Librarians Talk about Sex in Manga

That’s the provocative headline on the PW wrapup of the NYCC panel discussion titled “A Nosebleed means WHAT?: Sexuality in Japanese Manga.” One of the big problems librarians face is where to put the books:

Genre’s like Yaoi (boys in love with boys comics) can really produce problems for librarians, because manga is considered a category for teens rather than adults. One librarian said that if she had a manga collection for adult readers, yaoi wouldn’t be a problem. But, she said, manga is categorized for teens.

Some librarians complained that the ratings weren’t descriptive enough, and that some series start out fairly clean but heat up in subsequent volumes. Reviews and previews emerged as a way to help sort them out.

On the topic of the Japanese tendency to be, uh, franker about sex, Tokyopop’s Lillian Diaz-Pryzbyl made an important distinction:

“It’s not always acceptance [of sex],” she said of the sex depicted or alluded to in manga, but she conceded that manga often creates “an awareness [about sex].”

As a parent, I think that’s key. Actually, many younger teens are already aware of sex, but they don’t quite know what to make of it. Manga are one way for them to put it in context. My kids are 11 and 13. Some of the titles they are reading have sexual situations but most don’t push an “everybody’s doing it” attitude; in fact, the girls in these stories are rather puritanical. If the books are providing good role models, who, for example, say no if pressured to have sex against their will, I’m OK with that. Sometimes a character finds herself in a compromising or dangerous situation, and kids need to know that that can happen as well. For the manga-reading parent, some plots provide a starting point for talking about sex. But even if it’s just the kids reading the books, I think it’s useful to think about these situations before they start happening.

Obviously, the dynamic changes for older teens who read more mature books. But it would be incredibly unrealistic to have a book about teenagers that didn’t deal with sex. The more important question is whether it is exploitative or demeaning or otherwise unhealthy. We need to pay more attention to that and worry less about wardrobe malfunctions.