Cultural reluctance to educate young people about human sexuality and cultural reaction of shame and punishment for young people's experimentation and access to information through the prolific pornography industry is an intrinsically related combination which fosters unhealthy cultural human sexuality. Unhealthy in the sense that shame and ignorance become barriers to people's healthy and safe concepts and practice of sexuality. We relegate a large percent of sexual culture to the pornography industry and keep it separated as forbidden knowledge. When pornography overextends these boundaries of separateness, as in the case of young people accessing internet porn, a body of accurate, accessible and respectfully presented knowledge is needed to turn to. Shooing young people off the internet is like obnoxious shooshing of their curiosity and hunger for knowledge.
Young people speak with their behavior.
We are the gatekeepers and porn and cybersex chat are barriers in youth services. Our job as librarians is to open the gate when asked and assist young people to navigate those barriers. As adults looking back at our own youth, think about how such dispassionate information may have benefited us to make informed, individual choices. Weed and reseed your collection for Teen Read Week, Oct. 17-23, 1999. The following are a few human sexuality titles I highly recommend.