New Hampshire Trustees
Hear Out Scofflaw
A Milton, New Hampshire, woman relinquished Fast Girls, Teenage Tribes, and the Myth of the Slut to library officials at the end of the September 25 Milton Free Public Library board meeting after having held onto it for some three months to protest what she deemed its inappropriate content.
According to the September 26 Dover Democrat, Susie McKinley told trustees that she loaned Fast Girls to family and friends over the summer and received support for her action, citing her husband Robert’s characterization of the book as “a piece of trash.” Describing her action as an exercise in free speech, McKinley insisted, “The content and the quality of the library is the issue. My kids are all grown but I have concerns for those coming along.”
“Librarians are not police,” Milton library Director Karen Flynn-Schlieman responded, echoing board President Les Elder’s observation in the September 21 Democrat that he doesn’t “agree with the content either but it’s not my right to choose what books are there.”
Written by Emily White, the book contains interviews with women labeled as the sluts of their respective high schools by other teens, and analyzes the phenomenon from a sociological perspective.
Posted September 30, 2002.
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