As a YA writer, it's always interesting to hear how others deal with sex in their work. Carrie Mesrobian, author of the forthcoming Sex & Violence (Carolrhoda LAB, Oct. 2013), and editor Andrew Karre talked about sex in YA lit at the Children's and Young Adult Literature Conference at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.
I wasn't in attendance; however, I stumbled across their main points of discussion on Mesrobian's blog (via YA Highway) and they're quite enlightening--especially if you're always thinking about how young adults/new adults view or contemplate sex, both inside and outside the realms of fiction.
Two points (as outlined by Mesrobian) I find particularly enlightening:
1. You can write YA that doesn't have sexual content in it. What you cannot do is write imaginable young adult characters without thinking about them with respect to sex.
6. Adolescence, the notion of childhood innocence, and the concept of privacy are all relatively modern inventions. Reluctance to speak about sex or even expose children or young adults to sex has not always been the norm throughout human history. Also, teenagers have very little privacy in general, less now in the social media age. YA stories that feature long expanses in which characters have uninterrupted romantical sex are in conflict with this reality.
