I stumbled upon Her Dark Materials, an article on Slate by Emily Bazelton, and it brought back fond memories of being a young girl and lying across my bed, clutching a book. I was always clutching a book--in the car, at the dinner table, in front of the TV set, in the theatre before a movie. It began in the first grade, when I was among an elite few six-year-olds allowed to graduate early to the "big kids" section of the school library. That meant skipping baby stuff like Hop on Pop to dig into meatier classics like the Nancy Drew, Boxcar Children and Little House series. Then, as now, I lived in my head, and books were the matches that lit my imagination.
Before third grade I left kids books behind. My mom was also a voracious reader and I scavenged the popular titles of the day from her collection. I remember being scared to death by the idea that The Amityville Horror was a true story, and being intrigued by romantic interludes that I didn't quite understand in Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz books.
Like Emily Bazelton, I stumbled upon Judy Blume's Forever and V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic series as a child. I believe I was in the fourth grade when I first read Blume's tale of a teenage girl's first sexual experience. I had picked up the book expecting the smart juvenile storylines found in Blume's other books, such as Blubber, Superfudge, or even Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret? I found a little bit more than I bargained for. A worn, dog-eared copy of Forever passed from girl to girl through fourth and fifth grades. We furtively read juicy passages at slumber parties and worked to keep the book away from boys who might reveal the book's frank sexual content to an adult.
Later, in middle school, a friend passed me the first book in V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic series. For the uninitiated, the series tells the story of four children, the product of a secret incestuous relationship, who, after the death of their father, are imprisoned in an attic by their fundamentalist grandmother and oversexed mother. The oldest two children, coming of age confined in close quarters, eventually have a sexual relationship of their own. ...Yeah, I know.
Like the author of the Slate article, I feel a bit of a hypocrite today. Bazelton is shielding her children from Philip Pullman's dark trilogy that contains The Golden Compass for fear of its impact on their fragile young minds. I block BET in my home and drive my stepson and stepdaughter nuts railing against too-racy lyrics in R&B and hip hop. But both Bazelton and I (and most of my friends, I might add) were exposed through reading to topics we were too young to understand...and we survived.
In fact, I recall both Blume's excellent book and Andrews' trashy trilogy fondly. To me they are relics of another place and time--oddly a more innocent place and time when salacious material made barely a blip on a bookish suburban kid's radar. My friends and I were mostly teachers' kids with attentive parents. We never came home to empty houses. Our parents took turns ferrying us to school activities. We were smartypants kids who went to Saturday School and took gifted classes. Our biggest transgression was reading beyond our level and, gasp, sharing books with friends. MTV was just dawning and videos like the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" and Duran Duran's "Planet Earth" were quaintly chaste, compared with today's pimp/stripper anthems. Our environments were generally wholesome, so when we read a salacious Sidney Sheldon passage or heard Prince's Darling Nikki, it thrilled us, but it didn't impact our understanding of right and wrong. Even as I scanned for the juicy bits in books, I was clear that their subject matter was forbidden, not something to emulate myself.
I can't quite articulate why reading racy books was okay for me, but hearing Gucci Mane's "Freaky Girl" isn't okay for my stepkids. Today's kids get a steady diet of the sexy and profane in music, in videos, video games and on television. What was shocking to my friends and I is now the norm. And while my environment, and that of my friends, counteracted our reading material, many kids today aren't so fortunate.
Read What About Our Daughters' post about the dirty lyrics your kids are listening to here:
What About Our Daughters: Another Edition of Parenting Tips From the Childless: Do You Know What Your Kiddies are Listening to?#links#links
Were you a precocious reader? Do you forbid things today things that you did as a child? If so, why the double standard?
1 comment:
Hi Tami,
One of my Grand Aunts taught me to read before pre-school so I was bored to tears in first grade. That led me to start to read a lot. By the time I was ten I was stumbling through The Catcher In The Rye. So I know what you are talking about.
I think the difference between me reading the Catcher In The Rye and listening to Prince is that I was shocked by Prince Lyrics and frightened by Holden Caulfield’s miss-adventures. As you say MTV was pretty darn tame. Even the Rock songs with the "Babes" in them were tame.
Also, the tone of pop music was different then. It wasn't mean and rough. It was generally just about having fun. Even rap was about having fun.
Then NWA and Ice T came along and their effect on pop music and general kid culture was apparent. Sex was not the problem it was the meanness associated with sex; the pimp attitude. It took all the fun out and replaced it with hardcore.
Now it's all hardcore; Men are pimps, women are whores. There is no room for romance or innocence.
So this is not just a generational thing, like my parents not wanting me to listen to Prince. This is a case of the tone being very, very different. And this does not even include the racial aspect. That is all the N words interjected into the music and culture in general.
So I defiantly understand.
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