Book banning

[Rev. Rye]

We are meant to see the injustice blacks face through the innocent eyes of young Scout and have fatherly Atticus explain it to us in a way that children can comprehend, among other themes in the books.  Racist characters do behave as we expect and another female character was raped, though in the book it was described as "taken advantage of".  Nevertheless some parents apparently have zero appetite for their children being introduced adult concepts in school.  It is a shame because it seems that civilization keeps pushing the age of adolescence farther and farther out.  Children in their early teens were once of marrying age and would have been working for years, but now are only expected to go to school and play.  I think we underestimate what children can do and understand.  What I see most often from younger people is sheer boredom with life.

Parents still have to give permission for their children to attend sex education...which is basically explaining to them how their bodies work and not really sex education.

The fact that there has to be class a school to teach basic personal biology tells you that we are still quite puritanical when it come to sex.

It's no surprise to me that at the time of the writing of TKAM the euphemism of "taken advantage of" was used in place of rape.  The book most likely would never have been published otherwise.

Yeah, “take advantage of” was a common euphemism for shit like that, whether it was rape or just what appeared in hindsight to be exploitation. And, frankly, the rape stuff isn’t confined to the whole Mayella/Tom Robinson storyline. Given the shit that’s implied about Mayella’s relationship with her father, it only makes sense that Harper Lee (or her editor Tay Hohoff) wouldn’t want to talk about it outright. It might have been a few decades for the masses to accept the truth in such blunt language.

And just for the record, here’s the shit I’m talking about:

• While trying to seduce Tom, she says "what her Pa do to her don't count.” This is the most straightforward acknowledgment in the book. Admittedly, it’s ambiguously-worded, and it could mean goodnight kisses, but Mayella’s 19 1/2 and Bob Ewell clearly ain’t the sort of doting father who’d kiss his kids goodnight.
  
• The other bit’s a thinker, but bear in mind these facts: 1) Mayella spends her days taking care of her younger siblings (and they are young), 2) it’s stated clearly that she can barely remember her mother, implying that she died when Mayella was very young, 3) there’s no mention of any stepmother having ever been in the mix, and 4) I refer you to the previous bullet point.
  
• For what it’s worth (and this is on the film’s Blu-Ray, mind you) Mayella’s actress Collin Wilcox was from the area and actually knew several girls like Mayella IRL, and it was kinda taken for granted that they were being raped by their fathers.
  

I strongly suspect that if Harper Lee outright stated the obvious implication and left the rest of the book as it was, it’d first and foremost have been remembered as “that book about incest.” And if the way people still perceive Lolita is any indication, people’d probably consider it pro-incest. And if she actually went so far as to point out that Mayella’s situation wasn’t an entirely uncommon one, well, the racial themes would almost certainly have been the least of the book’s worries.