Spanking Shakespeare and Other Teen Tails...Erm, Tales

It's not what you want it to be.

When I was a teenager, there was very little published for my age group, which is why I read Miller and Nin and Plath perhaps a few years before my time. There were the school library classics - Twain and Austen and the Brontes - little of which satisfied my cravings for true explorations of the body politic and the human psyche. There were the Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine horror novels. There were the godawful Lurlene McDaniel teen romances and the cringeworthy Sweet Valley High twins. Then there were the tales of true teen life, meant to ward us hellions off of sex and drugs. For those who recall Go Ask Alice and Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones, I wholeheartedly sympathize.

Last week, while browsing at the Powell's on Burnside for birthday presents for an about-to-be-fourteen year old, I found the selection to be almost fantastically lascivious. Was I in the teen section or the erotica section, heretofore known to be located next to nautical fiction and across the aisle from sci-fi? Girls in corsets draped the covers of historical fiction. The cover of Melvin Burgess's Doing It consisted of a shadowed outline of a couple having upright sex. A favorite of both mine and Mr. W's was a zombie cheerleader lying back on a bench, one leg bent up in come hither fashion.

Anyhow, this post is not to analyze the past or current teenage landscape. It's to celebrate the apparent complete lack of difference between the stories we tell our sixteen year olds and the stories we tell ourselves. The fact that we are not, by now, a race of spankophile sex-craved zombie vampires in school uniforms remains a mystery.

These both look like BDSM erotica, don't they? Untamed, especially, looks like something published by Blue Moon.