If there are children around, please shield their eyes. If you’re under the age of 18, or value your child-like innocence, or are an adult who thinks that there is a vast empty space below your belly-button and above your knees, please stop reading now, because I’m going to be writing a very naughty word:
Scrotum.
This may have upset you, and for that I apologize. I suspect this blog may now be banned from libraries everywhere (if it made it through the family-friendly filter in the first place). Because apparently, the anatomically correct words for human and animal body parts are unacceptable in Freedom-land. First there was the Hoohah Monologues, because some people are offended by the word “vagina.” Now there’s the banning of a Newbery-Medal-winning book because the author uses the word “scrotum” and that makes some librarians and parents uncomfortable.
The story involves a dog who is bitten on the scrotum love spuds by a rattlesnake. According to the author, the real-life dog of a friend of hers was bitten on the hangy-thing-below-the-weewee by a snake, and she based the story off of that incident.
“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”
Well, he could explain it to them the way that my dad explained a scrotum gonad to my sister and I when, as little tykes, we saw a large dog running around and became extremely upset because we thought he had a tumor between his legs (our own dog was neutered): “Girls, that’s a scrotum, and it holds testicles. You might have heard the boys in the back of the school bus call them ‘balls.'”*
My mom laughed, we got it, and although I grew up to be a sexual deviant (or a “feminist”), my sister turned out all right.
Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”
“At least not for children,” she added.
Too bad you will find male genitalia on roughly half the population of the world. And in the works of such tawdry, quality-lacking authors like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, George Orwell, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And of course, family values crusaders like Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich and Lynn Cheney at least make illusions to our naughty-parts in their forays into literature.
But, as readers point out, it’s about the children!
What on earth is this? Now this lady wants to turn a kid’s book into an explicit anatomy lesson? What for exactly? What happened to simply asking your parents about various body parts? This is completely unacceptable material for a children’s book as anybody with any average amount of common sense should know. I will ask our local libraries to ban this book from their shelves. Tell her to confine scrotal literature to her own family library.
Other readers wondered why the dog couldn’t have been bitten on the leg instead of the naughty place. So here are my questions: Why are some body parts considered totally taboo? Why is a bite on the scrotum an “explicit anatomy lesson” while a bite on the finger would go unnoticed? Why is the scrotum so much more controversial than the leg? After all, in many cultures, legs are considered quite sexual, and showing too much of them –or covering them with pants instead of a skirt — is scandalous. Little boys have scrota. It doesn’t sexualize children to use the anatomically correct word for a part of their body in a totally non-sexual situation. Teachers and librarians don’t even have to explain the sexual purpose of the scrotum if they don’t want to, any more than they have to explain the sexual purpose of the lips or the hands or the tongue. But half the class already knows it’s there, and the other half probably has a pretty good idea — ain’t nothing wrong with naming it. Why is the word itself controversial?
We have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world. We have incredibly high STI rates. We far exceed other developed Western nations in our abortion rate (although countries where abortion is illegal and “pro-life” social policies are the norm pretty consistently beat us). Our knee-jerk anti-sex prudishness has very real social consequences, and they’re more wide-spread than banning books. The far right faction that opposes accurate sexual health education and any sort of rational response to human nature is a small minority in this country, but they are extremely vocal, and they have a whole lot of influence. The media focus on this book seems disproportionate, but it is evidence of a larger cultural battle between those who support science, human rights, sexual freedom, bodily autonomy, intellectualism, and proven solutions to social problems, and those who oppose all of those things. A minority of authoritarian, Puritanical librarians and parents have succeeded in banning this book from several libraries. People who share their views have succeeded in teaching students medically inaccurate, sexist and irresponsible abstinence-only “education, putting them in very real physical danger — 95% of people in this country have sex before marriage, and curriculum which boils down to “Don’t do it you filthy slut” isn’t going to be particularly helpful throughout these students’ lives (it’s also worth noting that a whole lot of people still value planning their pregnancies even after marriage).
Yes, this is silly, manufactured outrage over a word. But it’s also a microcosm of something that is very, very wrong with this country.
*Yes, this conversation did actually happen.