> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?