Bad Influence.

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Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves - PEN America

This report on book bans in the 2023-24 school year documents how censorial trends have continued to ripple beyond the shelves.

PEN America (pen.org)

Disproportionate to publishing rates and like prior school years, books in this prominent subset overwhelmingly include books with people and characters of color (44%) and books with LGBTQ+ people and characters (39%).

Over half (57%) of the banned titles in this subset include sex-related themes or depictions, due to ramped up attacks on “sexual content.”

Nearly 60% of these banned titles are written for young adult audiences, and depict topics young people confront in the real world, including grief and death, experiences with substance abuse, suicide, depression and mental health concerns, and sexual violence.

If you pick around for schools with bans, you can occasionally find 1984 on the list. But that is primarily because of the extramarital sex scene between Wilson Smith (the protagonist) and his lover Julia.

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I watched the library in my high school downsized repeatedly during and after my time in school.

They went from half a dozen librarians to one. They purged their collections of microfilm and whittled away any research tools that weren't just on a computer. They stopped ordering new books for the most part by the time my sister graduated.

I believe they've since renovated the space to convert a big chunk of it into more classrooms.

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everybody knows they are supervised and fear the supervisors

They regularly saw friends and neighbors persecuted by police. We don't really see that in the modern day. There's no cop who bangs on your door because you did a wrongthink online.

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I suppose I'm thinking of pre teens. It has explicit sex, as well as IIRC pretty strong description of how the main character is broken down by the torture. Even without the detail, the rawness of the theme's presentation feels more than I'd want to give a 6 year old, even an 11 year old. Animal farm is much tamer, even if, properly interpreted, it's just as brutal!

I don't know where I'd draw the boundary, if I were deciding. For that matter I don't think I agree with book censorship anyway: at 6 your parents should be protecting you more than the library rules. Maybe don't have it on the shelf next to Famous Five though?

Flying Squid

If there is a pre-teen able to read and understand Orwell's language, and there are precious few of those, I think they could handle the sex and the torture. As the cartoon suggests, they're seeing it on the internet regardless.

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Every big tech company has bent the knee to trump. While I don't find it likely that widespread crackdown would happen because someone shit talked cheeto Hitler, it's not beyond the realm of possibilities. At the very least, it's more plausible that he might use connections to dig up dirt on political enemies.

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Middle school is mid teens, right? I interpreted those children in the comic as younger.

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I disagree. The intelligence to understand the language is separate from the maturity to handle the content.

And yes they're seeing things on the internet... and shouldn't be. That's a long-standing debate in society about how heavily to shield them from it. But do you think the fact an 8 year-old might see awful things on tiktok means there's no value in telling them to wait a few years before reading a book like 1984?

Flying Squid

What 8-year-old is reading any Orwell? You're talking about something that is probably an issue for .00001% of people at that age. Like 3 or 4 prodigies. So why do these bans which, again, do not differentiate between 7 and 17, need to be in place?

Also, where are the parents of these 8-year-olds? Shouldn't they be aware of what their child is getting from the library?

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It sounds like we're talking cross purposes now. I don't know what children are reading Orwell. Not like in the comic, I imagine. For that matter, I hope most children are not, in fact, seeing videos of cats being killed.

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The UK CPS would like a word with you concerning your problematic online speech....

MacN'Cheezus

I mean, it's literally the premise of this comic that the kid goes to a library that has already banned the book. How does he know it exists at all? And if he thinks he ought to be able to get it at the library, why wouldn't he think of trying to find it on the Internet instead?

Kids these days were literally born after the iPhone was invented, they have never even known a time where you couldn't access the Internet from almost anywhere in the world using a device small enough to fit in your pocket, and somehow you think they'd be too stupid to even try?

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They regularly saw friends and neighbors persecuted by police. We don’t really see that in the modern day.

Maybe you don't...

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Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Flying Squid

Believe it or not, comics are not reality.

Again, where is this hypothetical 8-year-old's parents?

Flying Squid

Kids are seeing a hell of a lot more violent videos than they are reading Orwell. That was even true when I was a kid in the 80s. I saw every Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movie that came out while I was in elementary school.

Amazingly, it didn't leave me horribly scarred.

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Tweens know what sex is. This is needlessly prudish. They all have seen graphic videos/images of people blown apart on the beaches of Normandy by this point

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No but Huck Finn, To Kill a Mocking Bird, and other American literary classics are regularly banned/brought back across the US. They use justifications such as “coarse language” and other bullshit, but it’s almost always books that speak truth to power/about systemic bigotry in the US.

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That'll be next week in the U.S.

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Wahou... I never knew ban/brought back book was commun in some place. That's wild.