“You just follow your heart when it comes to fingering scenes” was MY takeaway quote from the latest newspaper report on the steamy goings-on in YA fiction, which predictably, has people a-Twitter.

But while the article is sensationalized, it isn’t incorrect. Young adult fiction is sexier than it used to be, even if the “threesomes” promised by the title are only evidenced by one example, with the other citations going to books about love triangles, which we all knew already (and are sick of? Yes?). And by sexier, I don’t mean “more characters having sex” but “more writing likely to elicit sexual arousal.” What we used to call–happily–dirty parts.

Contrary to Alessandra Balzer’s assertion in the article that “in the 1960s and ’70s, there wasn’t a category officially known as YA,” books for young adults have been marketed as such since at least the 1970s–I’m looking in a 1977 issue of the Horn Book at a Pantheon ad for Benjamin Appel’s Hell’s Kitchen which calls it a “powerful YA novel.” Sex has been a part of the genre since way back when as well, even if was generally off the page, some notable exceptions being Judy Blume’s Forever (1975), Elizabeth Winthrop’s A Little Demonstration of Affection (1975), and Norma Fox Mazer’s Up in Seth’s Room (1979). But the scenes even there were tasteful and discreet and designed to educate more than lubricate. The major differences between YA of the 70s and that of today are two: the intended audience is older (14 through adult rather than 12-16) and more of it is unabashedly commercial, that is, published as entertainment rather than for at least nominally didactic purpose. Abby Glines could not have written “Fuck, baby, you’re so damn tight” in a 1970s YA novel. When the 70s gave us Go Ask Alice‘s memorable “another day, another blowjob” we were meant to be horrified (even if what we actually were was titillated).

All of which is why I wonder at some of the arguments, such as those I read on Twitter yesterday defending the genre’s virtue, made for YA today. It’s not that it should not be defended, but that it is defended on the same grounds as were those didactic books of the 70s: authentic and truth-telling and hard-hitting and speaking to kids where they are at, man, and all that. Some of today’s YAs are all of those things, sure. But a lot are just great fun, and to defend them on the grounds of their moral necessity is to miss their point and as well to necessarily admit the arguments of their critics, such as the idiot the article quotes who claims the genre’s excesses groom readers for child molesters. Why can’t we just admit that teens like to read about sex?

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