On Censorship

John Green’s Looking for Alaska has been banned in Sumner County in Tennessee, making it the second county in Tennessee to do so this year. As the article sums up, the banning was due to a two page oral sex scene.

I’ve read LfA. I’ve read it more times than I can count. As a result, I’ve also read the two page sex scene in question more times than I can count. And guess what? I was in absolutely no way turned on by it. Not at all. I didn’t get all hot and bothered; I wasn’t suddenly crazy horny; I didn’t read the scene and think, “Whoa, I need to go give a really awkward guy a really awkward blow job right this second.”

Because that’s not the point. That’s not the point of the scene at all, and I always thought that was fairly clear, which is I guess why I’m so baffled as to why this book is challenged so frequently. John addresses the controversy in this Vlogbrothers video from 2008 in a far more eloquent way than I could even attempt. Basically, the scene is meant to emphasize the distinction between emotional and physical intimacy. Not so damaging, right?

Looking for Alaska was the capital-B Book That Changed My Life. If I have to pinpoint the biggest influence in my decision to pursue writing, it’d be this book. Depriving teenagers from this novel in a classroom setting because of a TWO FRICKIN’ PAGE ORAL SEX SCENE is devastating, especially since it reinforces the notion that teen sexuality = bad. (Which, spoiler alert, it’s not.) I could spend hours railing on those parents who give one-star reviews on Amazon because of profanity, sexuality, drinking, drug usage, etc. in young adult novels, and that it’s detrimental and damaging and blah, blah, blah, but I won’t. I can’t. I can’t argue that I can relate to profanity and sexuality and drinking and drug usage in books, or that even if I couldn’t, that wouldn’t change the content of what I read. I can’t say that it isn’t anyone’s business what I read except my own. I can’t, because I’m a teenager, and so I clearly don’t have the capacity to defend the merit of a particular novel against an adult.

The reason so many of John’s books have resonated with me (LfA was just the beginning of my burgeoning inner-nerdfighter—I’m still not over TFiOS to speak of it without crying) is because he doesn’t talk down to his audience. He’s in no way insulting to the intelligence or capabilities of teenagers merely because they’re teenagers. Just last weekend, I wrote an autobiographical argument for my writing class worth 25% of my final grade on the integration of young adult novels in the high school classroom. I devoted an entire segment of the paper to Looking for Alaska, and what it has to offer teenagers. I got an A on the assignment.

I have a bumper sticker on my car that says “Everything I Learned About Life I Learned By Reading Banned Books.” In Looking for Alaska, I learned about grief, first love, heartbreak, friendship, even religion. It forced me to rethink my own views on the afterlife, if one even exists. It helped me to realize it’s okay to be angry that someone has died. It made me unafraid of the labyrinth.

Thanks to Looking for Alaska and a slew of other banned young adult novels, I will keep reading.

And I will keep learning.