Yes, It’s Happening in Your School District -- This is Your Wake-Up
Obscene, Pornographic Books are Dominating Young Adult Fiction (YAF) and School Libraries are a Willing, Deep Pocket Participant in the Demand
A story pops up on your news feed about yet another parent battling with her public school district to remove obscene, pornographic material from its library, and your first thought is … praise God we don’t have that problem. You live in South Tulsa (substitute any non-East/West Coast suburban school district) where most attend church, are well educated, and vote/live conservatively. And your school district has traditionally been ranked high academically in the State. Further, your school district’s Superintendent and School Board assure you that they too are Conservative and espouse district core values of integrity, respect, responsibility, and self-discipline. You know without hesitation that those books are not in your child’s library.
But they are.
And if your child attends Jenks Public Schools (JPS), congratulations because this District is leading South Tulsa (though Bixby, Union, Broken Arrow, Owasso, and others are not far behind) in the volume of obscene, pornographic books in its site libraries. Some of these books are graphic novels (i.e., adult comic books) and others are more traditional works that fully describe sex acts (including heterosexual and/or gay intercourse, oral sex, pedophilia, and rape). And yes, JPS Administration and its School Board know that these books are in the District libraries (article to follow). With the exception of a graphic novel (Gender Queer) quietly removed from the high school library late last Fall, JPS has no current plans to remove other obscene books, or to reconsider the process by which these obscene, pornographic books are being allowed into the site libraries. This is where parents will need to find their voices.
Below is text and/or descriptions from a sample of books currently being made available to all students aged 14 to 18 by the JPS Administration and School Board in the high school library. Note, JPS does have a written policy based on current Oklahoma Obscenity law (Oklahoma Statute Title 21) that prohibits students from handing out material like this to other students (could be subject to suspension) or accessing it on the internet (see pg 79 of handbook: DISTRIBUTION BY STUDENTS OF WRITTEN MATERIALS IN SCHOOL FACILITIES and pg 93 Network and Internet Access - Terms and Conditions: Inappropriate Material). But the school library is being treated differently (again, despite clear Oklahoma Statutes [see Yes, Morality Matters - by J Ossenkopf (substack.com) ]), as though the law does not apply in this setting, or to the adults distributing this material. It does.
Oklahoma schools/ educators are not exempt from our Obscenity laws.
As a Mom, reading the below texts is heartbreaking and nauseating. But it is necessary to be informed. Parents, adults need to understand that the concerns with these books are not political; they are basic, self-evident, common sense – and confirmed by the laws enacted by Oklahoma to protect children from this type of content. You know this. This is the grooming of a generation to an immoral and destructive ideology. You also know this. Stand up.
SAMPLE of books currently in the JPS High School Library
All Boys Aren’t Blue by George Johnson Lexile: 890L (5th/6th Grade)
"You told me to take my pajamas, my pajama pants, which I said to take off my pajama pants, which I told you when, which I did. You then took off your shorts, followed by your boxers," she read from the passage. "There you stood in front of me, fully erected and said, 'Taste it.' At first, I laughed and refused. But then you said, 'come on, Matt, taste it. This is what boys like us do when we like each other.' I finally listened to you. The whole time I knew it was wrong, not because I was having sexual intercourse with a guy, but that you were my family. I only did that for about 45 seconds before you had me stop. Then you got down on your hands and knees and told me to close my eyes, and that's when you began oral sex on me as well."
What Girls are Made Of by Elena K. Arnold Lexile: 900L (6th grade)
Chapter 13
“Then he’s there, naked, the thick horn of him wet-tipped and hard, and a rush of wetness floods the cotton lining of my thong. “Take off your bra.” I feel, thrillingly, like I’m in a movie, like I’m on display for a vast and important audience, like the whole world is watching as I reach behind my back and unhook the strap. My bra falls into my lap and I push my chest forward, pretending that I think my pointed little breasts are beautiful. Seth thrusts forward onto the bed and between my legs and against the thin lace barrier that separates us. The hard nose of my teddy bear pokes against my back and I twist to reach it, grab it by an arm or a leg, and toss it to the ground. My thong gets twisted as Seth takes it off, and I hear it rip when he grows impatient and yanks too hard. I shouldn’t care but I do, because the thong is brand new and it matches the bra, and lace can’t be sewn back together. But I don’t say anything, and then 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. He puts one hand on my stomach to hold me still—he likes it best, he says, when I don’t move a lot, when I let him be in charge, and I know too that he likes to feel himself inside of me, under his hand, the back and forth motion of it. It’s clear from his face when he’s close, and I brace myself for a second, for the way he usually pulls out roughly right at the end, but then he looks into my eyes and grins, asks, “Okay?” “Okay,” I answer, and then his eyes close and his mouth twists and a vein on his forehead bulges out and he thrusts again and again hard into the center of me and I want to like it but I sort of don’t, and I feel him spasm, and spasm, and he makes a sound that would be funny in different circumstances before he is still. “Fuck,” he says, collapsing against me. I run my fingers up and down his spine, feel a few bumps back there, new ones. He hates that he has acne on his back—bacne, he calls it—so I move my hand away to not draw attention to it. Soft now, his penis shrinks inside me and then slips out. When I get up to go to the bathroom, a runny path of semen, like egg whites, trails down my leg. I am horrified. It feels like I’ve just peed myself. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I thought it would just sort of absorb inside me, or really, I guess I never thought about what would happen at all. The other times when we didn’t use a condom, Seth would pull out and come on my stomach or—those two times—on my back. And then he’d use his T-shirt or a sock to wipe me off. But this time, as I walk to the bathroom connected to my room, the sticky wetness drips down my thigh, a couple of drops falling silently to the carpet.
Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison Lexile: 710L (4th Grade)
Chapter 23
“What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick?” I said.
“Pfff.” Nick waved me off and turned his attention back to his beer.
“What if I told you I sucked it?”
“Will you please just shut up already?”
“I’m dead serious, Nick.”
“Well, I’d say you were a fag.”
“I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goble’s dick in my mouth.”
“The real-estate guy?”
“Yeah.”
Nick looked around frantically. “What the fuck are you talking about, Michael?”
“I was in fourth grade. It was no big deal.”
Cringing, Nick held his hands out in front of him in a yield gesture. “Stop.”
“He sucked mine, too.”
“Stop! Why are you telling me this?”
“And you know what?” I said. “It wasn’t terrible.”
Jack of Hearts (And Other Parts) by Lev A.C. Rosen
Pg 12. My first time getting it in the butt was kind of weird. I think it’s going to be weird for everyone’s first time, though. I was a freshman, and it was winter break, right before everyone left on vacation—a big holiday blowout party. There was this senior from another school, and we were drinking and flirting, and eventually we took off together. His parents were home, and my mom was home, so he got us a room at a hotel nearby. Ordered up some champagne to be fancy. Now, before this, I’d sucked my share of dicks and had gotten plenty of blowjobs, handjobs, every kind of job, but the only buttsex I’d had was with this junior who was in love with my cock and he’d just hopped aboard. And he’d taken control then. Total bossy bottom. I’d pretty much just laid back and enjoyed. So, as far as I knew, anal was pretty easy—like porn easy. Anyway, so this senior (I’m not naming names) and I are having fun, kissing and sucking and 69ing and what have you, and then he says to me, “I want to fuck that pretty little ass of yours.” And I was like, “I don’t know, I’ve never done that before.”And he smirked and said, “Sure, right.” And I said, “No, really.” “Well, I paid for the hotel room,” he said, “so let’s use it. I’ll take it easy on you.” But it was pretty clear he didn’t believe I was an anal virgin. So he bends me over the bed and drizzles some lube on my ass. I made him wear a condom, of course. And he starts pushing it in. And WOW, that hurts. I tell him to stop, it hurts, and he says he’ll go slower. I say okay because he’s already in, and I’m thinking, I’m gay, so this is something I have to learn how to do, right? So he slows down and pushes in, and eventually it starts to feel good—like, really good. He’s hitting the right spot, nerve endings are all aglow. Eventually he finishes and pulls out, and the condom, of course, is covered in shit. And he gets mad at me, like it’s my fault. I didn’t know about how to clean up down there. He makes me take the crap-covered condom off him and flush it, and then he showers alone.
Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope-Perez Lexile: 780L (5th Grade)
Pg. 68 Henry came to the side of her bed and pulled back the covers. Naomi sat up quickly and scrambled backward. “Shh”, he said. He took one of her hands in his and squeezed it. “Come on over here”. He pulled her to her feet, close to him. He shifted in his pajamas, and the part of him that made him a man stuck out, reddish purple and frightening. She had never seen one before except on a baby. This was different. He lifted her hand to his mouth and licked it. Then he lowered her hand down and closed it around his hardness. His hand moved hers. His left hand gipped her shoulder, pressing her head tight against the hard, flat plane of his stomach. She watched her hand move back and forth like it didn’t belong to her. In the distance, she heard the train pass. A moment later, the thing leaped. Henry’s whole body shuddered, and a hot mess lay across her palm and between her fingers. Henry wiped himself quickly with a handkerchief. Then, never letting go of her shoulder, he urged her toward the door. “Come on,” he said once it was open. He walked her to the bathroom and then guided her to the sink. “There,” he said, rinsing her hand and patting it dry. “All better.” He walked back to his room like he had merely gone to get a glass of water. In the morning, when her mother asked her what was wrong, Naomi smiled a bright, false smile and said that it was nothing. Henry, sitting across from her at the table, raised his eyebrows at her over the top of his coffee and smiled. “She’s a good girl, ain’t she? he said. He winked at her as if he were promising to keep her secret rather than commanding her to keep his.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Lexile: 920L (6.0-6.4 Grade level)
Pages 148-149: He examined her then with his fingers, and she kissed his face and mouth. Cholly found her muscadine-lipped mouth distracting. Darlene released his head, shifted her body, and pulled down her pants. After some trouble with the buttons, Cholly dropped his pants down to his knees. Their bodies began to make sense to him, and it was not as difficult as he had thought it would be … She moaned a little, but the excitement collecting inside him made him close his eyes and regard her moans as no more than pine sighs over his head. Just as he felt an explosion threaten, Darlene froze and cried out. He thought he had hurt her, but when he looked at her face, she was staring wildly at something over his shoulder … “Get on wid it, nigger,” said the flashlight one.“Sir?” said Cholly, trying to find a buttonhole.“I said, get on wid it. An’ make it good, nigger, make it good.”… With a violence born of total helplessness, he pulled her dress up, lowered his trousers and underwear … Cholly, moving faster, looked at Darlene. He hated her. He almost wished he could do it—hard, long, and painfully, he hated her so much.
Pages 162-163: [pedophilia] The confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him, and a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length, and softening the lips of his anus. Surrounding all of this lust was a border of politeness. He wanted to fuck her—tenderly. But the tenderness would not hold. The tightness of her vagina was more than he could bear. His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made—a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Following the disintegration—the falling away—of sexual desire, he was conscious of her wet, soapy hands on his wrists, the fingers clenching, but whether her grip was from a hopeless but stubborn struggle to be free, or from some other emotion, he could not tell.
Removing himself from her was so painful to him he cut it short and snatched his genitals out of the dry harbor of her vagina. She appeared to have fainted. Cholly stood up and could see only her grayish panties, so sad and limp around her ankles. Again the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her. So when the child regained consciousness, she was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her.
Page 174: His attentions therefore gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive—children. And since he was too diffident to confront homosexuality, and since little boys were insulting, scary, and stubborn, he further limited his interests to little girls. They were usually manageable and frequently seductive. His sexuality was anything but lewd; his patronage of little girls smacked of innocence and was associated in his mind with cleanliness. He was what one might call a very clean old man.
With only occasional, and increasingly rare, encounters with the little girls he could persuade to be entertained by him, he lived rather peaceably among his things, admitting to no regrets. He was aware, of course, that something was awry in his life, and all lives, but put the problem where it belonged, at the foot of the Originator of Life. He believed that since decay, vice, filth, and disorder were pervasive, they must be in the Nature of Things. Evil existed because God had created it. He, God, had made a sloven and unforgivable error in judgment: designing an imperfect universe.
Page 181: “The little girls are the only things I’ll miss. Do you know that when I touched their sturdy little t*** and bit them—just a little—I felt I was being friendly?—If I’d been hurting them, would they have come back? . . . they’d eat ice cream with their legs open while I played with them. It was like a party.”
The V-Word: True Stories About Firt-time Sex by Amber Keyser
All too aware that often media and pop culture messages about sex and virginity are at best inaccurate and at worst dangerous, Keyser has compiled 17 essays from female authors—straight, gay, bisexual, and transgender—on their first time having sex: the good, the bad, the ugly, and, of course, the awkward. The experiences range from a wedding night to a spontaneous but tender hookup to an alcohol-fueled one-night stand. The writing varies, but all the authors express genuine and heartfelt emotions. While there is a fair amount of explicit content, the tone is less sultry and more contemplative. Keyser prefaces each piece with a brief introduction that teases apart themes such as gender identity and sexual autonomy. The book concludes with information on topics such as consent, body image, and masturbation, all presented in a way that reflects the editor’s progressive mind-set. Appended is an interview between Keyser and contributor, former librarian, and editor Kelly Jensen, who offers many examples of YA novels with rich depictions of female sexuality. Although there’s a wealth of thought-provoking content here, Keyser is never preachy, and teens will come away feeling as though they’ve spent time in the company of a smart and self-assured but gentle and reassuring older sister or friend. VERDICT-A strong addition to sex ed shelves and a much-needed perspective on teenage sexuality.–Mahnaz Dar, SchoolLibrary Journal
— School Library Journal
“Two people can choose to have sex for no other reason than that it feels good. It doesn’t have to be the next step in a committed relationship. It doesn’t have to be about love. But if you tell me that it means nothing, I’ll lift an eyebrow in disbelief.”
Crank by Ellen Hopkins Lexile: NP (Non Prose) non standard punctuation w/ this book.
It
Started with a Kiss
Crank-revved, pistons firing full bore, passion firecrackered in tiny bursts from thigh to belly button.
Oh, baby.
I want you so bad!
"B-b-bad to the bone?" We laughed, but it wasn't a joke. Not for long.
My shirt tore open. "Wait."
I've waited for weeks.
Put up and shut up.
Kisses segued to bites. Bruises.
Pain rippled through my body.
"Brendan, please stop."
No. You promised,
You damn little tease.
Off came my shorts. Down went his zipper. I realized I was in serious trouble. "I'll scream."
Go ahead. No one can hear
but skunks and coyotes.
Still, as I opened my mouth, his hand slapped down over it. Those
sublime muscles hardened.
342
Just relax.
You'll love it.
My brand-new Victoria's Secrets
shredded, and I felt the worst of
Brendan pause, savoring my terror.
They all love it.
Had he done it a different way, I
might have responded with excitement.
Instead, I froze as he pushed inside.
There it is.
Oh, God. There it
goes.
It went, all right, with an audible
tear. Pain mushroomed into agony and all I could do was go stiff.
You weren't lying,
you bitch!
I laid there, sobbing, as he worked and sweated over me. Stoked by the monster, it took him a long time to finish.
Give me a line,
I'll give you an encore.
343
He pulled away, sticky and bloody.
Throbbing inside and out, I didn't move, didn't dare look him in the eye.
What the hell
is the matter, Bree?
I stared up at the clouds, gathering into gloom, shrouding the moon.
"My name is Kristina."
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur Lexile: NP (Non Prose) poetry
“Instead. Lie me down. Lay me open like a map, and with your fingers trace the places you still want to **** out of me. Kiss me like I am the center point of gravity and you are falling into me like my soul is the focal point of yours. When your mouth is kissing not my mouth but other places, my legs will split apart out of habit and that’s when I pull you in, welcome you home. Baby lick me like your mouth has the gift of reading and I’m your favorite book. Find your favorite page in the soft spot between my legs and read it carefully, fluently, vividly. Don’t you dare leave a single word untouched and I swear my ending will be so good the last few words will come running to your mouth and when you’re done take a seat cause it’s my turn to make music with my knees pressed to the ground.”
*There are some images I attempted to upload here, but Substack is not allowing. One is a “poem” written between spread female legs. The text reads, “you have been taught your legs are a pit stop for men that need a place to rest, a vacant body empty enough for guests, but no one ever comes and is willing to stay.” The other is a “poem” that shows something dripping from fingers with the text, “you must have known you were wrong when your fingers were dipped inside me searching for honey that would not come for you.”
Infandous by Elana K Arnold Lexile: 980L (7th grade)
“I have come to you, and I will have what I want. This is not a question. The question is only if I will have my pleasure with my knife buried in your side or without.” “Marissa and I have always made fun of girls who fuck tourists.” “Eugene’s penis was way bigger than a teen-sized tampon.” “I thought it was going to be just us, you know? Like, for a change? But as soon as we finished fucking …”
Character touches a female minor-aged character’s breast; character rapes another man’s wife by knifepoint with details; minor-age character remembers having sex with an adult with details; a porn DVD is played with details about what is on screen; character thinks about her Mom having sex with her friend; adult character is excited to spend the night with minor-aged character and have sexual encounters; minor-aged character and adult female are caught in the act and body parts are described as they are naked; character takes his daughter to bed and rapes her.
Character is thought to have eaten his own children; character cuts another character’s mouth apart so that she cannot talk; character throws the head of another character’s only son into the king’s lap after explaining that he just ate him in his dinner; father cuts his daughter’s hands off after raping her; character kills herself. Porn referenced, rape, adult and minor sexual relations, father/daughter consensual sexual relations, father/daughter rape, homosexuality.
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold Lexile: 890L (Late 5th, early 6th grade)
Pedophilia (Susie is 14 years old) – “Mr. Harvey, I really have to get home.” “Take off your clothes.” “What?” “Take your clothes off,” Mr. Harvey said. “I want to check that you’re still a virgin.” “I am, Mr. Harvey,” I said. “I want to make sure. Your parents will thank me.” “My parents?” “They only want good girls,” he said. “Mr. Harvey,” I said, “please let me leave.” “You aren’t leaving, Susie. You’re mine now.” As he kissed his wet lips down my face and neck and then began to shove his hands up under my shirt. I wept. I began to leave my body. I began to inhabit the air and the silence. I wept and struggled so I would not feel. He ripped open my pants, not having found the invisible zipper my mother had artfully sewn into their side. “Big white panties,” he said. I felt huge and bloated. I felt like a sea in which he stood and pissed and shat. I felt the corners of my body were turning in on themselves and out, like in a cat’s cradle, which I played with Lindsey just to make her happy. He started working himself over me.
A violent rape and dismemberment of a child is described by the child going through it. Struggle, penetration, copious amounts of blood, and a body part being recovered by a neighborhood dog is described in detail. A series of murders and rapes are described. Teens drink in excess, joke about using narcotics. A child’s suicide involving an overdose and another’s suicide attempt involving whiskey and medication.