally speaking for kids aged 12-18.

I'm not especially anti-drugs, I'm not prudish, I believe in openness around sex. Kids aged 12 shouldn't be reading about drug-fuelled sex parties.

I have the feeling that Dawson had a very troubled adolescence, and is now perhaps working that out through fiction using teen protagonists. That would be okay if the books weren't aimed at children.

After hearing 10,000 dresses being read to young children by the book's author,
I began to realise there is a lot more dodgy reading material being pushed onto kids than I had previously realised.
Hardly surprising that young adult fiction has gone all explicit by stealth.

Juno's book for world book day 'spot the difference ' made me cross. It's about a teenage girl who has spots. She's unpopular at school. Magic spot cream. some sort of campaign involving vulnerable students and the library as a refuge. Bingo - clear skin, popularity. They all realise she was always pretty cool. Yuck. Good authors have always written about people unlike themselves, but this was so soaked in tired and infuriating stereotypes it made me gag. And that was even before I started lurking here and began getting really infuriated about sterotypes .
Hi, nice to meet you all.

Neither book is out yet.

Well there you have it, right there.

What it's like for a girl by Paris Lees.

It's just so completely desperate.

The issue I have with expicit YA content is the way it can be distributed privately away from parental control.

This. I have little objection to sex being dealt with in YA books. As someone said upthread, it can be a great way for young people to read about and get to grips with issues that affect them.
But there's a big difference between writing story-related sex and writing purposely explicit and over-the-top sexual content that relies on shock value (the tweedledum thread to the story seems to do that for example).
If it were just bad writing,that would be one thing but its YA. There are a lot of precocious young readers who'd use that as a stepping stone from middle grade to adult fiction. My DS is one and I would have been too. I started reading my first books from the adult section of the library at 12.
There may well be parents out there seeing the 'Y' of YA and thinking that means it's probably fine when its actually pretty explicit.

I had Lego and a sindy house, am I non binary

Shit - I never had barbies, and there was me thinking I was a woman. How wrong am I
You and me both. I had Lego and was into fixing stuff, must be a bloke I guess?

Gads. This is really creepy.

I saw her give a talk a couple of years ago. The women before talked about their subject, the way middle aged women tend to give talks, then Juno came on, and it was like the whole modus operandi was that we find them attractive. It was like they'd learnt how to be a woman from Playboy. It pissed me off - not that they'd learnt how to be a woman from Playboy but that they seemed to think they were talking for all of us. They certainly weren't speaking for me.
They also have talked about how sex is different for them as a man and now as a woman - the crux seems to be that as a woman, you spend hours and hours getting yourself beautiful for it.

There was period, maybe around the late 80s and early 90s, that a lot of popular adult market books had some pretty silly sexual content. It seemed like every publisher wanted writers to include two sex scenes.

I used to read a fair bit of the better YA stuff around that time because the stories were as good without the irrelevant and often poorly written sex scenes. It seemed to me as if the writers had more freedom to think about the stories without having to shoehorn in things to sex up the book.

It's almost reversed now - many adult books don't bother with gratuitous sex, and it seems like a large number of YA ones do. I've seen people, parents, librarians, writers, talk about how great this is. Apparently it is a good way for youth to learn about sex, and also to see their own lives mirrored in the books they read (though that seems like quite a stretch in most cases.)

I think it goes along with a more general trend in thinking about youth. And it's not that I think no sex would or should happen in stories directed to them - but this is pretty clearly to me more meant to be a type of pornography than an important story element.

The issue I have with expicit YA content is the way it can be distributed privately away from parental control.
Nothing new there, but we do know boundaries are being pushed.

We really need to read this stuff to make an informed judgement on what is being introduced to young adults.
Much as I don't want to buy Dawsons book, I feel I should read it to understand what they are trying to put across. Its the same with Paris Lees book coming out soon.

Book club anyone?

G

Can someone say the word. I don't know what you're referring to.

Did any of the deleted posts contain the g-word?

If it's the word I'm thinking of, one of them said that and not much more. Interesting. Why would that word be banned on a forum aimed at parents?