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Fun & Full of Girl Love: Cherry by Lindsey Rosin

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CherryI’ve stepped back from reviewing this year, in part because it’s such a time-consuming aspect of blogging, and in part because I want to spend the time talking about books that really resonate and that might not otherwise see much attention in the book world. My book piles are growing at a monstrous rate at home, with piles upon piles of ARCs and finished copies and purchased books beside the basket of library books I’ve been working my way through. After what felt like six months of slow reading and a disinterest in reading all together, I’ve been flying through books at a speed I haven’t in a long, long time.

In part because I’ve been reading so many fantastic books.

I spent July reading backlist titles, plowing through a huge number of reads (for me — it’s all relative so the number itself isn’t important). And now with August here, I’ve started incorporating new and forthcoming titles back into my stacks.

And I’m so glad that Cherry by Lindsey Rosin was one that I picked up sooner, rather than later.

When was the last time you picked up a YA book that was not only wildly sex positive but also fun, engaging, funny, and featured an entire case of female characters who love, support, and encourage one another? Cherry could best be described as a contemporary American Pie but with female characters, with a twist of The To-Do List.

Told in third-person, Rosin offers up a story about four girls who’ve been best friends since first grade. There are fewer than 200 days between the time the story begins and their graduation, wherein they’ll be going to far-flung places around the world; while this sort of fear of separation lingers in their world, it’s not the thrust of their story nor their friendship. They’re tight, but they aren’t controlling of one another. They’ve accepted the reality, even if it’s one that they’re not necessarily looking forward to experiencing.

The book opens at Bigg Chill, the frozen yogurt shop that the four girls spend every weekend at in person. It’s their time to catch up and hang out, talk about important and not important things. Layla, a girl who likes to make lists and accomplish the things on that list, tells the rest of the crew that she has three things in mind to accomplish before graduation: she wants to get blonde highlights, she wants to raise one of her grades in an AP class to an A, and she wants to finally have sex with her long-time boyfriend Logan. Her friends consider this and offer up some perspective on the idea of including sex on her to-do list. Isn’t it odd to have that on a list of tasks to accomplish? Shouldn’t it be more than that?

After a long discussion of this — including some wildly realistic discussions of what sex is and isn’t, what masturbation is and isn’t, and who has/has not done things — the girls decide that they’ll make a sex pact. Together, but not together-together, they’ll all have sex before graduation.  There is a mix of emotions surrounding this, from fear to excitement and to the nervous feeling that one girl gets when she realizes that her friends think she’s the only non-virgin and the truth is, she’s never actually had sex.

And then we get to sex.

Cherry follows all four of the girls through the ups and downs of learning about their bodies, as well as learning about what it is they want from a sexual relationship. There is wonderful and frank discussion of masturbation — not just who is and isn’t masturbating, but how one could figure out what it is they like sexually — and there is open and honest discussion of contraception and protection.

But most importantly, and the part that made me realize this book wasn’t just a fun romp (though it is!), is that it showcases a variety of sexual interests and sexualities among the girls. We have straight sex as well as lesbian sex and it is on the page. From the moment that Emma meets Savannah, I hoped that something would spark, and I was pleased at the first kiss. Then the second. Then the fireworks. It was refreshing and truthful and powerful to see lesbian sexual interest right there on the page, presented in a way that was natural and fun and exciting, for both the girls and the readers who will pick this up.

What Rosin smartly does, in addition to highlighting sexual variety in this story, is not offer the easy ways in and out for the girls. There are ups and downs. What seems like the obvious partnerships aren’t necessarily the stories that see a happy ending. And the stories that we’ve come to see as unhappy ending tropes don’t end up that way.

Perhaps, though, the thing that made this book go from a fun, sexually empowering book, was how much it emphasizes and celebrates female friendship. Layla, Alex, Zoe, and Emma are tight, and even though there are realistic ups and downs in their relationships, they always come back to one another. There are boys (and a girl!) and there is sex, but there is not envy among them. They aren’t fighting for the same guys, and when they see a guy of interest being terrible, they tell their friends. They are not arguing over who gets what partner; they’re ensuring that the girls are finding the best, most respectful, most caring partners for them. Other girls who aren’t part of the core are rendered as important and fully-fleshed people worthy of respect as well. Though there is tension, the way that the girls describe other girls is done in a way that doesn’t demean or belittle them or call them any terribly sexist name in the book. In other words, it’s realistic that they don’t like every girl, but they don’t see the need to put that girl down using names or descriptions that belittle them.

Cherry is a fun read, and while it certainly tackles big, important topics, it’s refreshing in offering up a fun story about girls interested in and curious about sex. We regularly see this with males in YA fiction but rarely do we see it with girls. The cast of characters are all different, and they’re not all white, either — the book being set in Los Angeles feels authentic to the setting and to the demographics and to the sorts of relationships that would occur between teenagers there. The coming out scene with Emma is a small note in the story and it’s handled with care and love.

Though this will certainly see a fair amount of criticism — including this review by a male bookseller that I keep reading — it’s important to consider nuance. This is a book about girls who are curious about and who like sex. This is normal teenage girl behavior and thinking. The problem is that socially and culturally, we do not get to see or hear these stories. But we are allowed these same stories, often called “hilarious coming-of-age stories,” when they feature a male protagonist. Cherry absolutely tackles protection and pregnancy, and it absolutely talks about the fact not everyone is having sex. It also explores why and how people choose to engage in intercourse, and it discusses masturbation in a powerful, non-judgmental capacity. These are things we do not see in YA fiction.

I’ve spent a long time doing research on this and have written about it extensively on STACKED, as well as in the book The V-Word. The closest book to this one in recent memory is Julie Halpern’s The F-It List, which you may remember also caused some review controversy. While neither Halpern’s novel nor Rosin’s novel are perfect, both are doing something that needs to be considered thoughtfully and with extreme nuance. Rushing through books like this and announcing that they “don’t do” a thing or that they do a thing “too much” is denouncing the realities of female sexuality. No where does Rosin suggest all girls need to have sex and get it over. This is a story about four girls and their juggling of emotional, psychological, and physical desires in a world that constantly tells them to suppress those things while cheering on their male contemporaries for those very same things. Rosin tackles this, too, in the relationship between Layla and Logan.

Cherry is a necessary addition to the YA world, especially when it comes to fun fiction featuring a realistic female cast. Readers who love books by Amy Spalding will be delighted by this one, as will readers who are aching for a fun story ala movies like American Pie but with girls at the forefront.

It’s also a read for those eager for a solid story about friendship, girl gangs, and the power of female allies.

 

 

Cherry hits shelves August 16. Finished copy received from the publisher. 

 

Guest Post: Fiona Wood on Female Sexuality in YA Fiction

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I’ve been thinking and writing about female sexuality in YA for a couple of years now. It’s a topic that continues to fascinate and frustrate me. I’ve talked at length about what good examples are out there, and I’ve talked at length about what’s missing.

Today, I’m turning the blog over to a guest who has written one of the best examples of female sexuality I’ve seen in YA in a long time, Fiona Wood. Her recently-published US debut Wildlife presents an honest and unashamed exploration of female sexuality, offering a range of experiences, emotions, and words to describe a variety of sexual situations. She’s here to talk about the choices she made, as well as what she thinks some of the more solid YA novels that tackle female sexuality are.

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Teenage years are the years of sexual maturation. The location of early sexual experience in a field that ranges from respect/pleasure/affirmation to abuse/fear/vilification is hugely influential in forming a sense of self, and self-worth.
What role can the representation of sex in YA fiction play here?
Although it’s not the job of fiction to educate, it is nonetheless a job that fiction does well. It’s a private delivery of food for thought, away from the classroom. In the context of a society wallpapered with frequently unchallenged sexism and misogyny, fiction can offer, for example, female characters with self-awareness and agency, characters standing up to sexism, characters recovering from abuse. Fiction gives readers the opportunity to test their ideas and experience against those explored in the narrative. When it comes to sex, and particularly to young women becoming empowered, the more information they have, the better. 
When I’m writing, my job is to be true to character, and story. But I don’t write in a vacuum; I’m responding to a time and a social context; writing is political, and I write as a feminist. I have the readership age group in mind, and ask myself what I wish I’d been able to read at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
As a teenager I was always searching the bookshelves for intel about sex, and never finding very much. Somehow, Judy Blume’s Forever and Deenie did not make it to the shelves of my school library, though Go Ask Alice, which includes a really disturbing sexual abuse scenario, was freely available. When I read a book that opts for a dissolve when it comes to sex, rather than providing any detail, I can feel my sexually curious teenage-self asking, but what are they doing? What is actually happening? That’s why I like the idea of realistic representation of sex in YA fiction.
During the course of Wildlife’s narrative, protagonist Sibylla’s sexuality is expressed frequently, and is integral to her character. Theory and practice on sex and romance are on a collision course, accelerated by Sib’s manipulative best friend, Holly. The book’s other narrative voice, Lou, recalls a happy sexual relationship from the perspective of grieving the loss of her partner.
I always enjoy reading a treatment of sex that rings true to character. A few favourites include the humour, vulnerability, and honesty in the sex scenes between Tara and Tom in Melina Marchetta’s The Piper’s Son; Evan’s unflinching ownership of his past sexual opportunism in Sex & Violence by Carrie Mesrobian; the tender, awkward beauty of Riley Rose and Dylan’s sex in Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell; and Deanna’s sense of injustice at the gender double-standard that attaches to her sexual history, in Sara Zarr’s Story of a Girl.   
In an ideal world, by the time they are thinking of becoming sexually active, girls will be well-educated in all aspects of sex and sexuality, and have the knowledge and confidence to trust their judgement with regard to what they do, when, and with whom. I think young readers benefit from access to a range of narratives that deal frankly with sex before they become sexually active. This seems particularly important at a time when most teenagers have seen multiple iterations of pornographic imagery, offering a limited, unrealistic, and often misogynistic representation of sex.  
I hope readers will lose themselves in the story, and find themselves in the characters of Wildlife. I also hope they’ll wonder: What do I want my first sexual relationship to be like? What sort of conversations about sex will I have with a prospective partner? What might I do differently from this, or that, character? 

Female Sexuality in YA Fiction: A Look at the Landscape

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The more I write and think about YA, the more I find holes within it. Part of it is knowing I haven’t — and can’t — read everything. But part of it is that there simply are holes in the category.

I turned in a draft of the Q&A that will be a part of Amber Keyser’s The V-Word last week, and after having spent almost a year now reading and thinking critically about the ways that female sexuality are rendered in YA, there are definite places where YA can and should do better. I’ve been keeping an eye on this since writing about positive portrayals of female sexuality last summer,  and more, I’ve been keeping an eye on the discussions about sexuality as it’s depicted in YA.

The depictions of sexuality in YA matter because these are safe spaces for readers — teen readers, especially — can think about, explore, and consider what it means to be a sexual being. We don’t talk openly or honestly about sex as a culture, and we certainly don’t talk about it in positive, affirming, and empowering ways with teenagers.

With those thoughts in mind, I thought it might be worth talking about where we’re doing okay and where we could and should be doing better when it comes to sexuality in YA. What are we seeing? What aren’t we seeing? More specifically, I’m talking about female sexuality (and that extends, of course, to gender identity on a larger scale) and I’m talking about more realistic novels than fantastic. Which isn’t to say fantasy or other genre fiction doesn’t add to the discussion. It’s just not my strongest area of knowledge. I’d love any input or thoughts other YA readers may have on this topic, so feel free to think with me in the comments. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive but instead, something that spurs some thinking and discussion.

I’m fully aware there are presses publishing books that explore some of these topics — but accessibility is an issue, especially for teen readers. If it’s not something that’d be easily found on a library shelf, in a classroom, or in a bookstore, getting these books can be a challenge.

Virginity & Sexuality As Choice


When I was working through the books I’d read and doing research on sexuality in YA, one of the topics I had a really tough time with was virginity. It seems counterintuitive for virginity to be a tricky topic to find in YA, but it is. There are a few books in mainstream YA which tackle virginity — Terra Elan McVoy in Pure is an example, as is Purity by Jackson Pearce — but there aren’t many more.

Could it be because if sex and sexuality aren’t addressed in the novel in some capacity that we default our thinking to virginity? In other words, if we don’t know the character is sexually active or that she is living a pure life and that’s one of the subplots, if not the main story plot, do we just assume she’s a virgin and that’s it?

Not every book in YA is going to address sexuality, nor should it. It’d be silly to have these topics shoehorned into every novel and it’d be disingenuous to story, to character, and it’d be unfair to readers who’d be given something that doesn’t need to be there (which then makes reading a chore and makes it feel like a lecture, rather than a pleasurable pursuit). But what I want to know is why virginity outside of a religious/spiritual choice isn’t more common in YA? There’s nothing wrong with that choice, and I know it appears with some frequency in fiction geared toward that readership, but it seems to be the biggest piece of the virginity puzzle in YA when I’m not sure it’s the only piece we should be seeing.

Perhaps the best example of this I could find in fiction was Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi. This book is 22 years old, and yet, it did something really progressive and powerful that I’d like to see in a lot more YA today: Josie, the main character, is being physical with her boyfriend and enjoying it, but she then tells him she’s not ready to have sex with him. He goads her a bit about it, saying that she’s being ridiculous, especially since they’re having a good time, but she pushes back and tells him that her body and her choices about sex are her own and right now, she’s not feeling like she’s ready to have sex for the first time. This is a really powerful scene in the book, and one that made me pause and wonder why we don’t see more of this.

Where are girls who are choosing virginity because it empowers them to do that, outside of a religious choice?

I’d like to see more girls who are choosing virginity because that matters to them and because it makes them feel good to take and have that ownership over their own bodies and their own sexual lives. Not out of fear, nor out of duty. But because it’s exactly what they want.

Prude Shaming

The last few years have offered up a solid array of titles that explore slut shaming. Jillian and Mariko Tamaki do a great job of this in This One Summer, and there’s an especially good scene when the younger girl, Windy, tells Rose she’s unfairly labeling and judging other girls she doesn’t know — and she’s doing so in context of the sexual lives she knows nothing about. Jennifer Mathieu digs into slut shaming in her debut novel, The Truth About Alice, as well. There are other books that look at it with less focus than these two, but the important thing is that it’s there.

Is prude shaming though?

Perhaps because it’s tied into the fact we don’t see enough virginity-as-choice in YA (whether because of a religious reason or not!), but there’s also little exploration of what happens when you’re shamed because you’re choosing virginity.

I’ve seen bits and pieces of it — and even in Marchetta’s novel, Josie’s boyfriend picks on her when she stops him in that moment — but we need more. I’d love a book like Mathieu’s but showing the reverse: what happens when a girl’s choice of virginity becomes her downfall or the reason that she’s seen as any number of unsavory things? What happens when she asserts her right to choose not to do something makes her the center of bullying or the target of a community’s rage? Or what about when someone is asexual and simply isn’t interested in sex at all?

Even more, there are times when being a virgin isn’t a choice for teens. The opportunities for teens to have sex are far more limited than they are for adults. There’s a lot of ground to cover when it comes to virginity in YA, and I think prude shaming is a large facet within it.

Diversity


The biggest — and I mean biggest — failure in YA fiction when it comes to female sexuality is in diversity. And I mean diversity of every make, shape, and form possible.

Books that are doing a great job of portraying female sexuality have whiteness in common. It’s exceptionally rare to see a YA novel that tackles sexuality in a positive light that features a character of color. Hannah Moskowitz’s forthcoming Not Otherwise Specified (March 2015) features a queer character of color who is open, honest, and proud of her sexuality. She’s portrayed as enjoying female and male partners. Nina LaCour offers us a mixed race main character in Everything Leads to You, where she’s the center of a lesbian romance.

Both of these are rare sights.

In thinking about sexuality in YA, I had a near impossible job pulling out characters who were disabled discovering sexuality. Indeed, disability in YA already commands but a tiny part of bookshelves as it is, but the only discussion I could think to talk about in terms of a disabled person owning and exploring her sexuality was this powerful post by Kayla Whaley at Disability in KidLit. That isn’t a novel, though. It’s her life. Why aren’t we seeing more books like that?

If we consider mental illness a disability, we might be able to add more titles to the positive portrayals of female sexuality in YA mix — and even then, we’re not getting very far — but for stories featuring physically disabled main characters, the landscape is bleak.

More, we don’t have much diversity in terms of sexual choice itself. I noted above that we don’t see asexual characters (and asexuality is not the same as when we consider a default virgin narrative). We don’t see pansexual or demisexual characters. We don’t see many bisexual characters, though we’ve seen a few more in recent years, including Sophie in Tess Sharpe’s Far From You. We don’t see characters often who make choices outside of the one partner model — there is one I can think of but won’t spoil since it’s a semi-recent title. We also don’t see characters who see their sexuality as fluid and shifting; a lot of that may simply be because the teen years are about exploration and they’re a relatively short period within one’s lifespan, so discovering that fluidity can be tougher.

Female Masturbation


I’d actually begun an entire blog post titled “Going There: Female Masturbation in YA” a couple weeks ago, after reading this tweet from Andrew Karre:

I’m not sure if it’s because I was paying more attention over the last year or if it’s because I’ve come to dig out the cute way we talk around girls masturbating in YA, but this is something I think we’re seeing more than we believe we are. Could we do better? Absolutely. We can do better in not just seeing it happen more frequently, but we can do better in not being shy about describing what’s going on when a girl’s enjoying solo sex (fading to black or being euphemistic in a way that only those who are clued in know what’s happening).

When I served on Outstanding Books for the College Bound last year, one of the titles I nominated for one of the subcommittees I was on was Rookie: Yearbook One. It seems like a bit of an odd ball choice, but it’s an amazing resource. Besides diving into music and film and fashion and culture, this particular volume offered a really honest and blunt piece about why masturbation is important and why girls can feel empowered by knowing their bodies.


Rookie might not be hitting mainstream YA readers, but the fact that one of the biggest publications for teens, spearheaded by a teen, tackled this topic and found it important enough to feature in their print edition says a lot to me about how this is a topic teen girls are interested in and are talking about.

Beyond Rookie, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see masturbation pop up not just in Sarah McCarry’s All Our Pretty Songs, which I noted in my prior post on this topic, but I’ve seen it in other recent reads. There’s Julie Halpern’s The F-It List. There’s Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky (an older title, but a book that is entirely about female sexuality and highly recommended). There’s the classic from Judy Blume, Deenie, as well as Kody Keplinger’s The DUFF.

Then there’s Fiona Woods’s Wildlife, too, out in September, that I can’t recommend highly enough. Beyond featuring masturbation, Wildlife explores numerous facets of sexuality, and it’s empowering and validating in a way teen girls need to read and see, whatever choices they make for themselves.

We can keep doing better with this aspect of sexuality, and I hope that we do. Let’s see more diverse representations here. The majority of these stories are middle class white females — and we know there are many, many more types of girls than that. Let’s see this become a normal thing, rather than something that has to either be danced around or something that, when we read it, sticks out because seeing it called as much is a pleasant surprise.

Or, as I noted in the Q&A, it’d be great if we didn’t have to keep calling it female masturbation, as if it’s something wholly different than masturbation, period.

If you’re still thinking about this, I highly recommend reading Andrew Karre’s follow-up blog post to his tweet, regarding the comments teens in the workshop he and Carrie Mesrobian had. It’s insightful and I think not only shows what is and is not being seen by teen readers, but I think it speaks to why we can and should be having these conversations with teens.

They aren’t dumb.

On Expectations for Girls in YA Fiction, Misleading Reviews, and Sexuality

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A few weeks ago, I picked up and devoured Julie Halpern’s The F-It List. It’s a story about two girls who are best friends and how their relationship weathers everything. It starts with Becca sleeping with Alex’s boyfriend the day of Alex’s father’s funeral. The summer immediately following, the girls aren’t hanging out as much as they used to. Sure, Alex is angry and upset about what Becca did, but their reason for not hanging out has much more to do with Alex’s need to grieve losing her father than it does what Becca did or losing that boyfriend.

When the school year begins, Alex learns via another girl that something awful happened to Becca over the summer: she was diagnosed with cancer. Alex immediately runs to Becca’s side, and their friendship, while not perfectly patched up, is allowed to continue, and it’s through this agreement of continuing their relationship that Becca asks Alex for a favor. She needs to complete her f-word-rhymes-with-bucket list. Since Becca’s sick and worried a bit about what her future may hold, she wants Alex to do and experience a number of things that she’s always wanted to do but wonders if she’ll ever have the chance to do.

A number of items on the list have to do with sex. Becca wants Alex to masturbate, and she wants Alex to have sex with someone she can say I love you to and mean it. Other items on the list range from doing some silly prank-like stuff to more relationship-driven items. But it is those sexually-related items that Alex homes in on most and those are the items that come to signify not just a lot of what the relationship between the two girls is — blunt, honest, and unashamed — but also points where readers may either bristle or dig in for something deeper. In many ways, I thought the ways that both the sexually-related items and the friendship more broadly played out in the story were what made The F-It List knock out. It’s rare to see such positive portrayals of sex for girls. Both Becca and Alex enjoyed sex and both were very open and honest about liking it and sharing those positive experiences with one another.

But not everyone felt this to be the case. Here’s the review Halpern’s novel got in School Library Journal (you can click to make it larger):

I’ve read and reread this review many times, and every time, something new feels off in it. Keep in mind many trade reviewers review from advanced reader copies of books, meaning that not all of the kinks have been entirely worked out.

I note, too, that I also read The F-It List from an advanced reader copy.

Although I could dive into the notion that Alex performs the items on the f-it list out of guilt — an idea I disagree with entirely, as Alex begins to really embrace this as a commitment to her relationship with Becca — what I find fascinating is this line: “Both girls have casual, unprotected sex with all of their boyfriends without any thoughts of taking precautions.”

This line presumes a few things in it. The first is that it’s the responsibility of the girls to think about and carry out the actions necessary for protection during sex. While print space is limited and words have to be carefully selected in a trade review, the way this particular line is phrased, in conjunction with the line before it, casts a judgment upon the female characters in the story. They’re crass, with limited vocabulary, and they’re not taking responsibility for their own actions. These are the kinds of girls you don’t want to be role models for readers, since they’re not being “good girls.” They don’t arouse sympathy because what happens to them is all a matter of consequences and choices they make. They weren’t smart enough or thinking through things enough to protect themselves.

But what is worse in this line is that it’s factually incorrect.

Early in the book, Alex talks about the first time she’s had sex, as a means of thinking through Becca’s request that she have sex with someone she loves and cares about. The first person — and only person at that point — she’d slept with was a boy named Aleks, who was a foreign exchange student. Starting at page 76 in the advanced reader copy, Alex lays out the story as follows:

Becca was disappointed I hadn’t seen his penis yet and handed me a condom the next time I saw her. Two days later, armed with the Trojan, I followed Aleks back to his house again. […] Me in my underwear, him in blue boxers, we moved over to the bed. “Wait–” I told him, the first work spoken that afternoon. I found Becca’s condom in my backpack and brought it up to the bed. […] He slapped on the condom.


It’s pretty evident immediately that condoms play a role in not just Alex’s sex life, but in the discussions she and Becca have had as best friends about being sexually active. Alex got the condom from Becca, and Alex insisted that Aleks wear it when they slept together. Seems straightforward enough.

But there’s more.

Later on in the story, when Alex begins a relationship with Leo, the issue of the condom isn’t the only one that comes up before they take the plunge and have sex (they had a few intimate moments, but in each case, Leo stopped when Alex asked him to). She talks about why she wants to make sure there is protection. Starting on page 141 of the advanced reader copy:

His hands were gentler than I wanted, and I grabbed one and wrapped it around my breast. I let out a sigh, and Leo reciprocated with a sound of his own. “So you have a condom?” I asked. Life had been too cruel in the last year not to get me pregnant or diseased if I wasn’t careful. I couldn’t trust my body to do the right thing, and I didn’t want to have a conversation with Leo in the middle of this to talk past sexual partners. I didn’t want to know. I just needed it to happen. 


Immediately after, Leo puts on a condom.

In both instances, Alex takes precaution. In both instances, it is Alex — the girl — who insists on using a condom before engaging in intercourse and in the second section, Alex lays out why it is she finds taking this precaution important. With everything going on in her life right now, she recognizes that not being careful would only lead to further problems. She didn’t want to saddler herself with that, nor did she want to get into it with Leo, either. It’s clear and evident that Alex thought about precautions prior to intercourse, and she’s not shy in laying that out there for readers, just as she’s not shy in laying out there what and how she comes to enjoy her budding sexuality.

I’m struck by that review line again because it seems to me the reviewer missed these things (reading too quickly? Not paying close enough attention to the details yet still bringing them up in the review?). But I’m further struck in thinking about whether or not we as readers need to be hit over the head with how careful our protagonists — females especially — need to express how they’re protecting themselves when they choose to engage in sex.

Did the reviewer find fault in the fact that Alex doesn’t tell us about condom use in subsequent sexual situations, despite the fact she’s made it clear she wouldn’t be crazy enough to have sex without a condom? Is it necessary for every instance of sex, whether on the page or fade to black, be explicit in its depiction of protection use? And if that’s the case, where is there a line drawn between telling the story and being faithful to how the characters are and positing an over-the-head message about safe sex? Do readers believe that if Alex doesn’t explain in every sexual moment that she’s making sure there’s a condom in place that she’s chosen instead to not protect herself? Because as a reader, I assume when it’s laid out there for me as openly as it is, that there will be a condom. That I don’t need to be reminded again and again.

Because when real people have sex and are resolute in their wanting to be protected against pregnancy and disease, it becomes a routine, rather than a point of conscious decision making. You always have that box of condoms or you’re faithful in taking birth control (or both or neither). The story isn’t in the routine; it’s in the break from the routine. In Alex’s case, the routine is protecting herself, and I think any more insertion of the condom lines through the story would have turned this from a book where Alex (and Becca) really come to embrace their ability to be sexual beings to a story where they become pawns for the Message of “make sure you use protection.”

Part of me wonders, too, whether the fact this is such a positive portrayal of girls embracing sex and doing so without apology and without holding back on being crude and, at times, obscene, is what will hold some readers back from seeing these smaller moments when Alex is very keen on keeping herself and Leo safe. Halpern hasn’t written an easy story here in any capacity. But I think it’s this complexity which makes The F-It List such a great, memorable read. Because it’s not about Becca’s diagnosis. It’s not about death or the fear of that. It’s about embracing life and relationships — friendly and romantic — to their fullest in whatever way you need to. It’s unfortunate, though, that a trade review in one of the largest, most well-respected library journals could be factually incorrect about the story. In doing so, this book might not end up in the hands of those readers — girls particularly — who would get so much out of it. Who would see themselves in Alex or in Becca. Who would see it’s perfectly okay to enjoy sex alone or with a partner.

And that yes, it’s important to take precautions for yourself and have solid reasons behind why.

I can’t help wonder, too, whether books that do similar things as Halpern’s but feature a male main character undergo the same scrutiny and character judgment.

How to Relationship — Guest Post by Corey Ann Haydu

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Today’s post comes from Corey Ann Haydu, and it’s about relationships. What are the common relationship narratives we come to expect in YA fiction? Does everything have to be about teens having sex? Corey digs in and questions our expected — and unexpected — beliefs about sexuality in YA fiction, especially as it comes to girls.









Corey Ann Haydu is the author of OCD LOVE STORY and the upcoming novels LIFE BY COMMITTEE and RULES FOR STEALING STARS. She lives in Brooklyn, loves cheese and podcasts, and writes (and eavesdrops) in cafes. 















I am an imperfect feminist and an imperfect reader and if we’re all pretty honest these are the only kinds of feminists and readers there are. Because feminism and reading are both explorations and when we explore we mess up. 

This is a blog post about trying to be a better feminist and a better reader and a person less motivated by the Relationship Narratives that we’ve been told our whole lives and how YA literature does and does not come into play. This is a post about what we’re telling women about marriage and what we’re telling teenagers about sex, and how literature reinforces an Ideal that maybe doesn’t exist.

This is also a blog post about teen sexuality and our discomfort with it, which, because I am an imperfect feminist and an imperfect reader, sometimes includes my discomfort with it.

A few months back I was part of a reading at a Children’s bookstore. The reading was about relationships in YA literature, and our panel of YA authors each read a flirting or kissing scene from our books.

Then something happened.

Wonderful YA author Mindy Raf read a scene from her recent The Symptoms of My Insanity. It was less than a sex scene. It was more than a kissing scene. It was uncomfortable and funny. It was specific and evocative. It was messy and brilliant. It was too much for the children’s bookstore to have over their PA system, an understandable concern. After her reading we were asked that if we were going to read racier scenes, to read them off-mic, since there were children in the store.

This is a reasonable request. It’s a kid’s store, there are little ones, and our books, like a lot of YA books, were not necessarily appropriate for too young an audience. They didn’t kick us out or treat us disrespectfully. But it was a unique experience and there was something bigger at play, too, in my opinion. What was uncomfortable about Mindy’s scene was its break from the YA sexuality narrative.

Relationship narratives are something I’m thinking about a lot lately. Maybe because I’m in my thirties and in a relationship and am wondering what I am Supposed to be Doing. Maybe because I write about girls beginning to navigate relationships in unexpected ways.

I’m thinking a lot about how the things we see and read intersect with what’s expected of us in life. Lucky for 30-something women, we know exactly what the narrative is in literature and other entertainment for adults. We know what is expected of us if we are to follow the narrative presented in popular fiction. Meet, fall in love, get married. There is an implied goal to every relationship. And an endpoint that signifies the story is almost over. Marriage. It’s what the characters are working towards, and what the reader is instructed to root for, and—if we’re to believe stories and the way they’re told have an impact on our psyches—what we then hope for ourselves. We come to learn that a relationship has a shape, one shape, and that we need to be trying to fit into it.

I’d argue YA literature and media often do the same thing with sex.

It’s important to say that there are thousands of YA books that veer from a traditional relationship narrative. YA is growing and vast and a lot of writers are telling new stories and using sexuality in new ways to create new structures.

That said, a lot of stories aren’t doing this, and it’s meaningful to think about what the predominant place of sex in stories for teens is, and why it’s there. Sex is often used as endpoint in YA, in a similar way that marriage is used as an endpoint in adult literature and media. Sometimes it is heralded as a relationship accomplishment, or sometimes it’s the starting point of a more difficult story about the ways sex can go wrong, but it’s a fixed point around which other things revolve.

And maybe most meaningfully, when we’re talking about sex in YA, we’re talking almost exclusively about about intercourse.

YA relationships often have their own specific shape: meet, fall in like, first kiss, fall in love, first time having intercourse.

There is no messy in between.

And when there is, we’re uncomfortable with it.

A relationship in YA often moves to the Next Level with those two points of sexual contact—kissing and sex. Take Dawson’s Creek. This is neither literature nor incredibly current, but it’s a really strong example of the structure I’m talking about, and who doesn’t like a quick discussion of late 90s pop culture?

The characters in Dawson’s Creek have a first kiss, are boyfriend and girlfriend, and then angst about whether or not to have intercourse. As far as we know, they do not hit any other points of sexuality. They go from making out on the couch, fully clothed to sex, with nothing in between. They don’t worry about the other steps one could take, the other paths that occur while teens are figuring out how lust functions. They kiss and they have sex. If two characters wake up in the morning next to each other, naked, they’ve had intercourse. We know this to be true because it has always been true and the shape is ingrained in us.

We don’t even need to see or read about the sex happening. There’s a fade to black (or in the case of Dawson’s Creek, a fade to a snow globe of Los Angeles) and we understand that if a shirt has been removed or a bed is present, intercourse has occurred.

If two adult characters are in love, have slept together and have gotten through 1-5 difficult obstacles, we need them to get married. It is the conclusion to the journey. It is an answer to a question. It is a tangible, solid thing that we can understand very specifically—this means they are committed to each other forever and will have a family. We are comfortable with this story.

It’s problematic for adults. Marriage isn’t a tangible thing.

But sex? Sex is even less tangible. And the journey there is even less defined, in real life. Sex isn’t an answer at all. It isn’t even a prolonged state, the way marriage usually is. If the marriage Relationship Narrative is problematic and insincere and deceptive, the sex Relationship Narrative for teens is downright criminal. It’s a lie.

Here’s the harder thing to say: I’m guilty of this. It’s important for me to acknowledge this. A misconception about identifying as feminist is that you think you have all the answers to gender and sexuality issues. That you Do It Right. For me, for most feminists I think, that’s not the case. I’m the kind of feminist who is still training herself to see things through the right filter. I mess up, often. I play into familiar tropes and struggle to maintain both my own values and good storytelling and market viability. I have trouble even seeing where my own prejudices are, where I’ve fallen into the same traps as everyone else. Where and how and why I’ve given in to a dangerous structure.

I haven’t yet written the hooking up without intercourse stage of teen sexuality into my books. I’ve cut to black on actual sex. I’ve had the kissing and the implied understanding that sex has occurred and that the relationship is stronger because of it, more valid because of it. I’ve avoided letting my characters explore the messiness of sexuality. To be honest, I think I’m not sure how to do it yet. I’m not comfortable with the line between realistic/honest and graphic or too erotic. It’s a fault of mine, and something to check in with constantly. I have not done a good enough job speaking to the truth of teen, female sexuality. But that checking in and owning up is what being feminist is about for me. Checking in on those reflexes and working on them. Analyzing them. Being open to other people’s analysis of them. Hoping I’ll do better, wondering why when I sit down to write, I don’t want to.

What I’m sure of is that it’s dangerous to tell women that the goal of a relationship, the only way for a relationship to be “real” is to get married. And I know that telling a girl that sexuality is only about intercourse is dangerous. I know that letting sex be a stand in for validating a teen relationship is dangerous. I know that I don’t want to see relationships , especially for teen girls, take only one shape, over and over, because reinforcing an idea with such a specific prescription is hard on all of us. And we have enough stories we tell about teen girls and the boxes they’re allowed to sit in. We don’t need any more.

I loved that uncomfortable moment in the bookstore with Mindy reading about body parts and discomfort and not-intercourse. I loved that there was a specificity and awareness of the main character’s body and the chaotic, hilarious, strange, upsetting, turned-on, conflicted feelings going on in her mind. There was a lack of clarity that felt so much truer than the abundance of clarity that I think we feel pressure to write into young adult sex scenes. Mindy’s non-sex scene captured a truer part of adolescence, something that we don’t want to see. That is not appropriate to be played over the PA system in a children’s bookstore. That makes people tense up and shift around and wonder if it’s okay to admit that there’s something aside from making out and fading to black while the characters have their first time.

I forget a lot of scenes people read in their books during these panels. I’m sure we all do. I will never forget Mindy’s. It was shocking not because it was so sexy or racy or graphic. It was shocking because it was real and because it was an under-represented point of view that still doesn’t have a place in the teen Relationship Narrative. 

But like with all things YA, what matters is what the readers need and want and relate to. And although we’re uncomfortable with shifting the narrative, I think the girls aren’t. Even teen Corey, I think, related more to the grey area than anything.

What’s the scene of female sexuality I remember most from my own reading when I was young? Deenie by Judy Blume. A guy attempting to feel her up with her brace on. I believe it was in a hallway. It brought up two feelings for me at the time—the bubbling up of lust and the frantic spiraling of anxiety. The fear and hope. The weird mix of wanting it for myself and being terrified it would someday actually happen in my life.

Re-reading it now, it’s a small, subtle moment. That’s fine. That’s great! Judy Blume did, years ago, what I am struggling to do now. Make clear that there is more to sexuality than only kissing and intercourse in an understandable, simple, clear way that didn’t defy the tone of the book by being “too graphic” (whatever that means). She managed honesty and frankness while maintaining a boundary that she as a writer, and me as a young reader, felt comfortable with. It’s a tiny, masterful moment that makes me want to do better.

We can’t all be Judy Blume. Or really none of us can, but the fact that we all agree she is the queen of navigating sexuality as a teen means there’s probably something to learn there. She didn’t trap us into one notion of what a relationship looked like, and she didn’t tell us sex was a goal that meant a relationship was real or valid or that a happily-ever-after was coming. She didn’t insist there was only the first kiss and the first time with nothing in between. She didn’t seem to have an agenda.

And listen, sex as a teen can make love feel more real, can bring a relationship to the next level. Of course it can! Just as marriage can work out and it can be a valid goal for a 20, 30 40 or whatever-something woman. But examining what literature and media are telling us is vital. And understanding our wants in that context elevates our understanding of ourselves. We have to give teens the chance to evaluate themselves in the same way.

YA literature has a responsibility to make a space for girls to think about sexuality on a broad spectrum. We owe it to girls to give them something we don’t have—more than one ideal Relationship Narrative. Open space where there used to be claustrophobic one-path hallways. A chance to decide for themselves what love looks like, and what sex looks like in all its forms.

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Corey Ann Haydu is the author of OCD Love Story and the forthcoming Life By Committee, available in May.