To Smut Or Not To Smut;
That Is The Question.

In the article reporting this challenge, Linda Rutherford was quoted as saying, "I'm no prude, but this is smut." It's a safe bet that the book is not smut and Rutherford is a prude. The reason I make this assessment -- without having seen the book myself -- is because the same article reported Katrina Carr[1], who is a schools program specialist with the Rape Crisis Center in Madison, Wisconsin, as having said, "It doesn't surprise me to read this, because this is fairly typical of the way I hear students talk in schools. But I'm somewhat surprised that this is a book in a middle school library."

Okay; did you get it? The book is an accurate reflection of how teens in high school speak. Some teens, of course, not all of them. That makes the book pornography. Sounds a little off the wall? In 1905 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came under attack because Huck scratches when he itches and says "sweat" instead of perspiration. Description and dialogue which were true to life then and are true to life now. And as I mention elsewhere, Robie Harris's two sex-ed books have been condemned as obscene as well. Most recently they were deemed pornographic simply for acknowledging the existance of homosexuality.

And what passages in Knocked Out caused Rutherford so much embarrassment? In a glossary, nunga-nungas are defined as: "Basoomas. Girl's breasty business." In a passage in the book, one character's brother calls breasts nunga-nungas because, "if you get hold of a girl's breast and pull it out and then let it go - it goes nunga-nunga-nunga."

Also, the lead character refers to various levels of sexual activity based on a number system, with holding hands at (1), and progression to upper-body fondling in bed (8), below-waist activity (9) and "the full monty" (10)[2].

Let's take a look first at: "if you get hold of a girl's breast and pull it out and then let it go - it goes nunga-nunga-nunga." There are two ways of looking at this line. One is from a toonish point of view; as if one could stretch out the breast the way cartoon characters sometimes do with an antagonist's tongue, and when you let it go it snaps back and rebounds several times. If the brother speaking is younger, this interpretation would not be an unreasonable surmise. However, women's breasts are as sensitive to them as testes are to men. You try pulling out a woman's breast to snap it like that and it is likely to cause a great deal of discomfort. Which will prove highly counterproductive to sexual play[3].

The second view is of a older brother speaking from experience, but his mode of expression is somewhat childish. In my experience of playing with breasts, if you manipulate one it will return to its normal at rest position when you let it go. Stretching one out and releasing it will cause it to respond in that fashion if the woman is lying on her back. Which might well be a part of foreplay. For that matter, the same thing is true of a flaccid penis.

The second issue to look at is the idea that a fourteen year old girl and her classmates should not have such well developed ideas about sex that they could spontaneously create a rating system to pigeon-hole various forms of sexual activity. A blind condemnation that raises the question: Well, why shouldn't they?

As I point out in my op/ed A Brief examination of Societal Issues Surrounding the Censorship of Sex, fourteen is baby-making age. Which age is set by about four million years of human evolution, and a couple of billion years of evolution before that since the development of sexual reproduction. It is not human sexual development that is in the wrong, here. It is the anal-retentive hypersensitivity and blind denial that pubescent children are in transition to adulthood, and an incapacity to understand that legislated boundaries are artificial constraints to which the real world pays no heed whatsoever. When secondary sex characteristics begin to develop in a person, that person starts to become fully sexual. Including Linda Rutherford's thirteen year old daughter.

The last word in this affair probably goes to Beverley Becker, associate director of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, and who echoed a sentiment I have expressed myself in the pages of the chronology. "We'd defend the right of students to have access to this book. If this particular family doesn't like this book, we'd encourage the parents to address the issue with their child, not make a decision for everyone else in the school."

FOOTNOTES

[1] Ms. Carr works with a student group at Oregon High School that tries to prevent sexual violence. She declined to pass judgment on the book. She did allow, however, that the controversy gives people an opportunity to think more deeply about the often-contradictory messages our culture sends young people about sex. There was nothing to suggest whether she was pro sex-ed or pro abstinence, however.
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[2] The full monty is british slang for a stripper going completely nude; removing even the g-string. In this case, it no doubt means "going all the way."
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[3] I would speculate that this fact provides a basis for Ms. Carr looking askance at the presence of Knocked Out in a middle school library; as well as there being schools and schoolyards where adolescent females are at high risk of unwanted fondling of (read: sexual assault on) both their breasts and their pubic areas by adolescent males engaged in the sophmoric activity of "sexing".
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