In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Literature

Protect the Children: Hide Your Dictionary

protect

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.

Happy Banned Book Week!

Amanda and Redneck Mother have some substantive posts that are both worth reading. My experience growing up was similar to theirs — my parents never censored what I read, as long as it was in book form (I wasn’t allowed to read teen magazines until I was actually a teenager, and Cosmo and Glamour were definitely off limits until I was in later high school). Part of their reasoning, I think, is that I was a voracious reader and would read just about any book I got my hands on, and so there wasn’t much of a point in trying to bar me from reading certain things — if I wasn’t allowed to read them in the living room, I’d just stay up until 2am reading them with a flashlight under my covers. So even when I was reading books like “Disclosure” in 7th grade, I think they figured that it would be one of many things I’d read, and that it was better for me to be reading something “mature” than to not be reading at all, or to be reading The Babysitter’s Club until I was 16. I was addicted to Steven King in late elementary school, and moved on to John Grisham and Michael Crichton by middle school. As long as I was also reading somthing substantive, my parents didn’t really have a problem with it.

And reading the banned list, I see a bunch of books that my parents purposely gave me, with Judie Blume being the most obvious example. Of the top 100 most challenged books, I spot many of my favorites (and many that were assigned to me in school): I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Bridge to Terabithia, The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc. And as Amanda says, the primary connection between all these books is their ability to make adults really uncomfortable, be it through talking about sex, talking about the issues that adolescents face, or talking about oppressive social forces that we have yet to fully move away from.

I would further argue that it’s part of the general anti-intellectualism we see on the right. Now, people on the left have certainly sought to challenge books as well, but not nearly to the extent that we’ve seen from social conservatives in the United States — and the most frequent challenges reflect that. If we just don’t read about sex and racism and curse words, then they will somehow cease to be issues, apparently. If we simply say it’s inappropriate, then it ceases to be real.

Of course, this isn’t such a step away from how our current administration goes about its business. It doesn’t like a particular fact or issue? Simply put the President up there to say, “It’s not happening” or “We don’t think that’s true” and call it a day. These head-in-the-sand policies, which social conservatives have always relied on, have filtered up to the very top positions of power in this country. That’s a scary thing, and should serve as a reminder that the anti-intellectualism that encourages book-bannings and Intelligent Design theories taught on par with evolution and claims that global warming is a myth isn’t just a funny red-state religious-right thing that we can afford to giggle at and ignore. It’s an entire life philosophy that, at its heart, is anti-enlightenment and deeply frightening. It starts in school libraries, reaches out into the classrooms, and has somehow made its way up to the Presidency. Progressives have to be vigilant in fighting extremism in all its forms, including in our schools, our towns and our homes.

Celebrate Banned Book week — go and buy yourself a copy of one of the top 10, or check it out from the library.

Rejoice!

The Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners have been announced!

The winner:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA

Can I Have Mike Adams’ Job?

When a college professor is recommending these books for summer reading, you know you’ve got a problem (for the record, I’d be saying the same thing if he was recommending Stupid White Men and the DaVinci Code). For those attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, I’d recommend avoing Adams’ class, unless you’d rather read second-rate right-wing conspiracy-lit than anything worthwhile.

For what it’s worth, if I were a college professor suggesting some good summer reading, my list would go something like this:

Midnight’s Children and/or The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
White Noise by Don Delillo
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Women, Race and Class by Angela Y. Davis
Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis
Interpretor of the Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Backlash by Susan Faludi
American Pastoral and/or Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Color Purple by Alice Walker

There are a million others, but I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

Add your suggestions in the comments.

Don’t Worry, Ladies, There’s Always a Plus to Being Past Your Sell-By Date

According to John Derbyshire, you’re a whole lot less likely to get raped — because who wants to rape an ugly old bag anyway?

(That, coming from this).

Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.

There’s your first problem: Rapists aren’t “inspired to passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim;” he’s inspired to do violence against someone who is weaker and more vulnerable than himself. Many incidences of aquantaince-rape involve someone who was in a position of power over the victim. And while we know that rape is about both power and sex, it’s certainly not about an overwhelming passion that the rapist simply couldn’t quell. Ask any decent man you know if he’s ever been so “impassioned” at the sight of an attractive woman that he had to physically attack her, hurt her, and have violent sex with her. Rape is an act of violence and pathology, not passion or attractiveness.

But that’s not what the Derbs thinks (then again, this is the same guy who thinks that 15-year-olds are sexy.)

Now perhaps I’m just bitter, being past my sell-by date and all, but Derbs really got my creep-o-meter going off the charts with this bit:

He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14… which is precisely the age Lolita was at the time of her affair with Humbert Humbert. As Razib noted, my own “15-20” estimate was slightly off. An upper limit of 24 would be more reasonable. The lower limit really doesn’t bear thinking about. (I have a 13-year-old daughter.)

Read More…Read More…

Mark Twain’s Hawaii

Hunh. I never knew that Mark Twain had visited Hawaii, much less wrote about it. This article, a travel piece, offers some excerpts of Twain’s 1866 letters from the Sandwich Islands, at a time when whaling ships visited the islands, where France, Britain and the US were competing for influence, and when Kamehameha V was king.

My sister Kat lived in Hawaii for years, and her son H is part native Hawaiian (which I always find amusing, given how blond and blue-eyed he is). H is eligible for the Kamehameha Schools, but not other native-Hawaiian programs. Anyway, Kat enlightened me about the fact that Twain’s (really, Clemons’s) letters are quite well known in Hawaii. But, since it’s my blog, I’m going to post my own excerpts from Twain’s letters and mourn the fact that I have spent a grand total of four days in Hawaii, most of them on a military recreation base.

Determined to “ransack the islands” for his dispatches, Twain rented a horse and rode until he was laid up with saddle sores. He rode by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones, the remains of an ancient battlefield. He scaled the summit of Kilauea during an eruption, standing at the crater’s edge on a foggy night, his face made crimson by lava-glow. He hiked through misty valleys. He surfed.

You heard right, Huck: America’s greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, “for a particularly prodigious billow to come along,” upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.

“None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly,” he wrote.

. . .

“The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!”

The Best American Fiction of the Past 25 Years

Congrats to Beloved. It is, indeed, an amazing book, and well-deserving of this prize. I’m also glad to see that the runners-up and other nominees included three books by Don Delillo (including my favorite, White Noise), American Pastoral, and A Confederacy of Dunces. But interesting to see who’s making up the list of Best American Writers: of the 25 novels listed, two were written by women. Two (that I know of) are written by people of color. All the rest are by white men.

80s Flashback

We’re still arguing about Salman Rushie? Really?

This news is a few days old, but for those who haven’t heard, Rushdie is scheduled to speak at Nova Southeastern University and some students are upset because Rushdie “blasphemes” Islam in The Satanic Verses. Now, I can certainly understand being more than a little sensitive to all the anti-Muslim nonsense going on right now; I can understand being upset about the crap that regularly appears on conservative websites, about racist cartoons, and even about what Rushdie wrote. However, the fact remains that Rushdie is one of the greatest writers alive (and yes, I’m probably a little biased because I really enjoy his work). He’s been at the center of one of the biggest free speech conflicts of the past quarter century. He’s a man of great intelligence and integrity, not to mention incredible talent. Universities should be — and I’d imagine are — chomping at the bit to have him come and speak.

Should every student get in line and go see Rushdie if they can’t stand him and think he’s personally insulting? No. They certainly don’t have to attend graduation if they find him so abhorrent. But suggesting that he’s an inappropriate choice is just silly. Universities should, and usually do, pick speakers who reflect their values and the character of their community. It would, for example, probably be a poor choice for a school like NYU to invite someone like John Ashcroft to speak at graduation, because he’s so far out of line with NYU’s instititutional values. It would not be such a poor choice for them to invite EL Doctorow, or Toni Morrison, or even Al Gore. Is Salman Rushdie the kind of person whose reputation runs counter to all the things that institutions of higher learning should hold dear? No. He represents what higher education seeks to achieve — skillful writing, expression of inborn talent, and personal courage. So it saddens me to see students at NSU speaking out against him for the least courageous reasons:

“Who is to say there is not someone willing to try and kill him while inflicting harm to everyone else at the ceremony?” said NSU student Randy Rodriguez-Torres in an editorial published in this week’s NSU student newspaper.

I can understand being offended. If, for example, John Ashcroft was the speaker at my graduation, I might consider not attending. I support and respect any individual student’s choice not to go to their own graduation because they disagree with what the speaker stands for. But I’m not sure that there’s a good argument to be made that Rushie is an inappropriate choice, or that a graduation speaker must be someone who pleases everyone in the audience. I can see a better argument against selecting controversial political figures, since those people tend to be inherently polarizing. But agitating against the selection of one of the most well-regarded literary figures alive? Give me a break.