Real Teens and Rainbow Party

Anita Silvey wrote an article called "The Unreal Deal" for a recent School Library Journal, discussing how young-adult literature has broken out of the "problem of the week" template that first defined it. Folks who've kept up with the genre seem to have been underwhelmed by some of Silvey's observations: Teens read genre literature as well as serious stuff!

Of course they always have. And for many years they reached into the adult shelves to find those books. Now more publishers are coming to teens with books of all sorts, including those that don't put a premium on being "real." And why is that?

I think the article is missing a crucial term: "demographics." The recent rise in teen literature has occurred alongside a rise in the number of teens in the population, just as the first burst (late 1960s through 1970s) coincided with the peak of the Baby Boom turning fifteen. Publishers go where they see higher sales, just like any other business.

Silvey does offer a fine link to David Lubar and Dian Curtis Regan's kit to "Create Your Own Young Adult Novel" of the older sort. (Also seriously useful in that regard: Claire's article "OMG! My BFF is Crushing on My Hottie!" at Media Bistro.)

But my favorite comment from Silvey was about how the adult media, and by extension the larger adult culture, approach teen literature in an even more unreal way:

The mainstream media seems to delight in presenting what is contemptible, rather than what is praiseworthy, in young adult books. For instance, everyone--except teens, that is--desperately wanted to discuss The Rainbow Party, a novel that trumpets adolescent promiscuity.

And now the worries over teenagers' "rainbow parties," as breathlessly discussed in Rainbow Party, by Paul Ruditis, have faded away like a rainbow after a storm. It seems worthwhile to trace how that storm blew up in the first place.

1) In Oct 2003, Oprah Winfrey ran a show called "Is Your Child Living a Double Life?". On it, O magazine writer Michelle Burford said she'd interviewed about 50 teenaged girls and parents about sex, and described "rainbow parties" as one discovery from those interviews. It was unclear how many of the interviewees had described such activity. As far as I can tell, Burford hasn't yet published an article about the topic. But with Oprah having 30 million viewers per week, that guaranteed coverage.

2) The next appearance of the meme was a Nov 2004 episode of the cable-TV comedy Huff, titled "Lipstick on Your Panties."

3) Also watching the Oprah episode was Simon Pulse editor Bethany Buck. She conceived of the idea of a teen novel around the idea of a "rainbow party" in order, she later told USA Today, to "scare" young readers into safer sexual habits. Buck recruited Ruditis, who had written several books for the teen market, from series novels to Sabrina the Teenage Witch: the Official Episode Guide.

I think it's crucial that Rainbow Party wasn't inspired by its author's own experiences, or by the experiences of teenagers he knew. It was a multimedia conglomerate's response to a TV show. It was a media creation from the beginning.

4) In 2005, the book was ready for publication, and it kicked up the predictable outrage that Silvey notes. The multicolored national newspaper USA Today gave the book its first big publicity in May 2005. Some commentators needing a source of outrage for a column bit, starting with Michelle Malkin and Joe Scarborough.

5) The skeptical pushback appeared five weeks later with a prominent New York Times article, asking "Are These Parties for Real?" The paper of record couldn't find a single sex expert or teenager who said they were. That was followed by Caitlin Flanagan's takedown in the Jan 2006 Atlantic, preserved at Powell's.

6) But, like a zombie, the "rainbow parties" rumor keeps shambling on. Wikipedia now documents mentions in several 2006 episodes of TV dramas.

(And now for the best available evidence on reality. The Center for Disease Control has found a decline in youth sexual behavior since 1991, with the big drop among preteens. A clear majority of students are not sexually active. Most who are use condoms. We now return to our regular discussion of fantasy literature.)

To be fair to Ruditis's novel, all its talk about a "rainbow party" turns out to be as empty as that real-life media tempest. The teenaged characters discuss such an event, but none ever takes place. After all the titillation, Rainbow Party ends up reminding us alumni of the real facts about real high schools: everyone thinks that everyone else is having more fun.