Alright, maybe we don't. Personally I'm a big fan. The question is worth exploring though. What is it about sex that makes it taboo through so much of our society?
Recently I finished reading the Hunger Games trilogy. For the two of you who don't know, this is a series of dystopian-future novels about a girl named Katniss, and the role she takes in shaping her hellhole of a world. The books are superb, gripping and gorgeously written in a kind of jagged-edge firstperson conciousness. The plot… I've read and studied many, many novels, and can usually predict every twist after a dozen pages. Not here. Not even close. Mini-review aside, what I found interesting on the intellectual level is that the books are, inexplicably, marketed as young adult (YA).
Certainly they are readable. Effortless prose, basic vocabulary, manageable chapter sizes. There is little cursing, and the sexuality is limited to plenty of kissing (more on this in a moment). They also hapen to be the most violent books I've ever read.
People die, brutally and graphically. Not just the usual blank henchmen types, but characters we've come to know and love. This, I think, is the crux of Collins' technique. Nameless deaths, to paraphrase an old saying, are statistics. When our friends die, screaming in agony at the claws and teeth of mutated lizards (for example), that is pain. There is one death, late in the final book, that left me in tears (silver parachutes). And yes, I'm a 23 year old man. It wasn't just the death, but what it represented. Failure, the extinguishing of love and hope and the chance for happiness. We trust, our at least the publishing industry trusts, our teenagers enough to think they can handle that level of emotional devastation. So why isn't there a sex scene?
The entire series, in its own twisted way, is a romance. Katniss sticks her tongue down plenty of throats, and Collins treats the difficulty of relationships with a respect and clarity that I find admirable. She writes like someone who has been there before. Now, I can't pretend to know Suzanne Collins's mind. She is a better writer than I can or ever will be. I chose these books as a window not because I think graphic sex would improve them, but because the hyper-violence on display makes frank sexuality noticeable by its absence. Is this really the way forward, to put brutality on display while we keep the mechanics of creating life locked in a vault? Suzanne Collins respects her audience enough to show them pain. I can't help wondering what she might write about love.
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