This issue is pretty fascinating. I think it's summed up best in the comments, by Doctor Science.

"Calling certain things "too explicit", as my 19-y.o. points out, is often largely a way of shielding *adults* from thinking about reality. For instance, any movie that accurately reproduced the language heard in a high school hallway would be rated R for language. The lesson the kids take from this is that teenagers' actual lives are not considered suitable for teenagers, and that they're on their own because we adults don't want to know."

Adults judge things by their own comfort level to "protect" their kids from them that squick them. Not that it's wrong, but I think it's an interesting way to look at how adults rate and control content that YA/kids have access to and how oftentimes the things they don't have access to are way more tame than the reality that the kids are living.

Anyway, this was born out in part out of the post by Nancy Kress which is linked at the top of the article. It's ridiculous. She read one novelby one author before assuming that all YA must be horrifically "explicit". She makes at least three assumption about a genre she claims to not have read in for years. I really don't get why they used that as an impetus to start a discussion, since to any YA fan she sounds silly and alarmist.

Renay - http://bottle-of-shine.livejournal.com