Puget Sound Journal: Sex in literature -- who's to judge how far to go?

A survey published yesterday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that 32.8 percent of ninth-graders have had sex. More than one in five of them is sexually active.

They see it on "The O.C." and in fashion magazine advertisements, in video games that feature scantily clad figure and in movies -- remember the scene where the high school cheerleader tried to entice the quarterback by wearing only a whipped-cream bikini?

And 15-year-olds get the same spam e-mails we all do.

So it didn't shock Brandon Jerome, a ninth-grader at Federal Way's Todd Beamer High School, when he came across this passage while reading a book assigned in his English class:

"We made love there, against the trunk. Standing. She was a virgin. ...

"Words failed me. I strained to imagine the scene: the tree, the nobility of its trunk, the grandeur of its branches, the carpet of butterfly leaves, and then I asked him: 'Standing?

"Yes, like horses. Perhaps that's why she laughed afterwards, a laugh so piercing, so wild, and echoing so far and wide that even the birds took wing in fright."

It was on page 60 of Dai Sijie's "Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," a 2000 novel about two boys living in Mao Zedong's China, trying to counteract their "re-education" by secretly reading Western literature.

Brandon simply read past the scene. When his class broke into groups to discuss the chapter and to illustrate one of its scenes, Brandon still was not bothered. He did not object. He did not tell his mother what he'd read.

When his friend said, "I wanna see if I'll get in trouble," and began drawing the sex scene -- of the boy behind the Chinese seamstress, up against the ginkgo tree, her hair in his hand -- Brandon just laughed it off.

What bothered Brandon, he said, is that the teacher hung the pictures on the classroom wall and left them there for about two weeks. Brandon says there were about seven illustrations of the scene.

That's when he told his mom.

"I recall only three pictures that depicted the scene on page 60," teacher Vince Halloran wrote in response to my inquiries via e-mail. "Two were drawn with sensitivity and maturity. One was so subtle as not even to be noticeable. I would not characterize any of the three pictures as 'explicit' or 'graphic.' "

Halloran, 35, defends the book's value, says "a healthy, well-adjusted 14- or 15-year-old would not have any difficulty handling the scene" and says he is concerned that "the expertise of the districts' top professionals has been trumped by a narrow viewpoint."

The book was on the school district's list of approved material for ninth grade. Halloran had taught it once before. But Superintendent Tom Murphy removed the book last month from the list, following complaints by Brandon's mother, Lori Bridges, and by other parents.

"It's just too much for ninth-graders," Bridges said, noting that she does not want the book banned. In fact, she gave it to her 18-year-old daughter to read.

But, Bridges said, she would have liked a warning.

"It's a respect thing," she said, proposing several steps Halloran could have taken.

He could have told parents about the sex scene ahead of time, she said. He could have let students skip that passage. He could have placed those three paragraphs off limits when it came time to illustrate the novel.

Later in the novel, an old man voyeuristically watches two young people have sex. And a young girl gets an abortion.

"Some of these teachers just think they can do whatever they want with our kids," said Bridges, a stay-at-home mother of four, who pulled her daughter out of the Federal Way district two years ago when she was prevented from saying "under God" while playing the bailiff in a mock courtroom trial.

The School Board here will approve next year's reading lists for all grades. And it is drafting a policy that would prohibit material that is "vulgar, lewd, obscene, plainly offensive or sexually explicit."

But sex pervades society, even if it is mostly absent in classrooms and newspapers.

The policy being drafted concerns Halloran, who writes that "I don't believe public institutions should be in the business of implementing particular moral viewpoints."

He says that when it comes to morals, parents are the experts.

Bridges has pulled her son from Halloran's class, and has filed a complaint against Halloran with the district.

More headlines and info from Federal Way.