Reading Smut in High School

It has come to our attention that last week, a county in Florida removed books by Nora Roberts from school library shelves. 

We know we’re late to the book ban party, as this nonsense has been going on for a while now. We’re not here to tell you what’s going on with book bans, and how terrible they are, and that we are adamantly opposed to the way certain white suburban moms (who, we must admit, probably look like us) have weaponized “care for children” to push a radical agenda to remove content about sex, race, and queer identity from school libraries. 

(If you want a deep dive into everything that’s going on in the world of book censorship, BookRiot has regularly updated, very detailed coverage. Jen and Sarah at the Fated Mates podcast also did a great episode on the topic last year; their show notes include tons of additional resources and a full transcript.)

Rather, we’re here to talk about high schoolers reading romance. We fully support them doing so.

“WHAT?!?!” you might say. “High schoolers shouldn’t be reading romance novels. They are pure,  innocent beings of light who we must protect from THE SMUT.” 

To which we respond: “You know that they have access to the internet right? Have you seen what’s on there?”

All of us were avidly reading romance as high school students. (As is evidenced by our My First Smut stories: here’s Holly’s, Erin’s, and Ingrid’s.) None of us has any memory of ever checking out any book from the library at our high school, like, ever, but the local public library was a huge source for romance. 

(Please remember that we are Olds and that when we were teenagers YA fiction as a marketing category did not really exist. Once you finished The Babysitters’ Club, you might find a stash of Sunfires, but probably it was time to move from the kids’ section to the adult books.) (But also, let’s be honest, adults are overwhelmingly the main readers of YA books.)

What did we learn from reading all this smut at an impressionable age? To value ourselves as unique individuals. To look for love. To be optimistic about the world. To develop impressive vocabularies. To value sexual intimacy as a possible source of connection between people. To share books with friends and family. To read for fun. (Ok, we already knew about reading for fun—but we learned that reading could be really, really fun.)

Furthermore, we support school libraries stocking romance books.

School libraries are not thrown together randomly. Collections are curated. Books are selected based on the knowledge of the librarians, and information from other libraries, and requests from people who want to use the library. Books are in libraries because people want to read them—or because the people developing the collection believe that readers who stumble across these books might enjoy them.

If nothing else, a romance novel in a school, though it may contain sex, is likely chosen because it speaks to a teen audience. Once, when Erin was discussing sex in YA books with a friend studying for a Master’s of Library Science, her friend offered up a textbook excerpt discussing “appropriateness” as a benchmark for developing collections, noting that “appropriateness” stems more from what adults are trying to control than what teens might actually need or want to read based on what they might be navigating in their own lives. In other words “appropriateness” is more about adults than teens and doesn’t actually serve the individuals the collection is designed for. 

While we might like to live in a headspace in which teenagers would never engage in risky behaviors without a thorough and logical risk analysis, even the most responsible teenager still has a teenager’s brain, and they deserve to be met where they actually are, not where adults are trying to force them to be. Sometimes that means reading something fictional that navigates risky situations might be better than sticking our heads in the sand and pretending everything will be fine.

Or, as Nora Roberts told the Washington Post: “I’m surprised that they wouldn’t want teenagers to read about healthy relationships that are monogamous, consensual, healthy and end up in marriage.”

As a final note: if we’re getting big mad about sexy books…Nora Roberts’ books are not what we’d call “spicy.” Just sayin’.