{"id":32000,"date":"2022-10-22T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-22T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=32000"},"modified":"2022-10-16T08:41:27","modified_gmt":"2022-10-16T15:41:27","slug":"you-cant-read-that-banned-book-review-the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=32000","title":{"rendered":"You Can&#8217;t Read That! Banned Book Review: The Perks of Being a Wallflower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"perks of being a wallflower\" href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/49379178-the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/52425126989_8b46111cb0_m.jpg\" alt=\"perks of being a wallflower\" width=\"155\" height=\"240\" \/><\/a><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/49379178-the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower\">The Perks of Being a Wallflower<\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nby Stephen Chbosky<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/8206\/8231735349_b4f0694d29_t.jpg\" alt=\"3_5\" width=\"74\" height=\"16\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In a recent banned book news roundup, I linked to an article about a Florida high school teacher who innocently picked up a young adult novel and was shocked by what she read:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was a book that I had never heard of before. When I pre-read this book, I found that it was full of questionable, age-inappropriate material, including a lot of oral sex, bestiality and things of that nature.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The novel, of course, is &#8220;The Perks of Being a Wallflower,&#8221; frequently challenged, protested, placed on restricted reading lists, and sometimes banned since its publication in 1999. I&#8217;m neither a teacher nor a young adult, but I&#8217;ve heard of it. In fact I&#8217;ve been hearing about it for at least a decade and have long wanted to read it. The Florida teacher&#8217;s comment prompted me to finally get a copy.<\/p>\n<p>The Marshall Libraries web site\u00a0<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/library\/bannedbooks\/the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower\/\">summarizes nearly two decades&#8217; worth of attempts to restrict or ban the book<\/a><\/strong>. Note that these are just the attempts that made the news, and that most local fights over banning or restricting books go unreported. What do opponents object to? A partial list includes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Profanity and torture<\/li>\n<li>Gay positive themes<\/li>\n<li>A two-page rape scene<\/li>\n<li>Depictions of homosexuality, drug use, sexual behavior<\/li>\n<li>Bestiality<\/li>\n<li>Smoking<\/li>\n<li>Masturbation<\/li>\n<li>Drinking<\/li>\n<li>Arousing graphic descriptions<\/li>\n<li>Abortion and LSD<\/li>\n<li>Bad role model characters<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Protesters at school board meetings regularly describe the novel as disgusting trash, and as book-banning rhetoric ramps up, as child pornography, part of a leftist plot to lure children into lives of depravity, addiction, deviant sex, and transgenderism. One grandmother stood up at a school board meeting to say she worried boys would read the date rape scene and try to re-create it with her granddaughter! Talk about grooming! Bad stuff indeed!<\/p>\n<p>How bad is it? Here&#8217;s a brief snippet:<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 640px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a title=\"Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 6.29.56 AM\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/halfmind\/52425354658\/in\/dateposted-public\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/52425354658_1a1904bb2a_z.jpg\" alt=\"Screen Shot 2022-10-13 at 6.29.56 AM\" width=\"640\" height=\"459\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Page 157, &#8220;The Perks of Being a Wallflower&#8221;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>To set the scene, Patrick and the narrator Charlie are driving in a car, swapping tales about legendary high school characters of the past. Barry the vandal. Chip the bug killer. C.B. the wanna-be dog fucker. Action Jack the jack-off. Patrick, openly gay, is himself on the path of becoming a legend to future students. So is Charlie, who&#8217;s regarded by most of his classmates as a weirdo.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re the kind of person who gets aroused by any of this, I don&#8217;t think I want to know you. And just to be clear, the short reference to C.B.&#8217;s drunken attempt to fuck a dog is the full extent of the bestiality so often cited by people who haven&#8217;t read the book. It&#8217;s always that way: a character in a young adult novel so much as mentions or has a thought about a thing and as far as book-banners are concerned the entire book is about that thing.<\/p>\n<p>Not that there isn&#8217;t plenty of shit going on in &#8220;The Perks of Being a Wallflower.&#8221; Charlie, a high school freshman who comes across as intelligent, observant, oddly passive, and perhaps slightly autistic \u2014 the wallflower of the title \u2014 falls in with a group of seniors and spends the school year learning from and doing things with them: socializing, driving around, drinking, smoking tobacco and weed, having sex (which Charlie merely observes until late in the book, and then not fully due to being sexually abused in his pre-teen years).<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, there&#8217;s drinking and drug use and sex, like in pretty much every young adult novel. Charlie&#8217;s older sister gets pregnant and he takes her to the abortion clinic. Someone gives Charlie LSD at a party and he has an unpleasant trip. Early in the book, Charlie watches as his sister&#8217;s boyfriend forces her to have sex, only later realizing it was rape. Patrick, openly gay, has a secret homosexual relationship with the closeted quarterback of the football team. The girl Charlie loves, Patrick&#8217;s step-sister Sam, eventually tries to stamp his passport, but that&#8217;s when Charlie&#8217;s repressed memories of Aunt Helene abusing him as a child come flooding back and he suffers a breakdown.<\/p>\n<p>What do middle- and high-school kids talk and think about? I&#8217;m betting it isn&#8217;t Jesus and saving themselves for marriage. What kind of books do young adults read? What kind of shenanigans do they get up to?<\/p>\n<p>All the things the kids in this book think about and get up to. And you know it. We&#8217;ve all been there.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Perks of Being a Wallflower,&#8221; it seems to me, is well within the mainstream of contemporary young adult literature. It depicts the things kids are interested in without glorifying them. It&#8217;s message is a moral one, not preachy but realistic in depicting the consequences of drinking, drug use, promiscuity, and selfish behavior. It offers recognition, affirmation, and support to kids who&#8217;ve been the victims of child sexual abuse and incest (of which there are many, far more than we want to think about). And Charlie and (most of) his friends? They&#8217;re going to turn out all right. Like you did. Like I did. What was I reading when I was 14? Jack Kerouac&#8217;s &#8220;On the Road,&#8221; one of the many adult books Charlie&#8217;s English teacher, Bill, challenges him with.<\/p>\n<p>Which all goes to explain the popularity of &#8220;The Perks of Being a Wallflower.&#8221; Ban away, teabaggers, homophobes, frightened grandmothers, and bluenoses, kids aren&#8217;t going to stop reading it, nor should they.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky In a recent banned book news roundup, I linked to an article about a Florida high school teacher who innocently picked up a young adult novel and was shocked by what she read: \u201cIt was a book that I had never heard of before. When I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,412,30],"tags":[2266,2267,4033],"class_list":["post-32000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books","category-books-reviews","category-reviews","tag-bannedbooks","tag-challengedbooks","tag-youcantreadthat"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32000"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32030,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32000\/revisions\/32030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}