Oooh, It's a Big, Long Rant

I've recently developed a laissez faire attitude at work. Circulation staff still unclear on magazine procedures? Oh, well. Events staff still ignore the lovely pictures I draw them to illustrate meeting room set ups? Doesn't matter. Guy who wears the bike helmet still sings Celine Dion songs and discourses on the future of hover boards? I just let it be. It's the unfortunate side effect of having less than six weeks left as an employee. I discovered today, though, that there's one thing I cannot let be. I can never let it be. I will fight it to the end of time. Censorial patrons will never be okay with me.

I got a materials complaint this week from a parent who picked up a book her daughter checked out of the teen collection. The mother skimmed part of the book and discovered a chapter in which teens engage in underage drinking and strip poker. She would like us to throw away the book because the "whole thing is trash." Yeah, I saw that and I wanted to punch something. Possibly someone.

I read part of the book today and it's pretty mild. There's no profanity and no sex and no violence and no adult themes. It's pretty much a fluffy, plotless book that in no way glorifies either of the behaviors the mother objects to. If this is the kind of book she wants us to throw away, she needs to step away from my teen collection right. now. because if she doesn't she's going to find far more scandalous content than underage drinking and her head will explode and the number of complaints she'll have to file will deforest the entire northern hemisphere.

I don't endorse underage drinking or teens playing strip poker, but it's ridiculous to expect a library to be a collection of completely sanitized reads, and underage drinking just strikes me as one of the least offensive scenarios to encounter in teen fiction. Does this mother send her child to public school? Because if that child's school was anything like mine, she can watch some real live underage drinking in the girls' bathroom any old time she wants. And then inhale some second-hand pot and hear about the cheerleaders' sexual exploits from the previous weekend.

If I were a parent, there are things in literature that I would want to steer my children away from at certain ages (or at least be sure to talk to them about), but I hate the attitude that I don't agree with something I read so the book in which I read it has no value for me OR FOR ANYONE ELSE.

Allowing someone to read about an objectionable behavior is not the same as encouraging it. In fact the opposite is often true. Literature is a safe place for teens to experiment with risky behavior and its consequences. I loved teen pregnancy books as a middle schooler and all these years later, still no illegitimate children.