Today's self-centered, utopian attitudes toward sexual experience compel teachers to avoid both overcaution and over-indulgence in selecting controversial books for classroom use. One method of selection is to rank books in a gradual progression from those requiring little literary and sexual sophistication in the reader to those requiring much sophistication. If books are selected according to this progression, a student's first encounter with love in books will be love without physical description. He will later be prepared for physical description of love placed in easily recognizable moral contexts. In teaching controversial books, the teacher must avoid glossing over "shocking" passages in class; arrange for student counselors and the principal to read the books and, perhaps, listen to discussions; write to parents explaining what is being taught and why; stress to the students that a significant novel says something about man's life; and, most importantly, train the students to maintain an aesthetic distance which is a necessary part of literary discrimination. (JS)