Yumi Stynes, left, and Dr Melissa Kang, authors of Welcome to Sex! Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out.
Yumi Stynes, left, and Dr Melissa Kang, authors of Welcome to Sex! Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out.
EDITORIAL
Sex is a fraught topic, especially involving young people.
Some sympathy could then be had for librarians caught in the crossfire of the latest controversy over a book titled Welcome to Sex!
The exclamation mark may well be what has tipped the more prudish into apoplexy, aseven a cursory check on what’s beneath the cover deflects much of the criticism.
The book, targeted at 11- to 14-year-olds, traverses everything from consent and sexuality to sexual positions.
One commenter on Facebook pointed out the target audience wasn’t “even at the age of consent”, and while she normally agreed that being informed was good, she believed the book bordered on “grooming”. Another commenter said it was “totally disgusting and disturbing” and was not appropriate for children.
On the face of it, shouting (as that exclamation mark seems to suggest) “welcome to sex!” to an 11-year-old should set alarm bells ringing.
Welcome to Sex! The title may be designed to titillate, but does that make it inappropriate?
The first five chapters are titled: What is sex?; Parents and carers and awkward conversations; Getting intimate with myself; Orgasms and labels: sexual and gender identities. And yes, there are illustrated explanations of sexual positions.
So far, so eyebrow-raising, and a little cringe-inducing.
But hold fire on smashing the glass and hitting the panic button. Further scrutiny reveals the book also covers topics such as: What the outside world is telling us about sex; Myths about sex; and “Reasons to not have sex”.
Later chapters are on relationships and “looking after myself and my partner”. Hardly then, glorifying the fun of sex while neglecting the essential topics of respecting others, let alone the option of abstinence.
But such is the subject of teenagers and sex. The sad reality is that unwanted pregnancies, transmission of STDs, and coercion do not go away when we decide not to talk. So, too, the abrogation by many parents and guardians of the duty to guide young people on the matter means teenagers and adolescents will get what information they can from whatever sources are available to them.
According to an article in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 2020, the Office of Film and Literature Classification recruited an online, nationally representative, sample of 2071 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17.
The result, which was consistent with research conducted in Australia, found 66 per cent of the New Zealand sample had seen pornography, with 37 per cent viewing it in the past six months.
The unrealistic and exaggerated representations of sex in pornography are certainly not an appropriate education for the blank pages of a young mind.
The final chapter of Welcome to Sex! book is titled “Keeping safe”.
The authors have clearly devised a book title to appear as titivating as possible to entice the target audience, and some content can appear prurient when taken out of the context of the rest of the book.
But not judging a book by the cover does seem to be the best advice for critics in this case.
