s/o inappropriate books you read as a child

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:VC Andrew’s messed up my worldview for years

I started reading her books at 12, and they did nothing to me at all. How did it mess up your worldview?

I was younger and it messed up my understanding of how men and women interact in relationships.

Ha! There's a line from Flowers in the Attic that is seared in my memory: "He drove his rigid member into my resisting flesh."

Exactly. I was way too young to be reading about increst and rape.

My sister just reminded me of this book and how she checked it out secretly from the school library when she was a high school freshman and read it in her closet just to be a little rebellious but was then so disturbed by that particular part that she closed the book and threw it behind some clothes. She eventually returned it without reading the rest but she said it haunted her and sort of ruined the way she thought about sex.
And this is the concern.
Kids (even high school ones) whose first exposure to physical intimacy is in the context of these descriptive passages of graphic traumatic events do not have any real world experience by which to contrast why they are reading. What we consume shapes who we become.
And of course there will be other children who unfortunately have a reality that causes them to closely identify with what they are reading. And that can also be pretty traumatic as well.

My kid’s 10th grade class just started reading Homegoing, and there is just so
much of this in that book as well that we decided to opt our kid out. (Not because it is a terrible book. It’s actually an excellent, well-written book that tells a compelling story, so I’m not saying our kid should never read it. But it just strikes me as just too much intense drama, too soon in life.)

Meant TRAUMA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm with all of you 80's kids. I read Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Judy Blume and Sidney Sheldon. I remeber reading Flowers in the Attic but I don't think I read V.C. Andrews much beyond that. I was never into Stephen King or other horror, true crime or sci-fi.

I remember my parents trying to keep me away from Forever but we all got ahold of it and read the good parts in late elementary school.

Now imagine your 9th grade English teacher giving everyone a copy of Forever and announcing that the literature unit for the next six weeks will be crafted around this book and exploring “sometimes uncomfortable” themes.
This is basically how it is now.
They just send an email to notify parents that the book contains “sexually explicit content” and if the parent wants to, they can request alternative literature that does NOT contain sexually explicit content.

Let that sink in.

The teachers are telling us that their default is choosing literature that contains sexually-explicit material.

You must make a special *request* if you do NOT want sexually-explicit literature introduced to your child in the classroom.

Wild.

I didn’t opt mine out, but it has crossed my mind more than once when receiving these notices that it’s strange that they don’t just choose a book that doesn’t require this. There can’t be so few quality classroom literature selections available that they couldn’t have selected one that didn’t require this type of notification.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The thread about the daughter downloading a potentially inappropriate book got me thinking about a very inappropriate book I read when I was young.

I was an avid reader and my mom worked from home, so summers we had no camps but were relatively unsupervised.

At 11, I grabbed Updike's Witches of Eastwick, thinking it was some sort of fairly tale. Holy cow I learned a lot about sex reading that book. I'm not sure my mom had any clue.

Anyone else recall reading something and getting more than you bargained for?

You are kidding right?
Troll?

We do not censor books period.
Anyone who does is a dam fool. Big whoop sex omg you do know babies are made that way??
Maybe if people in the state of Texas actually read books 100 12 year olds would not need abortions.

Curious—do you provide copies of Hustler to your 12-year-old as well? Or maybe Penthouse “for the articles” on your coffee table? Or is the explicit material only fine if it’s embedded in a hard-bound novel?
It’s weird to me that people pretend we don’t already have existing standards about what’s appropriate sexual content for kids to consume (and that there are laws preventing adults from providing that content to children), but when someone points out that sometimes that content is contained inside arguably GOOD literature so is not appropriate for CHILDREN to access, you crazies cry “censorship!”

You need to do some reading my friend.
Here are some topics to study up on. Maybe don't participate in threads like this until you learn a bit more:

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thinner by Stephen King freaked me out for years. Like wanted to sleep in my parents’ room even though I was 11 or 12.

Also, my comments have nothing to do with whether or not kids should be censored. I’m just answering the question. VC Andrews and Stephen King were too much for me as a very sheltered and precocious reader. YMMV

There’s this Stephen King short story about a heroin addict who ends up stranded on a desert island and he eats his own hand. There’s this line about “cold roast beef”. My brother and I are in our sixties and we can still freak each other out by saying that in a certain tone of voice.

LADYFINGERS

“Survivor Type” scarred me for sure. Also “The Jaunt”. I remember reading something a few years ago about how King in retrospect regretted “Survivor Type” and that it went too far even for him!

Yes to VC Andrews, Lace, bodice-rippers by Bertrice Small, and an incredibly long fictionalized biography of Marco Polo that I read for the sex. It had a scene that included a boy being cannibalized alive by Mongols. I could have done without that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:VC Andrew’s messed up my worldview for years

I started reading her books at 12, and they did nothing to me at all. How did it mess up your worldview?

I was younger and it messed up my understanding of how men and women interact in relationships.

Ha! There's a line from Flowers in the Attic that is seared in my memory: "He drove his rigid member into my resisting flesh."

Exactly. I was way too young to be reading about increst and rape.

My sister just reminded me of this book and how she checked it out secretly from the school library when she was a high school freshman and read it in her closet just to be a little rebellious but was then so disturbed by that particular part that she closed the book and threw it behind some clothes. She eventually returned it without reading the rest but she said it haunted her and sort of ruined the way she thought about sex.
And this is the concern.
Kids (even high school ones) whose first exposure to physical intimacy is in the context of these descriptive passages of graphic traumatic events do not have any real world experience by which to contrast why they are reading. What we consume shapes who we become.
And of course there will be other children who unfortunately have a reality that causes them to closely identify with what they are reading. And that can also be pretty traumatic as well.

My kid’s 10th grade class just started reading Homegoing, and there is just so
much of this in that book as well that we decided to opt our kid out. (Not because it is a terrible book. It’s actually an excellent, well-written book that tells a compelling story, so I’m not saying our kid should never read it. But it just strikes me as just too much intense drama, too soon in life.)

10th grade would be the right age to read a book like Homegoing, particularly in a group and with guided discussion. Opting out is baffling to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I read a lot of Stephen King in middle school and high school. Most of it didn't bother me, but the group sex scene at the end of It was very disturbing to my 12 year old brain.

Me TOO!

I was 11.

As a poor kid who could walk to the library, I read everything, including Henry Miller. That guy was a freak.

[Anonymous]

Remember to opt your kids out of Grapes of Wrath. Lots of trauma and a woman breast feeds a man at the end. (sorry to ruin it).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Remember to opt your kids out of Grapes of Wrath. Lots of trauma and a woman breast feeds a man at the end. (sorry to ruin it).

I don't remember much about that one, other than that we had to read it for a class and I really liked it.

Skimmed through this topic earlier and I also read King, Blume, and Irving. Nothing that had too big of an impact. But then driving around I remembered that Helter Skelter was popular among a certain crowd in middle school and that was a scary one. Also, a friend had some stolen Forum magazines that were eye opening.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Remember to opt your kids out of Grapes of Wrath. Lots of trauma and a woman breast feeds a man at the end. (sorry to ruin it).

Trauma? It was reflective of actual historical events.

And the ending scene had absolutely nothing sexual about it - a malnourished man was on his death bed and a woman unselfishly decided to nourish him to save his life.

Maybe you should go back and re read it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Remember to opt your kids out of Grapes of Wrath. Lots of trauma and a woman breast feeds a man at the end. (sorry to ruin it).

Trauma? It was reflective of actual historical events.

And the ending scene had absolutely nothing sexual about it - a malnourished man was on his death bed and a woman unselfishly decided to nourish him to save his life.

Maybe you should go back and re read it.

DP. I had assumed this was PP’s way of throwing shade around those complained about the recent books being taught in English class.

This is the books thread. Are you always so literal?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Remember to opt your kids out of Grapes of Wrath. Lots of trauma and a woman breast feeds a man at the end. (sorry to ruin it).

Trauma? It was reflective of actual historical events.

And the ending scene had absolutely nothing sexual about it - a malnourished man was on his death bed and a woman unselfishly decided to nourish him to save his life.

Maybe you should go back and re read it.

+1
Like a PP, I read it as a teen and that rolled right over me.
I think things hit us differently as adults-- I can't read Stephen King now where kids get hurt, but did not give a flying eff as a teen.
Give teens some credit, will ya?

[Anonymous]

70’s kid
Valley of the Dolls and other Jacqueline Susann books
The Wanderers by Richard Price

[Anonymous]

Jacqueline Susann books in middle school--quite an education. They were page turners and kept me interested.

Fear of Flying in high school. Very boring and not sexy at all.

There were no YA books back then and I think teens have a much better selection these days.

[Anonymous]

The whole Flowers in the Attic series. Mom read it will me!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m 50 and have multiple older sisters who left stuff laying around which I devoured.
+1 to VC Andrews - I read ALL of them - there are like five different series essentially telling the same brother-sister love story in different settings over and over.

+1 to early Jackie Collins

A book called Celebrity where in the first chapter three young men commit rape

Historical romance novels, particularly Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

The worst is Letters to the Happy Hooker, not my sisters’ fault but was at my grandparents house because my mother had multiple younger brothers

Oh my gosh yes - the Happy Hooker book! My friend's mom had it and we DEVOURED it in 5th grade.

My grandmother had The Happy Hooker on her nightstand, but it was wrapped in a paper garbage bag, like we used to put on our textbooks back in the olden days. I just had to see what was under there! It was quite enlightening.