A Dragon in Sheep’s Clothing

‘Monologues’ Spurs Dialogue on Taste and Speech

CROSS RIVER, N.Y., March 7 — The three girls had been warned by teachers not to utter the word. But they chose to say it anyway — vagina — in unison at a high school forum, and were swiftly punished by their school.

Now the case of the three, all juniors at John Jay High School in this affluent hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, has become a cause célèbre among those who say that the school has gone too far, touching off a larger debate about censorship and about what constitutes vulgar language.

Is vagina, or the “v-word,” as some around here have referred to it, such a bad word?

“We want to make it clear that we didn’t do this to be defiant of the school administration,” said Megan Reback, one of the three girls, who all received one-day suspensions for using the word during a reading of “The Vagina Monologues” at the forum last Friday. “We did it because we believe in the word vagina, and because we believe it’s not a bad word. It shouldn’t be a word that is ever censored, and the way in which we used it was respectable.”

School administrators said that the girls, all 16, were suspended not for using the word but rather for insubordination.

The principal, Rich Leprine, said on Tuesday that the girls were told not to use the word because young children could be in the audience, but that they used it anyway after agreeing not to.

“When a student is told by faculty members not to present specified material because of the composition of the audience and they agree to do so, it is expected that the commitment will be honored and the directive will be followed,” Mr. Leprine said in a written statement. “When a student chooses not to follow that directive, consequences follow.”

The girls say they never made such an agreement.

Read the rest of the article….

And speaking of body parts (pun intended)….

The Newbery Medal winning book “The Higher Power of Lucky” is not being stocked by some libraries because it contains the word “scrotum.” The Newbery Medal is given for the most distinguished children’s book of the year.

Susan Patron, author of “The Higher Power of Lucky” and a librarian herself, at the Los Angeles Public Library, was stunned by reactions on listservs and blogs, she says. “There’s been an onslaught,” though many comments are positive.

“I believe children are able to handle this word,” Patron says. When she writes - this is her sixth book - she blocks out what others might think, she says, “to get to the heart of the story, to write for the child reader that I respect.”

Lucky, a 10-year-old motherless girl trying to find her way, overhears the word “scrotum” and thinks it sounds “like something green that comes up when you have the flu” and “secret, but also important.” The word is integral to her tale, Patron says, because at the end “finally Lucky can trust her guardian enough to ask what it means…. I didn’t consider any other word.”

The correct word for what’s happening to “The Higher Power of Lucky” may by blacklisting, not censorship, says Judith Schaefer, associate legal director for People for the American Way Foundation, a national civil liberties organization.

But “selecting a word as a basis for deciding this is inappropriate for children” rather than reading the whole work is what censors often do, says Donald Parker, a coordinator of the Long Island Coalition Against Censorship, a longstanding umbrella group with 22 member organizations.

Read this article at AM New York