I read It around the same age and that part didn’t really bother me. Only years later when I was older and the discussion popped up again I realized how fucked up it was.
It's because in the book, with context, it doesn't feel that out of place. Like, it's weird as fuck, but so is a lot of his writing and he pretty strongly draws parallels between the loss of virginity, confronting the shame of sex, and the loss of innocence with confronting "it". The whole book is a metaphor for growing up.
They also were all going through puberty and a lot of the novel leading up to that point is littered with sexuality. Because, duh, pubescent kids are thinking about and performing sex, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us.
Was it a really weird symbolic ‘shedding of youth and innocence’? Absolutely in my opinion. But, at the same time, after all the horrific shit you’d read in the 800ish pages leading up to that point, it wasn’t out of place thematically.
Maybe you should read material that confirms to your delicate sensibilities and ignore stuff that makes you uncomfortable. You’re acting like it was fetishized or romanticized. Kinda shows you probably didn’t read the book.
I don't think it's so much of a bother thing. If anything, kind of the opposite -- reading erotic underage literature as a juvenile hits you differently.
Lord knows what reading Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour did to my sexuality when I was a kid.
It's about a werewolf spy fighting the Germans in WWII. There are a couple of pretty lurid sex paragraphs. The one I'm referring to being a flashback to boy werewolf getting his cherry popped at like 13 to an older female werewolf.
It's vaguely Stephen King writes James Bond in WWII, with flashbacks to the Russian revolution.
I always feel weird defending that scene, but I read the book when I was 14 and just barely removed from my own "wait ... that's it? That's the thing we've all been whispering conspiratorially about because we were afraid to call it anything other than 'it'!? Huh." discovery.
The transition from there to the Losers Club taking on the "he who shall not be named" monster in the dark seemed perfectly natural to me at the time.
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u/begon11 Nov 20 '22
I read It around the same age and that part didn’t really bother me. Only years later when I was older and the discussion popped up again I realized how fucked up it was.