Let’s Make Change Happen Right Now

July 30, 2015 |

I’m not going to write a lengthy post about the removal of Courtney Summers’s Some Girls Are as an optional — OPTIONAL — reading choice for students at West Ashley High School in Charleston, South Carolina. I’m going to instead direct you to Courtney’s impassioned discussion of this challenge to her book, along with Leila Roy’s commentary, and commentary from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

I am a staunch advocate of intellectual freedom and have been since day one. I find it horrifying and small minded when one parent’s problem with material overrides the rights of every student to have access to material that not only impacts their lives, but that they would have the opportunity to discuss and engage with under the guide of adults who care about them and who want them to KNOW that they’re cared about.

To say this particular removal — one laden with missteps and subverting policies left and right — feels particularly brutal is an understatement.

So I’m doing something.

Thanks to a few phone calls, I was in touch with Andria Amaral at the Charleston County Library System about what could be done to get this book into the hands of the teens who want them. She feels as passionately about this as I do, as she said to me that she wants to stand at the door of the high school and pass this book out to kids. More copies of the book have been purchased for the library for their access, too.

Let’s do something together with our collective reader, intellectual freedom loving power, shall we? Can we get this book into the hands of kids of West Ashley who want it?

If you are willing to buy a copy of Summers’s Some Girls Are, I will send it down to Andria, who will get it into those kids hands for free.

Between now and August 17, I would love to see my house become overfilled with copies of this book. I will box them up and ship them all down to Andria that week, so she can get them into the hands of eager readers. Because Andria is also coordinating the efforts of the Cynthia Hurd memorial donations, it is easier for me to collect everything and send them down to her once, rather than have them trickle in to her.

Think this is a costly endeavor? Let me direct you to how you can participate, even if you’re short on funds.

Some Girls Are is currently $1.99 on Book Outlet, and What Goes Around, which is a bind-up of Summers’s Cracked Up To Be and Some Girls Are is $1. Right now, there are over 200 copies between the two of these books on Book Outlet. Let’s make them all disappear.

Can you spring $1 or $2 or $10 to get this book to these kids? It seems like a cheap way to tell these teenagers that their voices — their lives — really do matter.

You can, of course, send a copy from anywhere. I am not going to do anything but drop them into a big box to ship out.

If you want to take part, please drop your name and email in this form, and I will email you with my mailing address to make this happen. If you cannot participate yourself, please pass this along to anyone who might want to help out.

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Appropriate Literature: Guest Post by Elana K. Arnold

March 23, 2015 |

Today’s “About the Girls” guest post is from author Elana K. Arnold. She’s here to talk about the idea of “appropriate literature” and how that applies to girls, girls reading, and feminism.

Elana K. Arnold has a master’s degree in Creative Writing from UC Davis. She writes books for and about young people and lives in Huntington Beach, California with her family and more than a few pets. Visit Elana at www.elanakarnold.com.

A few days ago, I got an email. This is what it said:

“My 13 year old daughter is interested in reading your books. I research novels before she reads them to ensure they are age appropriate. Can you please provide me with information regarding the sexual content, profanity, and violence so I can make an informed decision.”

The subject of the email was: Concerned Mother.

I’m not proud to admit that my first reaction was a twist in my stomach, a lurching sensation. Was I attempting to lead her daughter astray, were my books nothing more than thinly disguised smut, or pulp?

And I wasn’t sure how to respond. Yes, my books have sexual content. They have profanity. There is violence. But my books—like all books—are more than a checklist, a set of tally marks (Kisses? 6. Punches thrown? 4.)

Then I began thinking about myself at thirteen, about what was appropriate for me in that year, and those that followed.

When I was thirteen, I read whatever I wanted. No one was watching. Largely I found books in my grandmother’s home library. I roamed the shelves and chose based on titles, covers, thickness of the spines. I read All You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But were afraid to ask). I read The Stranger. I read Gone with the Wind. And I read at home too, of course, and in school—Anne of Green Gables and Bridge to Terabithia and Forever.

Those early teen years were steeped in sex, even though I wasn’t sexually active. In junior high school, there were these boys who loved to snap the girls’ bras at recess. I didn’t wear a bra, though I wished desperately for the need to. I was sickened by the thought that one of the boys might discover my secret shame, reach for my bra strap and find nothing there.

So one day I stole my sister’s bra and wore it to school. All morning I was aware of the itch of it, its foreign presence. I hunched over my work, straining my shirt across my back so the straps would show through.

At recess, I wandered dangerously near the group of boys, heart thumping, hoping, terrified. Joe Harrison did chase me—I ran and yelped until he caught me by the arm, found the strap, snapped it.

And then his words—“What are you wearing a bra for? You don’t have any tits.”

The next year, there was a boy—older, 15—who didn’t seem to care whether or not I needed a bra. We kissed at a Halloween party, just days after my thirteenth birthday. I was Scarlett O’Hara. He was a 1950’s bad boy, cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his white T-shirt. He was someone else’s boyfriend.

The next day at school, a well-meaning girl whispered to me, just as class was about to start, “If you’re going to let him bang you, make him finger bang you first. That way, it won’t hurt as much.”

Later that year, before I transferred schools when my family moved away, my English teacher told me I was talented, and that he would miss me. Then he kissed me on the mouth.

The next year, a high school freshman, I was enrolled in Algebra I, and I didn’t think I was very good at it. Truthfully, I didn’t pay much attention to whatever the math teacher/football coach was saying up there, preferring to scribble in my notebook or gaze into half-distance, bringing my eyes into and out of focus.

On the last day of class, the teacher called me up to his desk. “You should fail this class,” he told me. “You went into the final with a D, and you got less than half of the questions right.”

I had never failed a class. I was terrified.

“But,” he went on, smiling, “I’m gonna give you a C-, because I like the way you look in that pink leather miniskirt.”

At fifteen, a sophomore, I took Spanish. I raised my hand to ask a question, and the teacher—who liked the students to call him Señor Pistola—knelt by my desk as I spoke. When I finished, instead of answering me he said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear a word. I was lost in your beautiful eyes.”

I wasn’t having sex. I had only kissed one boy. But still, I was brewing in it—sex, its implications, my role as an object of male desire, my conflicting feelings of fear and excitement.

Recently, I taught an upper division English class at the University of California, Davis. The course topic was Adolescent Literature. Several of my book selections upset the students, who argued vehemently that the books were inappropriate for teens because of their subject matter—explicit sexual activity, sexual violence, and incest. The Hunger Games was on my reading list, too, a book in which the violent deaths of children—one only twelve years old—are graphically depicted. No one questioned whether that book was appropriate. Of course, none of the characters have sex. Not even under the promise of imminent death do any of the featured characters decide to do anything more than kiss, and even the kissing scenes end before they get too intense.

So I think about the mother who wrote me that email, asking me, Are your books appropriate for my daughter? I think about the girl I was at thirteen, and the girls I knew. The girl who told me about finger banging. The other girls my English teacher may have kissed. The girls who had grown used to boys groping their backs, feeling for a bra strap, snapping it.

I think, What is appropriate? I want to tell that mother that she can pre-read and write to authors and try her best to ensure that everything her daughter reads is “appropriate.” But when I was thirteen, and fourteen and fifteen, stealing my sister’s bra and puzzling over the kiss of the boy at the party, the kiss of my teacher in an empty classroom, what was happening to me and around me and inside of me probably wouldn’t have passed that mother’s “appropriate” test. Still, it all happened. To a good girl with a mother who thought her daughter was protected. Safe.

And it was the books that I stumbled upon—all on my own, “inappropriate” books like Lolita and All You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex—these were the books that gave me words for my emotions and my fears.

Maybe the books I write are appropriate. Maybe they are not. But I think it should be up to the daughters to make that decision, not the mothers. Censorship—even on a familial level—only closes doors. We may want to guard our daughters’ innocence, we may fear that giving them access to books that depict sexuality in raw and honest ways will encourage them to promiscuity, or will put ideas in their heads.

I don’t think our daughters need guardians of innocence. I think what they need is power.

Let your daughter read my books, Concerned Mother. Read them with her. Have a conversation. Tell her your stories. Let her see your secrets, and your shames. Arm your daughter with information and experience.

Give her power.

***

Infandous is available now.

Censorship, Challenges, and Other Forms of Protest: A Reading List

July 28, 2014 |

If you haven’t kept tabs on recent book challenges popping up around America, one that’s drawn a lot of discussion recently comes out of the Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware. In early July, the school board made the decision to remove Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post from a reading list for incoming freshmen. The board cited language as the issue, stating it was inappropriate for the age group for which the list was intended.

Of course, this drew a lot of criticism not only because of the attempt to pull a book but also because it happened to be a book featuring a lesbian main character. It would be hard not to see that there was more to this story than meets the eye. A couple of worthwhile reads come from Jill Guccini, one over at Book Riot and one over at After Ellen.

Last week, the board went to make a final decision on the book, and after choosing to put the book back on the reading list, the list was then pulled all together. The board chose to reinstate an old summer reading system, in an exercise of power that undermined the hard work of librarian who created the book list and the educators who know how to work with students reading from it. Of course, the real losers here are the students.

There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye, though, and close readers of the article will note that the ACLU became involved in this situation. It’s hard not to wonder if the board’s decision wasn’t exactly what they said. Instead, their decision was a way around a potentially bigger, messier situation. If the board really cared about the profanity issue, as they claim to, then some of the classics that are being taught to students this same age would certainly raise the same sorts of “concerns” that Cameron Post and any of the other YA titles on the list do. So, no, it’s not about the language concerns. In this instance, it isn’t ignorant to see the potential lawsuits that could have spun from this and by removing the entire list, the board absolves itself a bit from looking like the close-minded, fearful body they’ve shown themselves to be at this point.

Every year around this time, book challenges seem to dominate the book news world. Leila’s done a great job rounding up recent ones and highlighting where they’re at at this point in time. I talked a little bit about why the summer and beginning of the school year tend to be favorite times for challenges last fall over at Book Riot, too. This isn’t surprising and that might be why it’s so disheartening and aggravating as a reader, as a librarian, and as someone who cares about teens.

I applaud those who can keep writing about this topic — it’s something I tackled before but I don’t think I can keep talking about. My feelings are exactly the same, and every time a board makes a decision to take books away from kids, I can’t help but get upset about how little faith those adults have not just in the teens, but in the educators and librarians who are trained, competent, and eager to talk about these stories with those students. It’s a vote made out of fear.

I kept a particularly close eye on the outcome of the vote on Looking for Alaska in Waukesha, Wisconsin last week because it’s not far from where I live. The book will remain in the curriculum, but it got me thinking about how issues like this impact the children of parents who are bringing them up. What must it be like to be the teenager who has a mother trying to get a book pulled from the classroom? What are they thinking? What will their experiences be like in the classroom now? How will their peers treat them? There are a million questions there that I think are far more interesting and insightful than the ones about why adults choose to pursue these challenges.

So rather than continue to talk about the issues, I thought it could be interesting to create a book list of YA books that talk about censorship in education or that explore what happens when parents or a school make an effort to keep information and experiences out of the hands of students. In some of these titles, it’s the central issue. In others, it’s a secondary thread in the story. Not all of these center around book challenges, and many of the titles are older.

If you can think of other YA books where censorship — in schools or in the community — or where parents (or students!) are challenging some aspect of curriculum, I’d love to know. Most of these titles were suggested to me via Twitter, so thanks to everyone who threw an idea at me.

All descriptions are from WorldCat.

The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff: Students and faculty at a high school become embroiled in a censorship case over “Huckleberry Finn.”

Smile Like a Plastic Daisy by Sonia Levitin: A high school senior, concerned about the fight for women’s rights, finds herself suspended from school and the focus of community debate following a confrontation at a swim meet during which she removed her shirt.

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith: Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong.
* In this one, The Chocolate War is brought up as a book that’s causing problems in the school.

Small Town Sinners by Melissa Walker: High school junior Lacey finds herself questioning the evangelical Christian values she has been raised with when a new boy arrives in her small town.

Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande: Following her conscience leads high school freshman Mena to clash with her parents and former friends from their conservative Christian church, but might result in better things when she stands up for a teacher who refuses to include “Intelligent Design” in lessons on evolution.

Save Halloween! by Stephanie Tolan: Is Halloween really the devil’s holiday? Joanna’s family never celebrated Halloween – her father’s minister who doesn’t like kids dressing up as witches and devils. But nobody worries about Joanna’s deep involvement in a class Halloween pageant until Uncle T.T. comes to town with his fiery crusade to abolish Satan’s own holiday.

Americus by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill: Oklahoma teen Neal Barton stands up for his favorite fantasy series, The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde, when conservative Christians try to bully the town of Americus into banning it from the public library.

Rapture Practice by Aaron Hartzler: Aaron Hartzler grew up in a home where he was taught that at any moment the Rapture could happen — that Jesus might come down in the twinkling of an eye and scoop Aaron and his whole family up to Heaven. As a kid, he was thrilled by the idea that every moment of every day might be his last one on Earth. But as Aaron turns sixteen, he finds himself more attached to his earthly life and curious about all the things his family forsakes for the Lord. He begins to realize he doesn’t want the Rapture to happen just yet — not before he sees his first movie, stars in the school play, or has his first kiss. Eventually Aaron makes the plunge from conflicted do-gooder to full-fledged teen rebel. Whether he’s sneaking out, making out, or playing hymns with a hangover, Aaron learns a few lessons that can’t be found in the Bible. He discovers that the best friends aren’t always the ones your mom and dad approve of, the girl of your dreams can just as easily be the boy of your dreams, and the tricky part about believing is that no one can do it for you. In this coming-of-age memoir, Hartzler recalls his teenage journey to become the person he wanted to be, without hurting the family that loved him.

The Sledding Hill by Chris Crutcher: Billy, recently deceased, keeps an eye on his best friend, fourteen-year-old Eddie, who has added to his home and school problems by becoming mute, and helps him stand up to a conservative minister and English teacher who is orchestrating a censorship challenge.

Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You by Dorian Cirrone: Sixteen-year-old Kayla, a ballet dancer with very large breasts, and her sister Paterson, an artist, are both helped and hindered by classmates as they confront sexism, conformity, and censorship at their high school for the arts while still managing to maintain their sense of humor.

The Trouble With Mothers by Margery Facklam: What is a boy to do when his teacher-mother’s historical novel is given as an example of the kind of “pornography” that should be banned from schools and libraries?

Profanity in YA: Research, Assumption, and Feminism

June 1, 2012 |

I’ve mentioned that my educational background is in psychology. I love research and I love the idea of studying behavior to better understand it. Throughout my coursework, I had to do a lot of my own research and paper writing, along with a number of my own full-blown studies. I also had to take a course in research methods, and the professor I took it with had us work with him on his personal research. His project was utterly fascinating — he explored dating advertisements to see whether there was any sort of script to which those seeking mates sold themselves to the opposite gender.

The project involved reading a lot of dating ads and coding them (the ads were randomly selected). My partner and I in the project had to make hash marks for each time we read a word that fit a certain category; some of the categories included mentions of appearance, wealth, jobs and whether these mentions were in relation to the person writing the ad or the person they were seeking, along with the gender of each. The two of us coded each ad separately, then we checked with one another to verify whether we had the same number of coded terms each. This is standard research practice, as it helps eliminate bias or misinterpretation. We had a really strict set of parameters to follow in terms of what did and did not count as something worth coding.

At the end of coding, our professor used the information to figure out whether there was any correlation between dating ads and gender scripts. From his extensive research on gender norms and on relationship psychology, he had a solid set of hypotheses about the behavior he’d expect to see played out in the advertisements. Using the coded data we’d provided, he was able to determine whether his hypotheses were supported or not (note: supported, not true or false). From the analyses (we as students) ran on the data, he was able to write about what this support could suggest about behavior. And since he studied behavior via the advertisements, he could draw those sorts of conclusions.

The long introduction to this is necessary in explaining why I had such a fascination with reading the study being interpreted by media and bloggers about profanity in YA. I was interested in both what the study looked at and how it was presented, along with how it was being interpreted (spoiler: it was being interpreted and is STILL being interpreted wrong).

The thesis of Coyne et al’s “A Helluva Read: Profanity in Adolescent Literature” is not even a thesis. It’s a statement presented in research form stating that the study’s aim was to provide a content analysis. Content analysis means the researchers looked at something intensely in order to understand communication patterns, rather than draw conclusions. It’s sort of a pre-study, meant to be the first step in doing more in-depth studies, if that makes sense. For the purposes of this study, researchers looked at how often there was profanity in a set of books, who said the profanity, who the profanity was directed at, and what sort of characteristics were associated with either the swearer or the sworn at.

In the next section of the paper, the researchers discussed why they chose this topic to explore. They talked about how media can influence adolescent thinking, and they were curious why it had never been studied in print material the way it had been in television or video games. Other research somewhat suggested that reading has a greater influence on adolescent thinking by virtue of how reading impacts the brain and processing (it’s higher level in that it’s engagement with material, rather than being lower level and passive in consumption). The researchers’ final words in this section say that “it is important to examine negative content in print media, such as profanity, as it may represent a significant cognitive and ultimately behavioral influence on the use of profanity.”

From all of the research they cite, this sort of conclusion is wild. First, they slip in the word “significant” for no reason; in research, the word “significant” is related to statistical analysis, not behavior. Once you have found stat analysis to be “significant” when researching, you can explore the correlation among variables (i.e., if you are reading dating ads and notice a significant difference between the way men and women identify themselves with objects of wealth, you can correlate that perhaps men emphasize wealth as something women would find attractive in a mate). Likewise, if you read the sentence a few more times, you’ll note the only thing they believe is that if teens are exposed to profanity, they will think about profanity more. It doesn’t say they will use it more. Just that their thinking and behavior could be influenced.

Ahem.

The third section of the study lays out the exact questions the researchers were curious about:
1. How frequent is profanity use in adolescent novels?
2. What type of profanity is used most often?
3. Is profanity more frequent and intense in novels aimed at older adolescents?
4. Does author gender influence use of profanity in adolescent novels?

Let’s break this down a tiny bit. Their questions were mostly developed to help guide collecting raw data. They wanted numbers — frequency of profanity and types of profanity. Then they were curious whether profanity was more frequent in books meant for older readers. And then, out of the blue, is the final curiosity: does an author’s gender (note: they use the word gender, not sex) influence the frequency of profanity use.

Tied up in their interest in counting the instances of profanity, these researchers were attempting to draw conclusions about whether or not the gender of the author impacted the frequency of swearing. Their choice to include commentary on what impact the women’s liberation movement may have had on profanity in a handful of YA books baffles me. After the researchers presented the question, they offered a little more research. Their first study (1973!) talks about how men used profanity more than women; their second study (1997) said the ladies were using “coarse language more than ever before.” How many conflicting variables happened between 1973 and 1997?

Oh right.

The researchers then offer up a bit of research from 1991 that says there’s still a stigma for girls to swear in a way there is not one for boys. They then ran with the info of the 20-year-old study to make the leap that because the “focus of adolescent novels is on the adolescent characters, the frequency of swearing should be higher among male characters than among female.” After this line, the researchers then give a series of hypotheses about the information they expect to cull from their data coding:

1. Male characters will use profanity (especially strong profanity) more frequently than female characters.
2. Adolescent characters will use profanity (especially strong profanity) more frequently than adult characters.
3. Profanity will be more frequent in humorous situations than in non-humorous.

The researchers at this point slipped in another research question, but it doesn’t interest me as much as the gender ones do. The question, if you’re curious, is about whether social status had any bearing on profanity (i.e., do richer, prettier characters swear more?).

So far, we have a study that is going to count things. Then they’re going to look at the things they counted and draw some conclusions based on those numbers. Note: not a single one of their questions was about behavior, about influence of profanity, or any other measure of the impact of the profanity in adolescent lit. Since they had no way to run such a study without first understanding the prevalence of swearing in the lit, they instead chose to go after an odd factor and attempt to draw conclusions of no impact: whether or not the author’s gender or the character’s gender influenced profanity.

As for methodology, Coyne et al used the books that were listed on the New York Times Best Seller List the week of June 23, 2008 and the week of July 6, 2008 and pulled out the 40 most popular titles. Any books geared for those over age 9 were included, and books in a series were limited to just the two most recently published books in the series. They then divided the books up into age categories, such that 9-11 were together, 12-13 were together, and 14 and older were together. One of the books was an outlier in that it had so many instances of profanity they did a little statistical work to make it less of a problematic title in the sample (and the way they did this was legitimate, especially since the book wasn’t even a novel but a memoir).

In studying the books, the researchers used the same system of coding profanity that prior researchers who studied profanity on television used. There were 5 categories:

1. The Seven Dirty Words — things the FCC won’t let you say: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.
2. Sexual Words — things that described body parts or sex in a less-than-nice way (so, “dickwad” is their example)
3. Excretory words — anything describing poop. This includes the word “crap,” even if it’s used in a way to express frustration. I suppose that makes sense.
4. Strong others — words that are offensive and taboo: bitch being one of them.
5. Mild others — words that are only kind of offensive and taboo: damn being one of them.

They drew their list of words in the 4th and 5th category from a book called Cursing in America (1992) so they had an objective list. At least, I’m led to believe that. The study does not offer an appendix with the actual list of words they coded for (a huge oversight). However, a word like “hell” used in the right context was not considered profane. The researchers only coded each word once — but they put it in the highest level category first. So, if the word “piss” was used, it went to the Seven Dirty Words category and not the excretory words.

Gender coding was straightforward: they went based on names and pronouns. They didn’t have a big deal with non-gendered characters except in the case of aliens or robots, and they were just left as “unknown.” They also coded for age (who said the swear, who received it) and for whether it was uttered in a funny or not funny situation. Social status stuff was explored too, but again, doesn’t interest me. They used multiple researchers to code the data, did verification of the coding, and all looks pretty good.

Their methodology was solid, aside from the fact the sample was so tiny (2 weeks worth of books in the middle of one summer). Also problematic was that it wasn’t random.

But rather than dwell on those little facts, let’s talk about the results!

In regards to their first research question, the researchers found 1,522 separate uses of profanity in the 40 books. Only 5 books did not contain a single profane item they were looking for. And 4 of the 5 were for books in the 9-11 age group. In doing a little more number crunching, the researchers found the average adolescent reading and average size book would encounter 6.66 profane words per hour. Let that number sit with you a few minutes.

For their second research question, researchers found that 51% of the profane instances were mild profanity. The Seven Dirty Words made up 20% of profanity. The other categories were much smaller.

The next research question relating to target age of the book and instances of profanity includes a large table that, if you can get your hands on the study, is worth looking at. But some of the interesting findings included seeing that the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books had virtually no profanity, whereas Harry Potter, Pendragon, and Ranger’s Apprentice books were coming in with 20+ instances each. For books published with the 9-11 year group in mind, there were 166 instances of profanity total. Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother had 175 instances of profanity, whereas the Summer Collection of Gossip Girls books had between 16 and 70 instances. Sarah Dessen’s Lock and Key had 53 instances. For books published with the 12-13 market in mind, there were a total of 654 instances of profanity. As for books geared for the 14 and older crowd, there were 1,522 instances of profanity, with The Book Thief having 101 instances of profanity, and the two Pretty Little Liars books having 40 and 80. Anna Godbersen’s The Luxe had 14 instances of profanity.

Looking at those raw numbers would suggest something, wouldn’t it? That The Book Thief is a terrible book because it has so much swearing in it, but that the Pretty Little Liars books were better because there weren’t as many instances? Or that Little Brother is the worst offender out there with its hulking 175 instances of profanity. But I’d say that The Book Thief and Little Brother are modern YA classics because I’ve read them and know the content, and I know as a reader that goes a lot further than the instances of profanity. Yet, researchers who are not invested in the content of the books are looking instead at word frequency, and in doing so, they’re intentionally developing a system of ranking the books based on it. But I’m not going to talk about this more because I think the YALSA blog post does a fine job expressing these things.

Of course the researchers found that there was more swearing in book for older adolescents than for those meant for younger ones. However, and I go back to my earlier discussion of the word “significant.” The research showed no significant difference in the instances of profanity for books published for those age 12-13 and those published for the 14 and older crowd. What that means is there cannot be any real correlations drawn. However, there was a significant difference in profanity between books aimed at those age 9-11 and those age 14 and older. To that I say, no shit. Oh, and books aimed at those for 14 and older were six times more likely to use the seven dirty words than those aimed at 12-13 year olds.

On to the thing that interested me the most in the results: gender. Again, gender. Not sex. There was no difference between the use of profanity in a book written by a male author and a book written by a female author. Even in terms of what kind of profanity was used (lady authors are using piss and fuck as much as the men are). The only differences found in the numbers came when the researchers looked at who was swearing in the text. Books written by females had more frequently swearing female characters than books written by males did, and vice versa.

When the researchers broke down the data they collected and explored their hypotheses, more things emerged worth looking at. First and foremost, gender of characters did not matter when it came to profanity use. In other words, female characters kept pace with male counterparts (the percentage break down was 49% of profanity came from a female character and 51% from a male). Likewise, there wasn’t a difference in the types of profanity uttered between the genders. And in results that aren’t surprising, adolescents swore a lot more in books than adults did. The researchers then drilled down even further and found that minor female characters swore significantly more than adult female characters except when it came to the seven dirty words (apparently adult females needed their fucks and cunts more than minor female characters did).

The other result I want to note was that profanity happened 23 times more often in non-funny books than in funny books. Again, a total no-brainer for anyone who has read one of these books in the last few decades.

My favorite part of any research study and the one I focused on most in this one is the discussion section. This is where the researchers have a chance to speculate upon the things they found. This is also where the bulk of misinformation about this particular study has stemmed from. The bulk of discussion in this piece boils down to this: while 88% of the books studied had profanity, some books had a lot of it, while others only had one or two instances (and I imagine many of those books were instances of saying “crap” or “damn” or other inoffensive, mildly profane words). They also state that in comparison to television, YA books aren’t pumping out more profanity. They’re on par with one another. And in an hour, the researchers found adolescents would hear 12 instances of profanity on television, as opposed to 6.66 in reading a book.

The researchers mentioned, too, YA books have more profanity than video games rated T for teen (this is based on a study they cite). But you know what they say about this? They suggest this is the case because most of the video games marketed for this age range are not heavy in dialog. And thus, when there is little dialog going on, then there’s going to be less profanity.

In their own research, they state that there is not more profanity in adolescent books than there is on television nor in video games.

More curious in the discussion, though, are the bits about gender. As the researchers showed, gender didn’t matter in terms of profanity use — that is, male and female authors wrote their swears equally, and they didn’t discriminate against the character’s gender either. But what the researchers had the gall to say here is what is worth thinking about. They write, “In previous years, women seemed to conform more to gender stereotypes, being kind, considerate, well mannered, and well spoken. In fact, it was often seen as a man’s obligation to protect women from profanity.” I want to note this was attributed to a source dating from 1975.

They continue with this, “With the women’s movement of the 1960s, however, activists challenged the idea that women should not use expletives. Later, women were encouraged to use expletives as a symbol of power they had gained through this movement.” Note, this was attributed to another source. Dated 1975 (not a typo — both sources are from 1975).

The researchers then dazzle us with this conclusion drawn from the antiquated research and their own work, “In books at least, it appears authors are moving with this trend and are portraying women to be just as crass as men.”

Let that sink in a second.

Coyne and her associates explored how many instances of profanity appeared in adolescent literature. But their conclusions come to involve the notion that the loose lips (or fingers) of lady writers is thanks to the women’s liberation movement. Not even thinking about the fact their sources about dainty and demure women date 1975, this sort of commentary is mind-blowing and discredits everything else said in the study for me. Because men are no longer dominant and women have some equal rights, they’re mucking up books with their crass language? If women were demure and well spoken and kind, they wouldn’t be contributing to the downfall of our children? To me, the message is between the lines here that, thanks to women having the ability to do what they want to do without the guidance of men, they’re ruining the future. They’re swearing! And they’re letting their young people in fiction swear! And forbid it all, but those young people then might use a profane word here!

Stepping back a little bit further, I’d like to point out that this study was conducted at Brigham Young University, regularly listed as one of the top conservative universities in the country. Moreover, the researchers were split between the department of family life and the department of communication. This is also an LDS university. Absolutely none of these things in and of themselves is wrong or questionable, but given what the commentary is in the discussion, the questionable research framing, and the topic at hand, it is hard for me to give this much credence. It is unabashedly biased and it is, without question, influenced by the source.

There’s more to the discussion section worth highlighting too. The researchers bring up the notion of social learning theory (we learn things via other people) and suggest that the more young people are exposed to profanity, the more likely they accept it. They become, in the study’s words, “desensitized.” That’s quite a leap to make, given that never once did this research set out to study behavior, but I suppose they’re pulling upon historical research on other, unrelated topics (they didn’t cite anything here though). But as much as I am giving this a hard time, I give the researchers huge credit when they state for themselves that they did not study behavior and that they were only speculating upon what the effects of reading profanity could do for cognitive and behavior of adolescents.

This is the line that those news articles everywhere failed to mention.

All Coyne et al’s study did was count instances of profanity and compare it to a number of other quantifiable variables like gender.

While the study talks about how finding books appropriate for adolescent readers can be challenging for parents, it states explicitly that the researchers do not advocate for a ratings system on books. They acknowledge that including a rating on a book is cause for hot debate and it is incredibly controversial.

What the researchers are curious about for future studies is how adolescents are using profanity in books. They set out believing that profanity would be used in humorous situations and were blown away to discover the bulk of swearing came in non-funny situations. As they state in the discussion, “Future research might more fully explore to what purposes profanity is used. Specifically, is use meant to exercise power, to assert superiority, to threaten, to warn, or to add emphasis or force to other utterances?” They also advocate for continued research of adolescent books in order to better understand it as a media form and to better learn about how it can impact behavior.

Okay.

Here is an idea that could help both future endeavors:

How about reading the books?

This is not a study about context and it is not a study about the impact of profanity in books on teenage behavior. This is also not a study about how important it is to label content nor does it even advocate for that. This is not a study about how women swear more now than they did in the past nor about how crass and filthy characters in books are. This is not a study about how books for 11-year-olds are going to ruin them for life. This is not a study about what does and does not make an adult uncomfortable reading in books meant for kids. This is not a study about how much better or worse books for young readers are than watching television or movies for that age group are nor is it a study about how video games and books compare to one another in terms of how they impact a teen’s mind. This is not a study written by the researchers meant to incite others to react and decry these books.

All they did was code data.

When I brought up the research project I helped out with, I mentioned that once we had coded the data, my professor was able to explore the statistical results and draw some interesting connections among the data. From there, he could suggest that men often spoke more to things of wealth in their dating ad while soliciting mentions of beauty in what they were seeking in a mate. He could then suggest that women made mention of their appearance in dating ads while their solicitations made mention of age quite frequently. In looking at this data, he could say that, in general, men are seeking mates who are good looking and do so by showing off the financial security they could offer and that women seek older, established mates while emphasizing their attractiveness. Through the research, my professor could draw these sorts of conclusions because he had not only the raw data, but he’d gotten it through the study of behavior (writing and submitting a dating advertisement), context (dating advertisements again) and through use of solid and up-to-date research done by others about intimate relationships and gender. It’s an incredibly careful methodology.

What Coyne and her team did was not this. They studied frequency of words in a non-random selection of books that were on the NYT Best Sellers list during two separate weeks. They studied those words out of context. They then went as far as to attempt to define behavior in a sexist and problematic way by looking at author gender and the number of profane words used in a book. Again, without context.

So what we should be making of this study and of the news articles that came out suggesting what this study said is this: nothing. What we should be doing when we attempt to describe what this study said is this: nothing. I will not be linking to any of the erroneous blog posts I’ve seen talking about this study because each time I saw one, I got a little bit more frustrated.

Misinformation is problematic. As much as this study in and of itself is silly, it wasn’t wrong and it didn’t actually suggest anything in regards to what we should be doing with profane teen books. It never once explored whether or not there has been an increase in profanity in teen books (that would have required them to study books over a period of time or from different periods of time and that is not what they did).

Part of being an advocate for books and reading and teenagers or, hell, anything worth being an advocate for, is being critical. It requires you go to the source material when you read a claim that feels outrageous or inflammatory. In this case, we’ve done precisely what the media, which didn’t even read the study correctly, has wanted us to do: panic. It’s caused erroneous stories to spread. Misinformation continues to be fed to people who take what they hear at face value. They then worry and fret about how everything is going to hell in a hand basket.

This is a non-story and a non-issue. But it has been a damn good exercise in critical reading, critical thinking, and, really, a damn fine opportunity to learn a hell of a lot about profanity and just what books are chock full of it.

It’s also been an opportunity to say thank you to authors for not censoring their stories and not conforming to gender roles. For pushing boundaries and challenging 1970s societal norms.

And the biggest thank you goes out to all of the women who pushed for liberation and for all of the men who have embraced equality.

Because, as I learned, feminism is about showing your power through one’s fucking words. For both men and women.

All data, citations, and statistics come from Sarah M. Coyne, Mark Callister, Laura A. Stockdale, David A. Nelson & Brian M. Wells (2012): “A Helluva Read”: Profanity in Adolescent Literature, Mass Communication and Society, 15:3, 360-383.