ladybusiness | (Reply)

From:

It's been a while since I read them, but I think quite a few of Justine Larbalestier characters have sex and it's fine; Magic or Madness has teen pregnancy and it's not the end of the world. Margo Lanagan's contemporary The Best Thing is about a (hopeful) teen pregnancy (and it's from 1995).

Kate Elliott's YA trilogy has teenagers figuring out their sexual relationship.

In Other Lands, my fave YA read of last year, had multiple sexual relationships between teens and teens figuring out where they are on sexuality spectrum and it was adorable and tender and I love it with the power of a thousand million suns.

And while some of protagonists in Mercedes Lackey's old old Heralds of Valdemar YA novels die, they also often have positively depicted healthy sex lives which are not the reasons why they die. These books are old and problematic in many ways, but I do remember reading them as a young teen and being honestly surprised by how positive they were about people getting it on casually and, um, in group settings.

I also have ideas in my first language, but I don't think they'd be helpful ;) That said, Polish language YA lit in the 1990s (and possibly even before) had contemporaries about teens having sex and getting pregnant, and while those were not depicted as good things obviously, the latter was not treated as the end of the world either but rather a difficulty to be weathered.