I hope that when the girls come back to school from their suspension, the first word out of their mouths on school ground is “vagina.” OMG IT IS SUCH A DIRTY WORD!
Seriously, I’d heard worse after five minutes on the bus my first day of high school. Are they going to start suspending students who cuss every other word?
It was in a feminist context, which I don’t think is the same thing as a sexual context. If the line had been, “It feels so good when my boyfriend uses an 18” double headed jelly blue dildo on my vagina", THAT would have been a sexual context.
I think the short sleeve analogy would be perfect in, say, Saudi Arabia or Hasidic Skokie, IL, where elbows are similarly hidden from view for cultural reasons.
I never personally made the point that a vagina is sociologically the same as an elbow, nor do I believe they are - I just said that you can teach kids the names of both body parts with equal ease.
I don’t know too many schools who would use derrogatory slang in a play, but “vagina” is not derrogatory; it’s a clinical term for a woman’s reproductive organ. Nothing naughty about it. If someone in the audience has a Hoo Hah Hangup, that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to put our fingers in our ears and say “la-la-la I can’t hear you!”
I can understand shortening it (i.e., reading an excerpt) but there was nothing about this reading that was improper by any thinking adult’s standards. The alternative words are the ones that are slang and offensive; not the word chosen by the artist. They need to save their editorial efforts for something that actually makes sense.
I don’t recall anyone arguing that it was a free speech issue.
I’m sure they could have. But the whole point of the Vagina Monologues is that it has to do with vaginas and (in part) the bizarre attitudes our society has toward them. Choosing a passage that doesn’t contain the word defeats the purpose of choosing that piece for the reading at all! If they weren’t such clueless pussies at the administration level, they’d have gotten the concept at its most basic level and either allowed the word or disallowed a choice from that piece altogether.
Seeing as it is a feminist piece, and seeing as the administration is behaving much the same way the author claims society behaves toward vaginas, I’d say it was clearly civil disobedience.
Civil disobedience isn’t only about freedom of speech. It is also about injustice and public perception.
They weren’t cursing and it isn’t a forbidden word. It appears in books the kids are being taught out of. It is the correct term for female genitalia. It is the only socially acceptable word for it.
I think having to deal with disobedient kids all day long may have colored your perception of what simple disobedience and a meaningful protest of Administrative Stupidity are. The administration had it coming. They’re behaving like children themselves. A dose of reality is just what they needed.
Whoa! You sound fitted tee be tied.
If I’d had the opportunity to advise the girls, I’d have suggested they substitute the administrator’s name for every occurrence of “vagina”, and make sure the selections contained many instances of that word, and make sure that the author’s intended word was clear from the context.
But that’s where the problem started - someone prior to open mic night decided that there IS something wrong with the term “vagina.” Otherwise the girls wouldn’t have been asked not to say it in the first place. The reasoning given was to protect the delicate sensibilities of the audience.
What I don’t understand is why the audience needs to be protected from such foul, filthy language. If you’ve decided that your toddler is not ready to learn anatomical terms for body parts, then they likely will have not heard the word before. My child probably has never heard the word antidisestablishmentarianism before. If we were to hear it in a public place, it would go in one ear and out the other. It’s not like the girls were dancing around the stage shouting “Hooray for vaginas!” over and over. Do parents also not take their impressionable delicate children out in public, where they might be exposed to unannounced swear words?
While I don’t disagree with the fact that the girls broke the agreement and there should be consequences, I think the fact that we as a society are so uptight that the school has to go to lengths to protect their audience from such a “dirty” word is sad.
Why would you assume they’d list everything on the program except this one?
[pet peeve] Vagina is not synonymous with “female genitalia”. The vagina is part of the genitalia, and is internal. [/pet peeve]
If you mean “vulva”, say “vulva”. If you mean “genitalia”, say “genitalia”.
I would have made them stay after class and complete a spelling list of the correct names of all the parts of the human reproductive system. Let’s see how smart they act after spelling “corpus cavernosum clitoridis” a few hundred times.
Kids today. I’m telling ya.
Regards,
Shodan
Ah, but we’re not necessarily talking about thinking adults. The issue may very well be the hellraising mom who might sue the school because her 10-year-old daughter was forced to hear a bad word and might need years and years of therapy to not become an axe-murdering prostitute. That’s the reality that principals must face every day.
The girls weren’t forbidden from saying the word vagina. They were asked not to say it in that particular venue. They weren’t strking a blow for women’s rights. They were being petulant brats.
Why would you assume it wasn’t listed as “A reading from the works of Eve Ensler”? Why would you assume there was a printed program at all, for that matter? I don’t know that there was one, and neither do you. Not enough info to go on.
We also can’t assume that the letter board outside the school said “Tonight 8 PM A reading of the VAGINA Dialogues in which girls with VAGINAS talk all about their VAGINAS.”
I share your anguish in a prescriptive sense.
By descriptive linguistics and common usage, however, we both have to bow our heads and mourn the passing of a great word. “Vagina” is now synonymous with “vulva”, as well as being descriptive of the canal extending from the cervix to the exterior of the body. It’s the most widely used non-vulgar term for the vulva.
Much like “stomach” means both the exterior abdominal region and the internal organ responsible for the second stage of digestion, in fact. When most people say they got kicked in the stomach, they mean the intestinal region. Getting kicked in your actual stomach would generally mean broken ribs.
As long as you live under my roof, you’ll live by my rules, young man!
In my day, we didn’t have any of this namby-pamby Internet stuff! We had to go to National Geographic for our smut! And they were floppy native boobs!
And we were grateful for it!
grumble grumble…
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, I’ll correct myself. Since the suprintendant said “As long as the intended audience knows what to expect, we don’t have a problem with it”, then I think it’s safe to assume that the audience was not, in fact, forwarned as to the content.
(Bolding mine) I’m not the one missing the point here. The students decided there’s nothing wrong with the word and decided to buck the establishment. They agreed to something and then changed their minds after the stupidity of the agreement sunk in. Too fuckin’ bad! If they were adults, they might have handled it differently, but they’re not. They were aware of the consequences and took it.
Horseshit back at ya. There was nothing obscene about the reading as written. There was no logical reason to edit it other than for length. The move was misguided and the kids pointed it out. With that kind of stupidity at the helm they had no choice but to circumvent the system. That’s how it’s done.
It doesn’t matter what the “community” thinks. The community, with regard to this incident, is misguided and needed an eye-opener. The fact that those in authority can’t see that doesn’t make it any less apparent.
That’s right. A term that is generally understood to be obscene would have gotten a completely different reaction. But that’s not what happened. They did nothing obscene. They stood up to a stupid authoritarian move the best way their teen-aged brains could think of and they made their point and took their lumps.
Are you saying that a public school principal should not be concerned with the possible reaction of the community?
Vaginas, scrotums*, what is the world coming to?
*if you think this is a brouhaha, Google scrotum and Newbery Award Winner (forgot the name of the book). In it, the author describes an accident that occurs to a dog–he is bitten in the scrotum by a rattlesnake.
This author is now accused of moral turpitude and defiling our Young… :rolleyes:
I hope the girls take their suspension with pride. I do feel sorry for the principal–he (she?) has to face any number of completely unreasonable parents every day.
I do wonder if a reading contained the word penis, if all this nonsense would have ensued, though.
Not with regard to this particular word. He caved to their (perceived) collective stupidity. He ought to give the community a little more credit and he should quit being such a vagina.
I’m not sure you realize how much you sound like a right-wing nutjob. They say pretty much the same thing about the standards they want to impose on others.
And the school (we really don’t know what the audience thought about it, do we?) was trying to impose their standards on the girls. This was one wimpy principal’s “don’t rock the boat” decision that was based on antiquated ideas that have no place in today’s world.
That’s absolutely true. And it’s truly unfortunate that society has deemed “vagina” to be a word that shan’t be spoken around children. And the principal was taking the community and the audience into account when the girls were asked (told? dunno) not to use the term “vagina”. Damned shame and all like that, but (and I see this has once again been missed, I’ll get to it more later): the girls involved specifically stated (I imagine), “We swan, Mr Principal, sir, that we won’t use the word “vagina” during our reading.” Then they turned around and used the word “vagina”.
Sounds like we’re on the same page.