With my almost 14 year old daughter I am having a lively discussion about a book in the romance genre who seems to be popular among her peers.
He asked me to buy it and I agreed, perhaps in a slightly superficial way. I just took a quick look online where this volume has enthusiastic reviews from readers who speak of it as a book by fantasy genre, with references even to Greek mythology.
After a few days after she started reading it, I picked it up to understand what attracted her so much and I discovered that I had a rough and inconsistent novelwith many sex scenes explicit without any in-depth analysis of feelings or anything else.
I would like to avoid continuing reading, also because there are four more volumes. How can I make her understand that he is not suitable for her? Is it wrong to ban reading it since many of her friends have read it and the other mothers (who I know and who are not naive) have agreed? Do I risk having the opposite effect?
Ornella
– Dear Ornella, I have received dozens of letters like yours from parents who discovered that their pre-adolescent daughters had become passionate about sagas of romance genre books full of very explicit sexual references and poor in any other value, whether literary or educational. The world of publishing, in fact, in the last 2/3 years has been overwhelmed by the phenomenon of these novels that tell love stories with explicit sex scenes, in which – among other things – the relationships are often very dysfunctional and based on a very intense attraction towards beautiful males, with a narcissistically fragile personality, often corresponding to the profile of the “beautiful and damned”.
The female world has always brought great success to this literary genre, the novelty here is that never before have so many pages and attention been dedicated to the description of scenes with explicit sexual content and never before have these narratives ended up in the hands of such young readers. Even in this case, as I have said several times in this column, we are witnessing a world that disrespects the protection of minors, who are urged to adhere to adultizing proposals that are not suited to their level of development. Prohibit? Censor?
I would advise you to do this experiment: try to check with her what happens if you read some pages of those books aloud, holding your daughter next to you. You will find that he will be very embarrassed. Then ask her why this embarrassment wouldn’t appear if you read books of another genre. Also check the classification with her
based on chili peppers present on the cover which defines the level of “spicy” content, and establish the limit that cannot be exceeded in the books he can read.
