I’ve always loved reading. But when I was a kid, I really loved reading.
I remember in third grade my best friend smuggled a copy of Jurassic Park into school (long before it was a movie, long before anyone had heard of it) with the gory parts bookmarked. We passed it around at recess and before class, furtively reading with fascinated horror (”he had his intestines in his hands!”), hiding it whenever the teacher came by because we were just sure she would take it away if she knew.
I remember a few months later sneaking, heart in my throat, from the children’s section of the library to the adult section, convinced I’d be kicked out if they caught me. (Nobody cared, but I was eight. What did I know?) I remember finding a copy of Jurassic Park, remembering the gory scenes, and sitting down to read the whole thing. It wasn’t great literature, I knew that. But it was the first adult book I ever read, and to me, it was magic. Words like paradigm and fractal seemed to open a vast and dizzying world I’d never even imagined.
Later there was Stephen King, who taught me about eye-watering fear and desperate courage and what it means to fight monsters, to win, to lose. Robert Heinlein, who taught me about love in all its myriad configurations and about fearless joy in the universe, about trusting your own judgment rather than limiting yourself by preconceived notions. Jean M. Auel, with her lushly recreated world, teaching my 13-year-old self the mysteries of sex and pleasure right alongside the mysteries of herbal lore and flint knapping and prehistoric gods, all of it part of a fascinating human tapestry. Tolkien, showing me wonder and beauty I didn’t even have words for, that first magical summer when I was still young enough to believe that maybe he did find and translate Bilbo’s book, maybe it was all real.
(And others, of course. Piers Anthony, who I dutifully read even while my stomach twisted in ways I didn’t know how to explain. Orson Scott Card, who broke my heart worse than any ex-lover possibly could.)
But that’s not the story.
This is the story: one year, for Christmas, my grandmother bought me a book. A collection of short stories, from an author she knew I liked.
Literally. She took a straight razor, physically cut the third story out of the book, then taped it back together, wrapped it up, and put it under the tree.
Naturally, like any red-blooded American youth, I hied my teenage ass to the library at the first opportunity, found the book, and read the forbidden story. It had a sex scene in it. An utterly unmemorable, boringly-tame sex scene.
That was what my grandmother thought she needed to protect me from.
I, who had wept with Ayla at the pain and brutality and desperate unfairness of her rape, then cried happy tears a book later when she found healing, I who fell in love with an immortal star traveler from Kentucky, who rejoiced to find that Andrew Libby did not die but was reborn as Libby Long, the person she was always meant to be, I who ached with Sam Gamgee when he thought Frodo was dead and memorized the songs of the elves, I who stood trembling in a sewer, helpless and afraid before an ancient evil and didn’t back down… I whose imagination had soared and plummeted, who had been shown so much that was real and important and beautiful and ugly and uncomfortable and true…
…I wasn’t considered mature enough to handle a mediocre scene of a man and a woman having brief, unexceptional sexual contact.
I was angry. Outraged, even. Yes, it was nice to get a book at all, but it felt like someone handing you a ten dollar bill and then slapping you in the face; the nice aspect of the gift doesn’t take away the sting.
This, perhaps, is why so much of the “anti” movement (and its accompanying ageism and infantilization of teenagers) is anathema to me. It feels like the modern rebirth of my grandmother’s well-meant but ultimately controlling and condescending behavior. Don’t read this. Don’t look at this. Don’t talk to that person. You’re too young. You’re too old. You can’t be trusted. I know what’s best for you.
Oh, there’s a lot more to it. The abusive behavior. The lies. The sheer ignorance, and the arrogance with which it’s presented as truth. The complete lack of understanding of human nature. There’s a lot about antis that confounds and enrages me by turns, and I’m sure I’ll talk about all of it sooner or later.
But to the kid I used to be, who snuck and lied and argued to be able to read things that were “too old,” “too scary,” “too adult,” who lied about kir age to be treated and respected as an equal in the early days of the internet, whose life was immeasurably enriched by things most parents probably wouldn’t let their kid read, that’s the core of it right there: telling people what they can and can’t read or write. Appointing yourself the judge of what is good and worthy. Deciding that because you don’t like something, nobody should have it.
You don’t get to control other people like that.
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