[mrthrowaway999]

>> We ban books, scrutinize classroom libraries, demonize librarians, and demoralize teachers.

How true are these allegations?

For example, book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.

I understand that removing books from a library is bad in principle. But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.

[o11c]

I looked into book banning a while back and AFAICT the vast majority of it is universally agreed as necessary (and every "list of most-banned books" is an outright lie). It's just called "curation" instead of "banning".

Not many people complain if they can't find "Lolita" in their school library, let alone a thousand copycats with less historical relevance.

[hnbad]

Sure, you can call it curation but that implies that school libraries previously were filled arbitrarily by whatever random people dumped there. Libraries are always curated by definition.

What changed wasn't the addition of curation but the constraints of it. The reason entire school libraries were emptied following the "book bans" is that these laws often use poorly defined language to classify what content and topics are permissible or not in school libraries and this means all existing literature has to be carefuly combed through to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it violates the law, especially when the consequence of an "illegal book" carries a fine or worse.

It's similar to the abortion bans: the problem isn't just that they ban abortions, the problem is that what an abortion is is often poorly defined because there are plenty of scenarios where a pregnancy has to be terminated to prevent harm to the pregnant person but we wouldn't normally think of this as "getting an abortion". The vague blanket bans mean medical professionals need to get a legal opinion on every individual case because they face liability if the procedure turns out to have been illegal in that situation (and not, for example, if they had performed it 24 hours later even if the progression was predictable at the time).

The same is also true for teaching sex ed in states which use vague language like "age appropriate" or blanket ban certain behavior outside a strictly cis-heterosexual norm (e.g. a teacher telling her students she got married to her husband likely won't get her fired despite her disclosing her sexual orientation whereas a gay teacher might not be allowed to disclose theirs).

Even if you think the state should decide which books can go in a public school library or not, certainly having a central register that reviews each book and classifies it is more efficient and more manageable than just making every librarian or school individually liable if their library carries a book deemed inappropriate after the fact. After all, review boards already exist for films and TV.

[ethbr1]

Hear, hear.

I'd chalk it up to typical legislative imprecision in writing laws... except for that imprecision's pervasiveness.

Now, I think inspiring self-censorship is exactly the intent.

It makes it easier to pass censorship laws ('We're really talking about {most egregious scenario}. We'd never charge someone for doing {something lesser}'), while simultaneously apportioning governments more power to selectively weapon the law via prosecutorial discretion ('It'd be a shame if you fought us on this. Everyone has done something wrong...').

[hnbad]

There are multiple factors at play.

On the one hand, in the case of book bans, creating an actual state-mandated review board to make these decisions in advance would make it much easier to call this out for the censorship that it is while offloading the decisions to librarians or schools and making them liable for guessing wrong frames it as a matter of "personal responsibility" and framing violations as parents making themselves heard instead of the state intervening directly.

On the other, it creates a culture of fear around "taboo" subjects ensuring that those that would be held liable for transgressions (the teachers, librarians and school boards in case of the book ban) will over-comply and apply the most far-reaching interpretation of the law in order to minimize risks of liability because even when you haven't actually violated the law you don't want to risk having to demonstrate this in court. This is of course done in full knowledge of the intended but unstated parts of the law, e.g. if "sexual orientation" becomes a taboo subject that only means "anything other than perfectly straight" but also the mere status of being in a homosexual relationship or being trans will be treated as taboo and a risk of liability (which in turn influences hiring decisions as the legal risk of hiring discrimination is lower than that of an emboldened activist parent suing over perceived immodesty).

And finally of course as you say it creates an almost blank cheque presumption of illegality that can be used by weaponized law enforcement through unequal application of the law. This is perfectly exemplified by Russian laws that don't outright make it illegal to be gay but make it illegal to "promote homosexuality" where you then you simply sue visibly or openly gay people for "promotion" instead. In the case of the anti-abortion laws this can be as simple as having had a miscarriage or a delayed period and being forced to prove your innocence.

[nineplay]

I would complain. If a kid has the ability and patience to read Lolita, who am I to stop them?

[nineplay]

If the discussion is specifically about school libraries, than I think it is absolutely legitimate to be concerned about which books are or are not banned. Many kids have easy access to school libraries, but not used bookstores or epubs.

- My own 14 year old has limited internet access and no account at any online retailer.

[apitman]

Is your 14 yo not allowed to go to friends' houses where they might have much more access to these things?

[nineplay]

My 14 year old can read any book at any time and our shelves are full of books that would upset many pearl clutchers. That is not the point. My point is that if even my kid from a supportive, educated, middle class family can't get used books or epubs, it's absurd to present it as a solution to banned books from school libraries.

[apitman]

And my point is that if you're that certain your 14 yo isn't accessing things you're not aware of, then you must be watching them very close indeed.

[nineplay]

I very much hope my 14 year old is accessing things I'm not aware of. I consider it a rite of passage.

I'm not solving for my 14 year old. I'm solving for the other 11 million middle school students in the US who don't have access to used book stores and epubs and are very definitely impacted by school library censorship.

[tourmalinetaco]

The question is what “banned” books, if any, would you willingly expose your children to? You already curate their access to the Internet, what difference is there in the school or even state doing the same?

[nineplay]

What is the difference between the state curating media for my child and me curating media for my child -is that a serious question? I trust myself, I don't trust the state. I'm not sure I've ever seen any poster anywhere on HN that trusts the state.

[chlodwig]

With regards to "book banning" every example I've seen has been referring to a government library, so the state is involved either way. What is going on is that one arm of the state (elected officials) is fighting another arm of the state (civil service selected librarians).

[nineplay]

Right, and the point of banned book weed is to highlight books that have been 'curated' from school libraries so that members of the community can review the works and give feedback.

If a middle school decided to curate away the Holy Bible, I'm sure many parents would want to be informed.

[therealdrag0]

Some schools ban simple classics like Mark Twain or To Kill A Mocking Bird. They can F right off.

[jkestner]

The statement is about school libraries. Those alternative sources are not very accessible to children.

[chlodwig]

As far as I can tell, book banning means "Republican elected officials enacting imprecise rules to override to the curation decisions of tax-payer funded school librarians." Personally, I think that many school and city librarians have made egregiously bad curation decisions, but I think trying to legislate better curation decisions through broad guidelines is not the best way to go about fixing things.

[jmull]

> How true are these allegations?

You provide a source yourself that book banning occurs.

The problem with making books less accessible is that less people have a chance to read them.

Banning books is an effort to control the ideas other people are exposed to. That certain specific efforts aren't 100% successful doesn't make it unproblematic.

[mrthrowaway999]

The question is one of magnitude, not of simple occurrence.

My argument is that de facto banning has little or no effect on accessibility. I'm sure the described book bans have decreased the probability of certain books being read, but again, what is the magnitude of the change? If I were to guess, it's so small as to be almost unmeasurable.

[jmull]

Everyone's welcome to their own opinion, but ones based on nothing are worth just that.

[consumer451]

If I understand the logic of your argument, why then have libraries at all?

[mrthrowaway999]

You misunderstand my argument but I'm not sure which part of it is confusing.

[consumer451]

> book banning. This source mentions that some books get banned from libraries: https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data. But i assume all of these books can be obtained via a bookstore or online retailer. Even if someone argues that it puts books out of reach because of price, I cannot believe that since one can get used books from what for as little as $3-5, or 15 minutes of googling can give them access to PDFs and epubs to tens of thousands of public domain books or millions(?) pirated books that can be read on tablets and phones which have saturated everyone's hands.

You seem to be arguing that library book bans are innocuous, because one can simply find the books elsewhere.

Is that correct?

[mrthrowaway999]

Yes. To elaborate, I think the effect of bans is so small that it's probably not even measurable because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

That does not argue for shutting down libraries. It doesn't make an argument for what to do with libraries at all.

[ethbr1]

> because we have become amazingly good at distributing textual information.

Have we?

The costs to doing so have certainly gone down, but the entire de facto system is much more centralized than its physical-based precursor was.

Once a physical book was created, it existed until it was destroyed.

In contrast, all digital destruction takes is a takedown notice to the centralized host and ambivalence on the part of anyone else having archived it.

Physical books were persistent by default.

[tourmalinetaco]

Book “bans” are indeed innocuous because they’re not bans at all unless it is legally codified into law. Any and all decisions to remove books from a library is called curation and is in fact perfectly reasonable.

[consumer451]

Book publishers seem to find fault with your argument, as the book bans appear to be rooted in law.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93pe9p5479o

[sickofparadox]

"Banned books" has always been an indulgent title put on books that have been banned from a handful of school libraries by busybodies, but never used for books so controversial that copies of them might as well be unobtainable.

[gjsman-1000]

> But pragmatically I can't see a problem with books being made in accessible.

Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic. Parents have been thrown out of school board meetings for reading their content out loud.

[ziddoap]

>Especially considering, most of these "banned" books (literally available everywhere else) are pornographic.

Where are you getting the data that most books are pornographic?

Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content. The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).

[tourmalinetaco]

Fine, you want precision? 22% of books curated out of public schools included sexual content such as statutory rape, drawn CSAM, and various other topics not appropriate for public education.

[wizzwizz4]

See, I would say that both of those things are important topics to cover in school. Children need to know about statutory rape, so they (a) don't ignorantly commit it / participate in it; (b) can be protected by those laws, in the event they need to seek such protection; (c) understand why those laws are there, so they don't stay in an abusive situation just because “I'll go to prison if you tell anyone!”.

The laws around drawn CSAM are strict. You don't get a free pass for drawing a 14-year-old having sex with another 14-year-old, merely because you're also a 14-year-old. (There's a good reason the law works that way, as ridiculous as it might seem.) Children need to be aware of such things, especially in jurisdictions where children can get tried as adults for taking naked photographs of themselves (which is just about the worst possible way to address that problem).

https://www.nominet.uk/shifting-the-dial-how-internet-matter... says:

> Girls said they wanted more information earlier in secondary schools – for example in Year 7 – if not in primary school. They felt that currently, the lessons they do receive are delivered too late.

> Strikingly, boys saw huge value in messages which tackle ‘perpetrator’ behaviour with unequivocal and un-sensationalised information about the consequences and legality of this behaviour.

> Girls were generally negative about “consequences of sharing” messaging or any messaging they felt was simplistic and failed to address the underlying causes of sexual image-sharing.

> Children said that currently, they typically learn more about sexual image-sharing from sources outside of school such as friends and family, or informally in school from gossip around certain incidents, as well as from TV and social media. In many cases this information tends to minimise or normalise sexual image sharing.

The content of the curriculum is a separate issue to the content of school libraries, but similar attitudes motivate decision-making in both cases. Censorship of information about sex has concrete harms, and especially censorship of information about child abuse.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I looked for myself once. The "most banned book" was, according to Google search (and DDG, many listings for it), the one by Maia Kobabe. This book is available on archive.org, you can find it yourself. And it is indeed pornographic by any meaningful standard.

> Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content.

Well gee, as long as it's not 98% what's the big deal. Frankly, I think everyone should be just fine with any number below about 80% pornographic. Wouldn't want to get carried away.

> The definition of sexual content includes things like "informational books about puberty" (i.e. sexual content != pornographic).

This is another absurd claim. When you go to look at the books themselves, this isn't some little cartoon of "how to roll the rubber down over the penis"... which while I might agree would disturb some people, it wouldn't much bother me. It's strapons and cock-sucking, and all the things that at least 20 or 30 years ago would have had something categorized as hardcore porn.

The people who want to claim it is "informational books about puberty" don't have the same definition of "informational books about puberty" and "sexual education" as the rest of us, and they like to take advantage of people being too lazy to check for themselves.

[ziddoap]

>Well gee, as long as it's not 98% what's the big deal. Frankly, I think everyone should be just fine with any number below about 80% pornographic. Wouldn't want to get carried away.

Are you perhaps misunderstanding what the statistic I quoted means? Because it doesn't mean that every banned book is 22% sexual, which I think is what you read it as?

If I rephrase it as "78% of banned books contain nothing sexual", does that help?

Otherwise I have literally no idea what you are trying to say here.

[gjsman-1000]

> Only 22% of the books banned in the 2021-2022 school year contained sexual content

Citation needed. That's a very narrow take on sexual content.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-...

As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD1GdCb-gII

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cyjjWuZoK8

https://youtu.be/Oe098d5iIW0

[ziddoap]

https://pen.org/book-bans/banned-book-list-2021-2022/

>As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for their content, this is well documented:

Neat, I didn't dispute that.

Where's your citation that most are pornographic?

[gjsman-1000]

> Where's your citation that most are pornographic?

I used an imprecise term for the high percentage that have sexual content. If you prefer, I'll rename it to "books grossly inappropriate for minors."

As for PEN.org, I do not trust their honesty, point blank. They have every incentive to be dishonest or to define the issue as narrowly as possible. I might as well quote Exxon about the harms of CO2.

[hnbad]

Anyone under the age of 21 is a minor in the US. There's a wide range of "minors" who are well into/past puberty. You can have age restrictions without having blanket bans or arbitrary and poorly defined categories of content.

You're also conflating everything that describes or mentions sexuality as "pornographic". Pornography is specifically defined as something designed to sexually arouse the consumer. That's not the same thing at all.

[ziddoap]

So, no citation.

Got it.

[hnbad]

I'm pretty sure they'd also get thrown out of those meetings for "merely reading out loud (to adults!)" the content of certain sections of the Bible.

Also that sounds more like an argument for age restrictions. The kind of content most people would find acceptable for their 6-year-old to read is quite different from that of a 16-year-old.

[Vegenoid]

If anyone has good data/analysis of banned books, please share it. While looking, I only found PEN's dataset: https://pen.org/book-bans/2023-banned-book-list/

And the only comprehensive analysis I found was their analysis of that dataset: https://pen.org/report/book-bans-pressure-to-censor/

Any other analyses I found used that dataset. I don't distrust PEN, but they surely have some bias, and more sources is always better.

Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, they don't look at the grade levels that books were banned at, which seems very important. Banning a book is very different if it's for grade, middle, or high school. Middle and high schoolers are thinking about sex, talking about sex, and having sex, so the standards for what is appropriate should change substantially based on the age of the students.

And of course, it's very difficult to do a comprehensive analysis of "how sexual" a book is. There are books with lots of literary value that have a few paragraphs that are very explicit, but the rest of the book is not. If you only read the explicit paragraphs, you would not have the context or know what the rest of the book is like. The context of a whole novel around explicit content makes it very different than when the explicit part is considered in isolation.

It doesn't help that it's hard to make our own judgements about how graphic something banned for "sexual content" is, because the offending content can't be posted online for copyright reasons.

> As for parents getting thrown out of school board meetings for merely reading out loud (to adults!) their content, this is well documented

One of those videos is not about books at all, it is about someone wanting to quote one of the school board members who said something sexual. This doesn't invalidate everything you said, but I point this out to demonstrate to you that you are not thinking about or analyzing this clearly or with rigor.

Yes, of course there are instances of age-inappropriate books with little literary value that are sensibly banned, but pointing to a few such instances and extrapolating that to "most banned books are pornographic" is obviously bad methodology.

I'd sure love to use an LLM to analyze the banned book data along with the full text of the books, but that would take quite a bit of time and money.

[nineplay]

Three youtube videos is not 'well documented'. I am skeptical that this is a widespread phenomena.

[wizzwizz4]

There's a difference between “talking about sex” and “pornography”.

> So they made their father drink wine that night. And the firstborn went in and lay with her father. He did not know when she lay down or when she arose. The next day, the firstborn said to the younger, “Behold, I lay last night with my father. Let us make him drink wine tonight also. Then you go in and lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.” So they made their father drink wine that night also. And the younger arose and lay with him, and he did not know when she lay down or when she arose. Thus both the daughters of Lot became pregnant by their father. (Genesis 19:33–36)

> Your lips drip nectar, my bride; honey and milk are under your tongue; the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon. A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a spring locked, a fountain sealed. Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates with all choicest fruits, henna with nard, […] Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden, let its spices flow. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits. I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love! (Song of Solomon 4:11–13, 4:16–5:1)

> How beautiful and pleasant you are, O loved one, with all your delights! Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the scent of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine. It goes down smoothly for my beloved, gliding over lips and teeth. (Song of Solomon 7:6–9)

> Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts. (Ezekiel 23:19–21)

— The Holy Bible (ESV) (famously not pornography)

And a honourable mention to the KJV translators, who – when faced with a double-meaning – took the literal translation:

> My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. (Song of Solomon 5:4–5)

Idiomatically, “my bowels were moved” in the original Hebrew refers to a strong emotional response (ESV translates it as “my heart was thrilled”) – but considering the rest of this book, I have no doubt that the wordplay is intentional.

A book doesn't become pornography, just because the authors chose not to censor all references to / descriptions of sexuality. I understand keeping these books out of the hands of 6-year-olds, but by the time they've reached the age where their own minds are generating sexual material, I don't see the benefit of denying them a safe environment to explore such ideas (i.e., books). Most teenagers have more pressure (from their peers) to engage in actual sex than to read a particular library book. So… what happens when they're not aware of sexual consent, safe sex practices (e.g. condoms aren't just for contraception), or any kind of role model? (Hint: some effects are visible in the statistical tables.) I'm not sure what these bans are supposed to accomplish, other than make parents feel better.

[micromacrofoot]

are you equating all sex with porn here?

[NoGravitas]

They certainly are. It's the American way.