Judy Blume’s children and young adult novels have covered everything from racism to menstruation to religion and sex. Her dedication to writing about difficult issues for the younger set has resulted in her fair share of controversy. She is one of the most challenged children’s authors of all time.

On her site, Blume writes about censorship:

I believe that censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen.

Today, it’s not only language and sexuality (the usual reasons given for banning my books) that will land a book on the censors’ hit list. It’s Satanism, New Age-ism and a hundred other isms, some of which would make you laugh if the implications weren’t so serious. Books that make kids laugh often come under suspicion; so do books that encourage kids to think, or question authority; books that don’t hit the reader over the head with moral lessons are considered dangerous.

Since the 1980s, when she found herself the target of censorship, Blume has been reaching out to other writers, as well as teachers and librarians, under fire, and working tirelessly with the National Coalition Against Censorship to protect the freedom to read. She is the editor of Places I Never Meant To Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers.

Thanks for telling it like it is, Judy. Happy birthday.

Image via Answers.com.

“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it,” wrote Anne Frank in her famous diary. “The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!”

This, according to the Washington Post is the passage that caused Culpepper County, Virginia, school public officials to pull the book from the shelves.

This passage is present in the Definitive Edition of Anne Frank’s memoir, written between 1942 and 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.

This book is usually assigned to eighth-graders.

“What we have asked is that this particular edition will not be taught,” said Jim Allen, director of instruction for the school system. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. So we listened to the parent and we pulled it.”

The book will still be taught; the original work published by the girl’s father, Otto Frank, was heavily edited before publication in 1947, eliminating young Frank’s criticism of other people living in the Annex and all her discussions about sexuality.

It wasn’t until the 50th anniversary of Anne Frank’s death, in 1995, that the Anne Frank Foundation published the unedited, definitive version, which contains the passage. From now on, the edited version free of these passages will be used.

“I’m happy when parents get involved with these things because it lets me know that they are really looking and have their kids’ best interest (in mind). And that’s where good parenting and good teaching comes in,” Allen said.

Sex is evil! Water it down! Cut it away! Sanitize everything there is to read about it! Come on, world! This will definitely help our children grow up informed and aware!

If our sarcasm isn’t clear in the above statement, we’ll make it clear: we here at Sex and the 405 do not approve of this move.

I would also like to take this moment to thank my parents for sending me to private schools all of my life, most of which were run by super-progressive heretics.

Image from Amazon.com. Information from The Star Exponent and The Washington Post, via Eric Ludzenski.

A couple of days ago we reported on a Riverside County district that had banned the dictionary because of the graphic manner that it defines oral sex (“the ora stimulation of genitals”).

According to the Huffington Post, a committee of parents, teachers and administrators decided this week to allow the kids at Oak Meadows Elementary School in Menifee to use Merriam-Webster’s. The school enables parents to opt to have their kids use an alternative dictionary.

Common sense prevails. Small victory in an epic battle.

Information via the Huffington Post.

I wish this was a joke or a statement about how the three people who hit on me at the coffee shop this morning seemed to only use monosyllabic words and so liberally sprinkled the word “like” in statements that nothing they said made too much sense.

It’s not. Some schools have in fact banned the dictionary.

Why? A parent complained the definition of “oral sex” in Merriam Webster’s 10th edition, common in fourth and fifth grade classrooms (populated by nine and 10-year-olds), is too graphic.

It describes oral sex as “the oral stimulation of the genitals.”

The Press-Enterprise reported on the incident:

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said [district spokeswoman Betti] Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the [Manifee] district.

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.

I AM ASHAMED OF THIS STATE TODAY. ASHAMED.

Information from The Guardian and Press-Enterprise.

Vanity Fair’s Claire Howorth talks with Joshua Ferris, lit darling and author of the acclaimed Then We Came to the End and the new The Unnamed.

VF: Do you think your generation of writers is conflicted about sex? Or feels awkward writing about it? The Unnamed contains two pretty notable sex scenes and they’re… relatively tame… I mean, they’re not Roth-ian…

JF: But they’re also not deciding to masturbate in two corners [laughs]. If I had gone on, it would’ve taken the wrong tone. I think if a book is going to take on sex, it should take on sex, and do so boldly.

I’m not sure that there’s a categorical mistake that’s being made somewhere by saying that this generation of writers is too tame compared to the earlier generation, or that somehow this generation doesn’t take it as seriously, or is even less preoccupied by it. A lot of those Roth and Updike books almost have sex as the only object.

I don’t know where a writer can be faulted… Michael Chabon, let’s say. Michael Chabon can’t be faulted for having a far more ambiguous ending spot or approach towards sex simply because he might be the heir to Bellow or Roth.

I think you could talk similarly about a departure of prose style, and wonder, well, why isn’t Jonathan Safran Foer writing as effervescently as Bellow? It seems slightly misguided.

At the same time, we don’t really have anybody writing boldly about sex. So maybe there is something in the water, I’m not sure. But I suspect that it’s not over. I don’t think the sex game is over.

Information from Vanity Fair.

“It’s not the business of all sex writers everywhere to solve the world’s sex problems.”

Written by tech and sex writer and sex educator Melissa Gira Grant, this statement would become the premise of the book Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed. Using crowdsourcing to fill the book with real stories, Grant and Meaghan O’Connell recently completed the first round of pledges to have it published.

(In fact, demand is so huge, they doubled the amount of money they initially set as a goal in the first three days.)

Unsurprising, especially once you read Grant’s development on the original premise:

Sex writing within the limited scope of “erotica” has been unfairly burdened with rehabilitating sex in public. We as writers have to turn in work that exalts sex, always treats sex like the hottest, the most revelatory thing two (or however many more the CFS required) bodies can do together.

Sex within “real” “literature” doesn’t fare much better, where even if only a very tiny group of writers insist we write in a “post-sex” world, the rest are left making sense of how to not just fade-to-black on fucking.

Or worse than all of that and certainly within that, sex is never treated as a site of inquiry in its own right. Sex stands in for “freedom” or “cultural disintegration” or “womanhood” or whatever. Sex is asked to be too much, and “sex writers” are expected to answer to all of it. Oh, and make it really hot, too.

For some reason, the internet gives sex writing the room to breathe and be more than someone else’s platform to sell a thing or be a thing, anything but what it is: storytelling from a raw and flushed and necessary place. Sex, as commercialized and stupid as it gets online, is also still ours. The continuous partial disclosure of blogging (as in, you would never maybe say this much if you had to do it all at once) makes writing sex even more human, gives us nigh infinite space to say what needs to be said and not have to worry about how well it will do on a rack at the airport.

If we’re successful, we’ll have a beautiful, crazy, lovely book and before it even hits our shelves, a whole lot of people will have let us know how much they want that, too.

Watch the book trailer:

Now go get a copy.

Image from Coming & Crying. Information via Melissa Gira Grant.

Yes.

I was in college when The Sexual Life of Catherine M. came out. That, for me, was the perfect time to indulge in the auto-biographical account of the French critic’s orgies and anonymous sex days. That book and I enjoy a somewhat adversarial relationship now due to its detached, blatantly unerotic nature, but even so, I love that an intelligent, established woman came out about her sexual exploits.

“I reveled in it,” Millet says when she looks back on it. “It’s what I was truly good at–what I was the best at. I loved particularly the anonymity, the abandonment of orgies. The sensation that one was glorying in this unbelievable freedom, this transcendence… My sex life was always very important for me, for the construction of my personality, the definition of myself.”

Millet is back, this time with a book to shock us because of its emotional and psychological honesty. Her new book Jealousy covers three years during her marriage to Jacques Henric, when she discovered he was having infidelities. She had her own lovers, but the discovery still destroyed her. The Guardian elaborates:

“I had no need,” she has written, “to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships.” And: “I had love at home. I sought only pleasure outside.” So this sudden and vicious attack of “the timeless and universal malady”, she explains, was “a real crisis. Physical. I felt like there was no way out; I was living a contradiction. I knew I could never make him understand the pain he was causing me; I could only agree when he said: But how can you possibly reproach me, with the life you’ve led? Morally very difficult to deal with.”

“The Sexual Life of Catherine M took a long time to write,” Millet explains. “But that was mainly just my own technical difficulty in writing. For Jealousy, I had to make a real effort, not so much to describe the crisis itself, but to relate the way I had behaved. Going through his papers, opening up his drawers, reading his letters–it doesn’t exactly cover one in glory, does it? That took me ages. Forever. These are very deep impulses, and they’re much more difficult to write about than mere sex.”

The jealousy is sprung not just at the idea of Henric with others, but also at the notion that sex was no longer what it had been for her.

“It was in the period when I was taking less and less pleasure in orgies,” Millet recounts. “And the discovery that Jacques was having relationships with other women perhaps exacerbated a feeling that I was returning to the state of self-doubt I’d known when I was younger. It’s as if I no longer possessed the sexual excellence that was mine when I was young; Jacques had it now. This was his moment, not mine. I imagined him enjoying a pleasure, a privilege, that I had once enjoyed. I suffered more from that than from any fear that he might leave me.”

Jealousy details the spectrum of her emotions and thoughts as carefully as her previous books does orgies and sexual positions.

When The Guardian’s Jon Henley asks her whether the experience had changed her perspective in regard to having relationships, Millet doesn’t hesitate:

“I continue to believe that love and sexual desire are feelings you can experience divergently,” she says. “You can be attracted to and love many people at the same time. Of course, there are relationships that are more important, deeper, than others. But there are an infinity of ways in which a person can experience love. We’re fighting against the heritage of romanticism, mon ami. I hate giving advice, but we need to rid ourselves of the notion of l’amour unique. It’s not like that in real life. Romantic love affairs generally end in tears, you know. The point is that even having a relationship like that doesn’t stop you having others. Even from loving others.”

Jealousy is now available in the U.S.

Image from Groove Press. Information from The Guardian.

The zeroes flew by, didn’t they? We’re here to give you a recap of books that caught our eyes, captured our hearts and made us think during the noughties.

by Angela Koh

According to Judy Dutton’s How We Do It, 60 percent of adults fantasize about kinky sex.

Why would we rather smell a wet sock than kiss someone’s lips?

Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing was the first to publish a list of these paraphilias in Psychopathia Sexualis.

The Latin couldn’t keep readers away from the book:

Formicophilia: attraction to small animals or insects crawling on parts of the body

Chremastistophilia: arousal from being robbed

Telephonicophilia: arousal from making obscene phone calls to strangers

Voraphilia: arousal to the idea of being eaten or swallowed alive

We can’t forget about Japan’s omorashi or the arousal from having a full bladder. There’s even historical relevance to the fetish for gas masks in Great Britain after World War II. Today, Kraft-Ebing’s list of medical problems is simply diagnosed as human preference. Researchers found men who identified as sadists were not closet misogynists. Women with particular SM tastes were also activists in feminist groups.

With no psychologically unhealthy reason for such kinks, it’s become natural to push the envelope in bed. Dutton reports that the SM community has recently included activities of scat (feces arousal) and “ageplay” (enacting adult/child sex) as a part of Living in Leather’s programming.

Some fans argue that the rush of “edgeplay” like using guns and knives is well worth the risks. Angelina Jolie herself is rumored to have a room of ropes and sharp objects for her sexual disposal.

With the STD epidemic and the growing appetite from today’s internet-rampant sex fetishes, at what point must our generation return to question the sanity and safety of kinky sex?

The zeroes flew by, didn’t they? We’re here to give you a recap of books that caught our eyes, captured our hearts and made us think during the noughties.

Thirty-four years ago, a young, unknown graduate student tackled the myth that most women should be able to orgasm through vaginal intercourse in a book that revolutionized our understanding of women’s sexuality. The book was The Hite Report on Female Sexuality and it shot its author Shere Hite, to center stage.

Having surveyed over 3,000 women about their sex lives, Hite had enough data to back up a revolutionary claim: that conventional sex placed unrealistic expectations on women.

“I was making the point that clitoral stimulation wasn’t happening during coitus,” Hite told The Independent in an interview several decades later. “That’s why women ‘have difficulty having orgasms’–they don’t have difficulty when they stimulate themselves. Shouldn’t we just rethink the idea of what sex is and what equality is?”

Hite’s wasn’t an attack on men, it was an attack on a general lack of understanding about female sexuality. Being able to delight in sex as much as one’s partner is a matter of equality and human rights.

Since that revolutionary work, Hite has explored other areas, such as the societal pressure placed on men to perform, and her belief that religious extremism in the East and West is the manifestation of protest against the growing power of women.

Her 2007 book The Hite Report: On Women Loving Women, is an examination of friendship and partnerships between women and why they fail.

Jessica Brinton at the Times Online offers her take:

Hite says that there is an underlying tension in relationships between girls that makes us compete with each other rather than get along. She thinks that if we could only overcome it, we would be all set for a new kind of 21st-century female power, one that relies not on trying to be sexier than one another, but on helping each other out.

On the face of it, she’s spot-on. We do give other girls an unnecessarily hard time. These days, it isn’t considered chic to bitch, Dynasty-style – we leave the crude viperishness to the Jordans, the Cheryls and the Poshes. Competitiveness comes in a different guise: an awesomely sophisticated game of one-upmanship. Do you have the latest Mulberry bag? Are you wearing this season’s key shape in denim? Will you go back to work after having a baby – and if so, how long after? Is your baby sleeping through the night? No? Oh, you poor thing. Urgently trying to guess a woman’s age the moment you meet her is not very sisterly. Nor is our morbid fascination with the collapsing lives of Misses Winehouse and Spears.

And even when we are not getting one over on other women, we are probably still forgetting to give them the respect they deserve. Yes, we tell each other when a new haircut looks fab, but if we are honest, our girlfriends are mostly there to play a supporting role in our lives with men. Married women complain how hard it is to make and maintain new friendships. The only permanent fallout I have ever had with a close girlfriend happened because of a stupid misunderstanding over a man. The ITV series Mistresses was hit girls’ television but, like Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives before it, the implication was that the beautiful friendships at its centre wouldn’t have had anything like the intensity without the fuel of romantic crisis.

Last week, I received a curious e-mail from a man named Chris Mitchell who told me he had secrets about the Magic Kingdom–dark, stormy secrets, the kind we here at Sex and the 405 are all about.

Mitchell had worked at the Orlando theme park for a year as an official photog.

Now, he’s coming out with the stories he heard on the field, a sort of incredible expose that will change our notions of the Magic Kingdom forever.

On the day before Christmas, another e-mail arrived from Mitchell, this one containing a chapter of his book, Cast Member Confidential.

“The lawyers who work for my publisher made me edit this one pretty heavily, but I’m sending the unexpurgated version…” he wrote.

And like a good girl, I waited until Christmas to open the gift.

Three in the morning, there I sat at my desk, cigarette freshly lit, and opened “The Bear Necessities.” Enjoy, with the proper mixture of delight and horror, as I did:

For ten years, Brady was the pride of the character department: Chip, Dale, Quasimodo. He brought Roger Rabbit to life in a way that no other performer could match. But, by far, his favorite was Winnie the Pooh with his bashful smile and his honey colored fur and his pot belly that was just big enough to jack off inside.

“What flavor today, Brady?” one Pooh coming off stage would ask.

Brady would pull the ubiquitous sucker out of his mouth and smack his lips. “Butterscotch,” he would say, then the greeter would Velcro him in to the suit and he would shuffle on stage, his crooked leg giving Pooh a comical gait.

This was the late-nineties, when Pooh wore a honey pot on his head with bees flying around it. A performer could pull his arms inside the costume to wiggle the bear’s nose and then push them back into the paws to sign autographs. Or, at least that was the original plan.

Brady liked to pull his underwear down around his thighs and hold his balls. He’d walk around like that for a while, then lift his fingers to his face and sniff them. The scent of his musk and the sheer naughtiness of the escapade broke over him in waves of arousal and he would stroke himself off right there, in front of everybody, where nobody could see.

How could he? How could he masturbate and sign autographs and pose for photos without losing focus or breaking character? Surely, that kind of multitasking required supernatural concentration. Simple. He could do it because he was, above all, a professional. He knew the choreography by heart and was able to do the dance steps in his sleep. He could sign with one hand, sniff the other and wiggle Pooh’s nose with his elbow. Since Pooh is a right-handed character, Brady became adept at jerking with his left hand. After all, it wasn’t like there was a whole lot else for him to do inside that suit for thirty minutes straight.

The lollipops were perfect for covering up the smells around his fingers and face. Some days he used cinnamon, some days spearmint. And every night, when he turned in his costume, the wardrobe department dutifully washed away the seminal fluids.

One day, Brady went to pick up his Pooh costume, and received a shock.

“It’s a new design,” beamed the wardrobe lady. “Isn’t this an adorable face?”

One look at the new body confirmed the worst for Brady. “Arms,” he said. “It’s got actual arms.”

“Yes, he does! Oh yes he does! The cute widdle bear has arms!

Brady was crestfallen. The new design meant he would not be able to pull his hands inside the pot belly. It wasn’t like he was going to leave the character program or anything, but he felt gypped. Ball fondling had been his hard-earned perk. For three years, he coasted along in the character program, picking up new characters, learning animation for parades and autograph sessions. And then, one day, salvation came in the form of Monsters Inc.

One of the stars of Monsters Inc., Mike Wyszowski, fell right into Brady’s height range. Basically, a giant eyeball with stick legs, Mike Wyszowski was shaped in such a way that the performer had to keep his arms inside the costume at all times. He could eat a burrito in there if he wanted to, or check his voice mail, or, yes, even jack off.

Once again, going to work was a treat. A day of Mike Wyszowski was better than any day off – imagine doing the one thing you truly love and getting paid for it! Plus, consistent with tried and true marketing techniques, every day from the opening of the movie until the DVD release, the coordinators scheduled a park full of Monsters Inc. characters. Which meant that Brady, who had carefully made himself indispensable as the friendly eyeball, was more or less on constant call.

And the best part was, there was even a shelf inside the costume with little holes that accommodated extra lollipops.

Unexpurgated excerpt from Cast Member Confidential by Chris Mitchell, out January 1, 2010. Image via Chris Mitchell’s blog.