Violence Good - Sex Bad - Religion Good.... or is it the other way around?

I think I'm about to upset a lot of people on the Fictionalley Park forums. It's a discussion of whether or not the next Harry Potter book will contain any sex scenes, and a lot of people are, in effect, saying "Oh no, she can't write that, it would be terribly inappropriate". Oh, and one of the mods calls the perfectly acceptable medical term "vagina" obscene. Ho hum, film at ten.

Anyway, my contribution to the debate:

They're in their teens, and their late teens at that; while I'm no more keen to read explicit scenes in HP than anyone else, it certainly is a subject that needs to be covered one way or another.

As for the propriety of it, I'm somewhat divided; personally, I get rather uncomfortable with overly specific sex scenes, but with a bit of thought, I really can't see any justifiable reason why. Why has sex become such a taboo, when violence is fine? That, I think, is where the "I don't want my kids reading about sex" argument falls down - parents don't mind their sprogs reading about child abuse, graphic amputations, murder, mucus-laden troll-slaying, mental rape, at least two characters seeing their mothers killed right in front of them, kidnapping (by the alleged good guys, no less), racially motivated murder, vicious beatings, enforced self-mutilation, and all sorts of other stuff that really is reprehensible - but the very same parents get in a terrible flutter as soon as there's any mention of sex, or even utterly neutral but hyper-sexualised body parts.

I recall reading about a woman who was thrown out of a Toys R Us for breast-feeding her baby - on the grounds that "That's totally inappropriate - there are children here!" You know what, silly shop manager? There's a kid stuck on the end of that thing too, and I don't see that sprog complaining. (Actually, on the Penn & Teller show that I can't name here, an opponent of breast-feeding actually equates breast-feeding to paedophilic rape. No, she wasn't joking.)

Quite frankly, if I were a parent - and I hope to be one day, not that the prospects look terribly good at the moment - I'd rather my kids were brought up with a healthy, knowledgable attitude towards sex, rather than seeing it as something shameful and taboo. It's no wonder that violent crime keeps rising - kids are effectively taught that sex is unacceptable, while violence is commonplace. And so all sorts of people rail against the evils of cinema and computer games, when it is in fact their own misguided prudery that's causing the problem.

Sex isn't unhealthy, it's not ugly, and it's not inappropriate for a teenage audience to read about - at least no more than someone cutting off their own hand in a fit of sycophantic, brainwashed cultism. Nor, for that matter, is sex any worse - far better, in fact - than the constantly thumped idea that the future is unchangeable, and that a lunatic's delerium in any way forces anyone down a set and unchanging path.

I'd rather my prospective kids believe in free will and being decent to people, than any religiously-based concept of "violence good, sex bad".

If Rowling writes a sex scene in Deathly Hallows, that's likely to be a couple of pages I'll rather hypocritically skip over - but it won't be inappropriate for her audience.

So, what say you? Am I right, or am I talking bollocks?