Forget hiding in an attic for two years and dying of typhus at Bergen Belsen – what’s really offensive about Anne Frank’s experience was her awareness of her vagina. Some unfit asshole in Culpepper County, Virginia became scandalized by Frank’s mention of her genitalia in The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition and complained about it to their kid’s school. The school district responded by pulling it off their shelves and replacing it with a “less graphic copy.”
Maybe it will sit in a storage closet somewhere next to the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, now that parents in Menifee, California have called its suitability into question. A child discovered the definition of “oral sex,” which reads, “oral stimulation of the genitals,” and hir parents complained to the school. In response, it was removed from the library and the district is forming a committee of principals, teachers and parents who will examine the book and determine whether it’s fit for young eyes.
What the hell is wrong with people? Newsflash: your kids have genitals. No, the devil did not put them there. Is it me or are parents scrambling to sterilize and sanitize and suck the life out of everything their fragile children encounter nowadays? They don’t want to talk to them about gay people, they don’t want to talk to them about private parts, they don’t want to explain a goddamn thing about the world. And they think their own squeamishness is a good reason to restrict everyone’s access to learning material.
Why not just lobotomize your kids so they never exhibit curiosity or ask any challenging questions. If I were a parent I’d be stoked my kid opened a hard copy of the dictionary, you know?
Oh, Sarah, you silly girl, our vaginas are for our husbands to discover. Until then, a discreet silence is the only proper approach.
I’ve mentioned before that I volunteer as a clinic escort. One thing I’ve learned about the far right by seeing them in action is that they live in a world of fear. Everything that doesn’t fit into their tiny little box of what’s “Christian” is to be loathed and attacked with all the passion they can muster. And that includes most everything that gives the rest of us joy-literature, movies, art, our bodies, free thinking and free speech, and on and on.
The extent of their ignorance is staggering. When they talk about reproduction at the clinic, it’s clear that no one ever taught them how male and female bodies work. Someone once came to hand out condoms. This provoked hysteria-tears and screaming and a prayer circle on their knees.
I would never, ever want to live in their heads, not even for a second. And they need to keep the hell out of mine. If they don’t want to read “Anne Frank” or the friggin’ dictionary, fine. But don’t tell me I can’t give them to my kids.
OH FOR THE FUCK OF SHIT. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I don’t have the patience for this bullshit today. Looking up kitten pictures before I set something on fire.
I feel really incredulous when I think about some of the stuff you point out, and what mischiefmanager talks about – how can anyone live in a head like that?
Do you think that the real question is, “What to DO about a person who lives in a head like that?” It’s clear these people are a barrier to progress. What is there to be done? I’m baffled.
Maybe the first step is to encourage the Culpepper school to reinstate the book. How much input would the school accept from outside its district?
I think it must be tortuous to live in a head like that. I’d feel sorry for them if, like you said, MM, they weren’t trying to control our lives.
Amanda Marcotte wrote a really excellent post last week in which she observed that “pro-lifers” hate life, as we know it:
The impure wetness of real life disturbs them. They dwell endlessly on the medically disgusting aspects of abortion—aspects that exist in all medical procedures—because their minds are enraptured by hatred of the perceived filthiness of human bodies and life. The world with all its squirming, actually living life—it’s bothersome. Better to dwell on the imagined peace of the fetus, the immoveable quiet of a person in a vegetative state. Someone who is recognizably human but not really living—the purest, simplest, least disgusting way of being. Purity is always under threat, from fluoride to uncontrolled sexuality.
that quote from Amanda Marcotte is awesome
Well said, Amanda. But when you start out believing that the moment you’re born you’re a sinner, you don’t have anywhere to go but down.
When I was growing up, looking up the dirty words in the dictionary was a rite of passage. How dare they tamper with tradition!
That’s horrifying.
Between this and a horrible racist email about Haiti that I was forwarded today (by someone who had been forwarded it by a colleague and was similarly appalled, I have to say), I am full of despair for humanity today.
Ugh. I wish the school districts would grow a fucking back bone and refuse to give in to these hysterical whims. If I was a parent I would complain if they pulled this book.
At the public elementary school I attended, the big library copy of Merriam Webster practically fell open on the pages with “fuck” and “masturbate” because kids had looked up those words so often that they’d cracked the book’s spine.
Words are not the problem, folks.
And that’s a great quote by Amanda. I remember one time being in a rest stop parking lot on I-64 in rural Virginia and parking next to a van that had all kinds of anti-abortion stickers on it, including one that said, “YOUR CHOICE IS A BLOODY, PAINFUL MESS.”
One of my feminist friends with bigger ovaries than me took out a sharpie and wrote underneath: “BUT LESS SO THAN LABOR.”
Also, this reminds me that after I heard one girl call another a ‘whore’ at school, I went home and asked my mother what that was.
She told me to look it up in the dictionary, and I couldn’t find it, so I went another year or two in ignorance. I have a feeling that was the whole point.
BeckySharper, if that woman is representative of them, you must have the coolest friends in the world.
Wow, those parents really would have hated my 8th grad English teacher then. To introduce “The Diary of Anne Frank” to us, she had all of us go stand in a corner of the class, with our arms up, crammed together. We had to do that for a minute. Then she said “Imagine you had to do that for days while you were being transferred to a death camp.”
She went on to pick us off, one by one, sometimes two and three, saying “there goes your mother to the ovens, half of you just got killed in the showers” etc. Finally I was the last person standing. She then went “Imagine out of a group of 32, BetterFishtoFry is the only one left. Maybe she did things for the guards because they liked her eyes, maybe she made no fuss, for whatever reason, she lived. All the rest of you are dead.”
And then we started reading.
It was such a profound experience, and I know one kid’s parents called the school, but it was because they were upset their kid hadn’t gotten to “live”. Totally missed the point, but at least the teacher did the exercise every year until she retired.
@endora: Yeah, that friend is a total badass. I was the timid one wringing my hands going “Uh, you’re not actually going to write on that guy’s van…are you?…oh…I guess you are.”
@betterfishtofry: Wow. Talk about a teachable moment. Good for her.
Way back in ye olden days of the 70s, my mom taught high school English. HIGH SCHOOL, mind you. And she wanted to teach “All the President’s Men”. It contains some curse words, and some parents got up in arms. Again, remember these are teenagers, who have heard pretty much every curse word in existence.
So my mom had to go through the book and note every instance of every curse word, even just “damn” and submit it to the principal, along with her justification for teaching the text. She ultimately did teach the book, because she felt that it was more important to teach the book than to give in to some hysterical idea that teenagers might have their lives ruined by reading words most of them used anyway.
Clearly, the hysteria has not abated, and in fact has gotten worse.
I don’t think this happened in my school, although the HS drama club was repeatedly denied the right to do Grease, since it had smoking in it, and rumors of teen pregnancy, and some really really really naughty words. (Never mind that the school had a “smoking cage” out back for students over 16, and at least a handful of girls had babies every year. It was probably because they had seen the film too many times.)
And the Dude’s Mom is a lovely woman, but even she went through their copy of the Dutch book Gnomes and drew little bikinis and stuff on all the nude figures. Somehow, the Dude still learned about boobs and wieners and stuff.
Ugh, it’s times like this when I realize how lucky I was to go to my elementary/middle/high school.
The biggest “book sex” scandal we had came in second grade, when a kid named Travis discovered a book called “The Philharmonic Gets Dressed.” We all crowded around, hoping to see pictured of naked people. Instead it showed an orchestra preparing to put on a concert. Disappointing.
@PhD My son wishes I were more like dude’s mom then. He gets upset when his friend comes over and I have a book of mine left open to this page:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~am482_04/am_scene/benton/persephone.jpg
Maus got banned from my school because a parent complained about how one of the characters used racist language even though that anecdote was included in the book to expressly show how people who have been victims of prejudice can still exhibit themselves and it’s not excusable in that case either.
I find it interesting that conservatives are so prone to this sort of thing since one of the most common responses to anti-oppression critiques of media, etc. is “this is the real world, you can’t expect everything to cater to your sensibilities”.
I’m very happy to report that MM never forbid me from reading a book (that I can remember, anyway), and simply encouraged me to come to her with questions if she thought the book covered material outside of my experience. That’s because she’s awesome.
“I find it interesting that conservatives are so prone to this sort of thing since one of the most common responses to anti-oppression critiques of media, etc. is “this is the real world, you can’t expect everything to cater to your sensibilities”.”
Baraqiel, it is fascinating indeed. Thanks for pointing this out.
Oh, I was just thinking about this yesterday upon hearing of the death of JD Salinger.
First, you have to know that my parents are very religious, in a fairly conservative, fundy kind of way. But my dad’s also an english prof, so he had much more progressive views where books are concerned. So when I was about 11 or 12 I had devoured all the Jane Austen and Bronte sister books available and was feeling restless when I noticed a bunch of books on the top shelf in my parents room. I’m now assuming that my mom had put them up there, since this collection included a lot of banned books. But one of them was Catcher in the Rye. I asked if I could read it and, although my mom kind of frowned, my dad said “sure” and handed it to me. I proceeded to read all the books off that shelf (The Scarlett Letter, The Grapes of Wrath, Native Son…) over the next couple of months. Of course, now I realize that Lolita was also up there, but disappeared before I got to it, and I wonder what other books my dad removed from the oh-so-intriguing banned books shelf.
But this experience is kind of informative to me. My dad was also really good at discussing stuff he knew you had read with you in a non-teachy sort of way that didn’t turn you off to reading, but made you more likely to keep reading a wide variety of things. So while I agree that this BS is infuriating, thoughtful parents can circumvent whatever bullshit is going on in the school district by having open and engaging conversations with their kids and exposing them to good books wherever they find them. I’m with him on the Lolita thing, though. His granddaughters aren’t reading that when they’re twelve either.
@Rachel: I don’t agree with your last statement. We never kept anything away from our kids. We figured that if they were old enough to want to read it, they were old enough to read it. A 12 year old who could get through “Lolita” would be a very smart and determined child indeed. As long as you make it clear that they can come to you with questions, I would allow it. I might ask how the child was enjoying it and see if s/he understood that it was a satire.
It’s insane how much of this crap teachers have to put up with. A lot of it never makes the news because the teachers just quietly circumvent the system (i.e. “You will NOT mention that we read this play to ANYONE, EVER, got it class?”) I really wonder what my relatively conservative school district would do if they found out that I read “The Red Tent” and “Dutchman” in high school.
Of course, I came from a family in which the Collegiate Dictionary rested proudly on the bottom shelf since before I was born. My mother would probably have been delighted if I’d thought to look up “oral sex;” it would have saved us both the most embarrassing conversation of our collective lives.
@Rachel: If my kid could make sense out of Lolita at age 12 or in high school, I’d not only be delighted, I’d be fairly sure he/she was mature enough to handle it. Most people I know didn’t read it until they were in college and even then a hell of a lot of them didn’t “get” it.
Besides, it’s not particularly graphic…just a little disturbing.
If a kid is going to read, the kid is going to read. I read Roots when 9 and Mandingo (not exactly a classic but certainly lots of content my parents would have freaked out about!) shortly afterwards. Clan of the Cave Bears pretty young too. Lots of graphic violence, sex, racism, sexism, etc – if Lolita was available I’d have read it too.
The dictionary! My god, if you don’t give them the dictionary, they are just going to ask their friends and their friends are going to tell them what things mean using the giant never-ending game of telephone definitions which had my 30 year-old neighbor convinced that women pee out of our clitorii!!!
So sad. I’ve only been out of high school for five years but it sounds like the fight still is strong in trying to pretend the children “don’t know”.
Holy shit we had to be some of the most disgusting young people I have ever known. >:)
I remember one young lady in particular who would inform us in loud voices exactly what she and her football-head bf would do all the time. If I do recall it was her family that had a problem with Catcher in the Rye and To Kill A Mocking Bird.
I also remember someone pitching a fit in art class in middle school for some distorted nudes that our teacher had hanging in a poster. I recall the copies being only about an inch by two with a discription of the painter. In short, if people want to complain they will always find a reason.
While I find this totally appalling, the optimist in me wants to hope that this sort of thing happens rarely and the only reason we’re hearing about it is because of the 24 hours news cycle we have these days. Even so, I hope the other parents called bullshit on this.
Also, I remember that the edition of Anne Frank’s Diary that was used for a long time left out a lot of stuff about Anne discovering her sexuality, which her father didn’t want published. I think the newer edition came out in 1999/2000 or around there. Can anyone back me up on this?
woops, nevermind, it talks about the old vs. new edition in the news stories.
@marianna: You’re right–Otto Frank originally removed some passages from the diary about Anne’s sexual awakening, as well as some that were critical of her mother and talked about tensions in her parent’s marriage. Otto Frank gave the missing pages to the head of the Anne Frank Foundation before he died. Some legal wrangling followed, but most editions published since 2001 now include that material.
It’s alright for children to read about mass genocide. Reading about vaginas on the other hand would be way too scary.
Have they pulled the dictionaries yet for having the word “vagina” in it? I mean, if it is, I hope it says “see ‘Hoo-ha’”. And under “hoo-ha” the definition could be “what girls have where the penis should be”.
If you want absolute control of the material your child(ren) experience, homeschool them.
If you cannot homeschool them, try to find your flavor of private school OR begin an education co-op with like minded parents.
The public schools exist to educate every child according to a basic set of facts and information in order to make them into productive adults. Productive adults DO need information on how their bodies function and how to protect themselves. If this is something you wish to censor from your child, your only options should be the first two listed above. You should not be able to hijack the educations of hundreds or thousands of children just because you are squeamish about “naughty” parts.
This reminds me of my time student teaching 3rd grade. One of the girls in class came to us in tears because one of the boys had touched her “nasty.”. We had to have the counselor, nurse, and an assistant principal help us to understand that her parents had taught her to call her entire vaginal area her “nasty.”. Her younger brother, in kindegarten, had been taught to call his penis a “touch me not.”. This was the worst I’ve seen.
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Alas, Marianna, it’s not going away. The kids who were the biggest party animals in high school have all grown up and turned into the hyper-religious repressive parents. I watched this happen in my own HS class.
It never ends.
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[...] Greet Box WordPress PluginYou know what makes me angry? Aside from lite jazz? When parents feel the need to step in and censor childrens’ libraries. This time, not only the thesaurus, but Anne Frank is under [...]