The January/February 2006 issue of the Atlantic Monthly has a lengthy piece by Caitlin Flanagan titled “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica: How nice girls got so casual about oral sex.” She’s looking at pop culture as a reflection of an alleged shift in sexual behavior by tweenagers (the middle school crowd), rather than placing blame. Or at least that seems to be her intention. She loses her way about half-way through the piece.

Early on, when she’s still lucid, she mentions a recent Young Adult novel, The Rainbow Party, by Paul Ruditis. The novel, about a bunch of high school sophomores throwing an oral sex party, is allegedly supposed to be an indictment of abstinence only education, but is apparently just bad. Howlingly bad. I haven’t actually seen the book, so I’m not certain if that’s the case or not.

Flanagan’s article starts out with a lot of promise, it appears she’s going to really tackle head-on (no pun intended) the hysteria about tween-aged girls and casual oral sex. She even wades into the racial aspects of the hysteria straight-away: Jewish girls seem to be taking the blame for this epidemic of wanton behavior.

Alas, Flanagan rambles and rants and bores the reader so much it seems she’s part of the hysteria herself, rather than a journo looking for answers or at least trying to raise good questions. She takes Doctor Phil to school, however, and for that I’m willing to forgive a lot of sins. A lot of sins. She cogently examines The Lost Children of Rockdale County, a Frontline documentry about a teen syphilis outbreak in an Atlanta suburb. The documentary created quite a stir, flames that Oprah then fueled, according to Flanagan:

Two years later Oprah invited Dr. Phil to her television show to address the topic. “There’s an oral-sex epidemic,” Oprah told the audience point-blank. Teary mothers related their horrifying stories: “A year or two ago she was playing with Barbies and collecting Beanie Babies. And then now all of a sudden she’s into casual oral sex!” Wide-eyed young girls spilled the beans on their slutty classmates, and intimated that they themselves weren’t so different. That the entire subject is ugly and fraught was underscored when Dr. Phil decided to confront a young blowjobber about the error of her ways. She was sitting in the front row next to her mother, who was apparently hoping that public humiliation on a global scale might reform her daughter.

Dr. Phil, who has the vast, impenetrable physique of a pachyderm and the calculated folksiness of a country-music promoter, employs a psychotherapeutic cloak of respectability to legitimize his many prurient obsessions. “When you’re saying ‘It’s just friends,’ let me tell you,” he raged at the poor girl, “a friend doesn’t ask you to go in the bathroom, get on your knees in a urine-splattered tile floor, and stick their penis in your mouth. That’s not what I call a friend.” (Poor Howard Stern has spent years alternately outraged and heartbroken about the FCC’s refusal to sanction women’s talk shows the way it does his morning show, and episodes like this make you realize he has a point.)

I don’t dislike Flanagan. I’m also not terribly familiar with her work, to be honest. A lot, maybe most, of her writing is about the self-involved mommy culture and it’s pretty sharp, except when it devolves into being self-involved. Then it gets unintentionally post-modern.

Nevertheless, I expected more from this article. It’s worth a read, although about half-way through I’d suggest you commence skimming so you don’t lose consciousness.

Naomi Wolf has a much more lucid and concise piece, specifically about young adult fiction, in Sunday’s New York Times Book Section.

Unfortunately for girls, these novels reproduce the dilemma they experience all the time: they are expected to compete with pornography, but can still be labeled sluts. In “Invasion of the Boy Snatchers,” the fourth novel in the “Clique” series, Lisi Harrison reproduces misogynist scenarios of other girls shaming and humiliating a girl who is deemed “slutty” — Nina, an exchange student from Spain. When Harrison writes that Nina’s “massive boobs jiggled,” you know she is doomed to the Westchester equivalent of a scarlet letter.

Though “Rainbow Party” got all the attention last year — that was the novel about oral sex in which the characters even sounded like porn stars: Hunter, Rod and Rusty — kids didn’t buy it, literally. In spite of a shiny, irresistible cover showing a row of candy-colored lipsticks, it was a book more reported about than read.

But teenagers, or their parents, do buy the bad-girls books — the “Clique,” “Gossip Girl” and “A-List” series have all sold more than a million copies. And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren’t really the problem. The problem is a value system in which meanness rules, parents check out, conformity is everything and stressed-out adult values are presumed to be meaningful to teenagers. The books have a kitsch quality — they package corruption with a cute overlay.

[read the entire essay.

Her focus on the abject materialism of several of the hottest new YA series is more interesting, perhaps because it seems like a unique viewpoint – most reviewers, critics and parents never see past the sex.

I have no clue how or if these books are really damaging young minds, if they reflect actual tween/teen-aged culture, if they’re just another component of the larger pop culture, or if this is just another publishing fad.

I can, however, attest to the surrealism of this young children’s CD: “My Name is Cheech the Schoolbus Driver.” Yes, that Cheech. Randomly, did you know he has his own line of hot sauces, available at thecheech.com? Now you do. But back to the CD. Be very, very careful with this thing. The songs are dementedly catchy and you’ll be singing them all day. Just trust me on that.