Is mild sexualization of minors allowed in writing?
Her clothes screamed bohemia, with a prominent cleavage, leather bands running up her arms and nails painted black.
In my book there is a romance between two 15-year-olds, and the book is from one of those 15-year-olds' perspective. Here, he describes his romantic interest's clothing style with the above sentence.
Now, this is a mild sexualization of the girl, due to the addition of "prominent cleavage". The reason I added this was to illustrate what kind of person this girl is, and also give some reasoning to the guy's infatuation with her. I'm just wondering, is this kind of description acceptable? I'm simply using it to paint a picture of the girl's "edgy" personality, not to appeal to sickos. The book is after all targeted to millenials and teens.
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Always keep in mind, that the youth isn't so pure and innocent, like 30 years ago. The most teens start their sexual relationships around 13 and 14 (at least in Germany where I live), some earlier, some later. Thoughts about the other sex and sexual desires are part of the human nature. Why denying that? If I may be so blunt: It would be strange to have a story, where no one is having sexual thoughts.
Sexual intercourse and thoughts are part of the human nature and especially teens (where the body is overflowing with hormones) have the desire for that.
And like the answer from Galastel said: "There's no age rating for literature". So there shouldn't be any problem in writing what you want.
Small Edit to my answer:
TV-Shows and Movies for teens often tend to go much more into details. So I wouldn't see any problems at all
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It is absolutely certainly legal for what you describe to appear in literature. Consider, for instance, that Juliet was 14 when she married and had sex with Romeo. A more modern example: Song of Ice and Fire; Daenerys is 13 when she is married off to Khal Drogo, with their sex receiving multiple descriptions.
For a milder example, similar to what you actually want, look at this description from Dresden Files, of a character who is explicitly, only a couple of pages earlier, stated to be a juvenile, and with the first-person narrator being in his 30s:
Molly stood facing me in a long, gauzy black skirt, shredded artistically in several places. She wore fishnet tights beneath it, showing more leg and hip than any mother would prefer. The tights, too, were artfully torn in patches to display pale, smooth skin of thigh and calf. She had army-surplus combat boots on her feet, laced up with neon pink and blue laces. She wore a tight tank top, its fabric white, thin, and strained by the curves of her breasts, [..] Bright rings of gold gleamed in both nostrils, her lower lip, and her right eyebrow, and there was a bead of gold in that little dent just under her lower lip. There were miniature barbell-shaped bulges at the tips of her breasts, where the thin fabric emphasized rather than concealed them.
I didn’t want to know what else had been pierced. I know I didn’t, because I told myself that very sternly. I didn’t want to know, even if it was, hell, a little intriguing. (Jim Butcher, Proven Guilty, chapter 8)
In fact, there's no age rating for literature, like there is for movies or games. So it's not like your story could get "PG13-rated" for what you write.
Since real 15-year-old girls do dress in extremely sexualising ways, you are doing nothing but describing the truth. And 15-years-olds, who are perhaps your target audience, are already familiar with sexual attraction, even those who are not yet experienced with anything beyond attraction.
In light of all the above not only is what you want to write legal, I also don't see anything remotely wrong with it.
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What you are describing as mild sexualization is PG or teen is generally stating the content being viewed is suitable for ages 13 and up and is basically dependent on adult guardians’ decision as to whether they personally feel the content may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, mild sexual depictions, or infrequent use of strong language. Anything other is R-rated maybe suitable for young adults over the age of seventeen, because the content is intense in violence, sexual language and content, as well as display extremely brutal and bloody. I you cross those content characterizations it is considered unrated, pornography, etc. Good luck with your book!
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