GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING
Dan O’Donnell has a unique thought experiment that exposes what the protests over “book banning” in Menomonee Falls are really all about.
Oct. 25, 2023
Perspective by Dan O’Donnell
Consider the following two sentences (and please forgive their, ahem, risqué subject matter):
“Seth rises above me like a wave and smiles, and I smile back and then he pushes into me, hard and fast and it hurts and feels good all mixed together.”
“I remember him pulling my arms over my head and pinning them down, kissing me hard with his entire body on top of mine.”
Again, apologies for the subject matter in an otherwise family-friendly column, but that’s the point: The first sentence is from the young adult novel What Girls are Made Of, which until very recently was available at the Menomonee Falls High School Library. The second sentence is from the pornographic story “Our First Oral Pleasures” on an erotic fiction website.
They are utterly indistinguishable from one another, yet the story containing the second sentence would never, ever, ever be included in any school library anywhere (one would hope), while the removal of the book containing the first sentence has prompted massive backlash in Menomonee Falls.
On Monday night, furious residents hijacked the monthly school board meeting to demand that their children can again access erotic fiction in their schools. A week ago, the district removed What Girls are Made Of and 32 other books it determined violated its new policy prohibiting works that include “sexually explicit language and/or images which may be considered inappropriate for students.”
Seems pretty straightforward, right? Not to the dozens of protesters who held signs, made impassioned speeches, and bravely fought the patriarchy for the right to read smut to small children. One of them, Whitney Roth, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the “district’s criteria for what it thinks is sexually explicit was vague and that led her to believe the books were removed because of personal beliefs and viewpoints rather than the books’ educational merit as a whole.”
Really? She really can’t tell what is inappropriate for children and what isn’t? Let’s test that theory with another two racy sentences:
“She more or less just grabbed a random handful of my crotch, and gave it a little squeeze, and let go, and the world as I knew it basically exploded.”
“Her hands were nice and soft and the sight of her red fingernails wrapped around my erection was really thrilling.”
Would Ms. Roth be able to tell which sentence is from Literotica.com and which is from Jesse Andrews’ The Haters, which was just removed from the Menomonee Falls school library? Probably not. They’re virtually identical. Yet the first is from a book that Ms. Roth and dozens of her fellow freedom fighters want in front of kids and the second is from a pornographic story whose title is so explicit it can’t be printed here.
So what gives? Why are these parents so insistent that school libraries include such graphic depictions of sex, masturbation, pedophilia, and incest (all of which are found in at least one of the 33 books that the Menomonee Falls School District removed)?
The most charitable explanation and, one would hope, the most likely is that the overwhelming majority of those who are demanding the return of these books has no earthly idea what’s in them. They are naïve and ignorant but believe themselves to be the wisest and most learned in the room; magnanimously imparting their enlightenment on the puritanical book-banners and the peasants they are cruelly keeping in the Dark Ages.
They see themselves as the spiritual heirs to the women’s liberation movement but are pushing for a new, far less age-appropriate sexual revolution. Do they really not know what they’re doing? Or, in a truly scary thought, do they know exactly what they’re doing?
Has anyone stopped to ask modern progressives why they are so insistent that teenagers have easy access to sexually explicit books? Why they teach graphic sex ed lessons to third graders? Why they demand that drag queens dance suggestively in front of preschoolers at pumpkin farms?
Because one could very easily come to a very, very uncomfortable conclusion.
