[deleted]

Yeah, when I first read the book years ago I wasn't as nearly weirded out by it as so many people claim to be now. I accepted it as a rite of passage and solidifying their bond against an all consuming evil and, as you say, "ensuring remembrance" of what they couldn't forget.
But that would never fly in this current climate of everything being offensive and triggering and sexual assault and child abuse being measured sometimes by something as erroneous as the wrong words or the wrong hug.
There is good and bad now..there is black and white. There is no context to it. It just is.

I think SK has said it was a different time when he wrote it. He also said he was doing a lot of drinking and drugging at the time and a lot of people now don't see the necessity of the scene for kids of that age.. It'll never happen now even discreetly or implied..

Did I miss something? Who had sex with Beverly? I did not read the book.