A few weeks ago a heated discussion erupted on our usually placid school WhatsApp group. This is the group created for the parents of children in Year 5, where we mostly help each other to find our ten-year-olds’ lost swimming kits. It’s never been a site of discord — that is, until there appeared a rash of anxious messages about confiscated books.
One parent spoke of a manga book — a Japanese graphic novel — that contained pictures of a naked woman. It had been doing the rounds. Another said her daughter had seen sexualised representations of women with completely unrealistic bodies in these books on multiple occasions. Soon I was reading phrases like “violence and nudity” “toxic masculinity” and “blanket bans”. Before long it
