The stork (i.e. Sex and Gatekeepers)

I imagine I’m kissing his lips, that makes it easier and hearing him sigh with pleasure makes me go on even though my jaw’s hurting and, at times, I feel like I can’t breathe. He places a hand on my shoulder, stroking my hair, pushing my head down gently.

“Take everything off,” he murmurs, and I obey. He touches me, still groaning, and I want to make love to him, whatever happens, but I keep kissing him between his legs until he asks me, in a strangled voice: “All the way? Can I?”

I go red. I don’t really know what he means. So I just smile and he takes it as a yes. We go all the way. I’m not sure if I like it to be honest, I don’t know if it’s better than the kiss I was expecting, but I do know that, right now, Ruben’s mine and he needs me. While I’ve got my head between his legs, he keeps groaning and saying I'm special and then he has a spasm and liquid fills my mouth.”

            This is a passage from my novel about underage prostitution and grooming girls for sex (chapter 15). Can you guess why parents and teachers didn’t like it? Strong scenes (?), explicit sex, broken taboos, all the ingredients to cause gatekeepers an heart attack. My editor Alessandro, a sweet young man who supported me through the whole writing process, was torn about this novel he had really wanted. When he read the first draft, he phoned me: “I have  bad news and good news. What do you want to hear first?”

“The good news,” I said.

“It’s really the best text by an Italian author I’ve ever read during my career. Yeah, I know it’s not so long, but anyway.”

“So what can possibly be bad about it?”

“It won’t sell.” Full stop.

It didn’t sell. Editors may not be so good at predicting what will sell, but they surely know what won’t. They know gatekeepers, they can feel them breathing down their necks, they know that if you talk about death and/or sex in a children’s book, you’re done for.

            What happens when a brave publisher chooses to take her chances? From that very moment, both editor and author are confronted with censorship. Pre-censorship helps an editor contain the damage. Every time Alessandro called to discuss the novel, I could read between the lines. He was telling me without telling me: “Please, write about sex without writing about sex.” After all, we are fed fairy tales with mother's milk and we learn early on that the curtain must be lowered before the wedding party is over.

More insidious is self-censorship, something that the author inflicts on herself to avoid cuts or heavy revisions. It doesn’t matter that you vividly remember how straightforward it was to talk about sex during your childhood and teenage years, and how your friends loved to be explicit and detailed. Your entire sexual knowledge depended on that frankness, but as an author you know that adults often don’t like the combination children+frankness+sex. They seem to prefer children+innocence+the stork.

What is suitable for a child to read? And for a teenager? Why are adults usually indulgent when it comes to TV, internet and videogames but then expect children’s books to be reassuring? (Sorry, I censored myself; what I meant was: then expect children’s books to lie to children in order to fake the innocence that is so hard to find in real life...). I’m collecting answers to these questions for my dissertation. If you want to give your contribution, I’ll be happy! But don’t tell me that children are vulnerable angels because one of my favourite pastimes as a little girl was to play at HELL: I would be Satan and my little friends were the damned in the deepest circle of hell. I’m serious. Really.

Pixar's stork in "Partly Cloudy".