One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the puzzlement that liberals express when parents protest, say, a school reading assignment for 13-year-olds that includes Brent Easton Ellis’s snuff-novel “American Psycho” and “The New Joy of Gay Sex.”
This is a true story. An eighth-grade teacher in Maryland’s upscale Montgomery County decided it would be heaps of fun for the kids to read a banned book–so she handed out an assignment sheet containing the titles of 100 of them, including the above two. The kids were supposed to consult with their parents, then write a book report about a banned book of their choice. Some parents were horrified at the assignment and complained to the principal, and the assignment was canceled. And naturally the Washington Post’s Metro Section goo-goo Marc Fisher just can’t understand why the principal caved:
“[T]his was a creative assignment, tuned perfectly to eighth-graders’ desire to be let in on adult topics, yet tempered by requiring parents to help kids pick the right point of entry.”
Uh-huh. Here is a plot summary (lifted from the Amazon site) of “American Psycho,” whose original publisher, Simon & Schuster, deemed it unsuitable not only for 13-year-olds but for adults and pulled it just before publication:
“Bateman calmly and deliberately blinds and stabs a homeless man. From here, the body count builds, as he kills a male acquaintance and sadistically tortures and murders two prostitutes, an old girlfriend, and a child he passes in the zoo. The recital of the brutalization is made even more horrible by the first-person narrator’s delivery: flat, matter-of-fact, as impersonal as a car parts catalog. The author has carefully constructed the work so that the reader has no way to understand this killer’s motivations, making it even more frightening.”
Yeah, I’d sure want my kids reading that. And here’s what Amazon says about “The New Joy of Gay Sex”:
“As the authors suggest in their introduction, some readers, gay and straight, will be offended by this book’s nonjudgmental, even accepting attitude toward ‘the kinkier aspects of erotic life.’ These activities include sex with animals, sadomasochism and ‘intergenerational love affairs’ such as the relationship between an 11-year-old boy and a 21-year-old man.”
No comment.
Promotion of pedophilia aside, why not, if you want to “let in” kids on “adult topics,” assign them some good literature written for adults? Stories by Joyce and Tolstoy, Seamus Heaney’s poetry, “Wuthering Heights,” “The Odyssey.” Why stuff their heads not only with pornography and pointless violence but with junk? That’s the real crime of this silly assignment.