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Sexy Stirs Mixed Feelings in MontanaA materials reconsideration committee at Jefferson High School in Boulder, Montana, voted 4–1 November 27 to retain Joyce Carol Oates’s Sexy in the school-library collection, declining a request by an English teacher on the faculty there to have the book removed. “I can see both sides of the issue,” complainant Victoria Foster said after the meeting, according to the November 29 Helena Independent Record. She went on to explain that she filed an objection this fall after a student brought the book to her attention, directing her to chapter seven “and that the f-word came up quite a bit.” Foster also complained about sexually explicit passages in the novel, which tells the story of a handsome 16-year-old adjusting to his sexuality and his effect on other people’s behavior. According to JHS librarian Diane Thompson, Oates offered her own perspective on the book’s review in an e-mail response to junior Nathan Eury, who contacted the novelist as part of his journalism class. “My young adult novels are meant for mature adolescents,” Oates wrote, explaining that for teens who “have been largely shielded from contemporary culture, these novels would not be appropriate,” and speculating that the town must be “unusually remote and sequestered amid contemporary American society.” JHS Principal Sharyl Allen, who cast the lone dissenting vote, cited Oates’s e-mail in asking fellow review-committee members, “If Sexy isn’t in our library, what’s the loss to the community?” Arguing that schools censor anyway by blocking access to some websites, she asserted, “We’re not a public library.” Thompson said that the school district’s reconsideration and selection policy were instrumental in facing the challenge, since they are based on the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and the School Library Bill of Rights approved by ALA’s American Association of School Librarians in 1969. “With what those state, there really was no way to say a novel like Sexy didn’t fit in a high school library,” she told American Libraries. Posted November 30, 2007. |
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