Scrotums and Censorship
Sun Feb 18, 2007 at 09:29:37 AM PDT
When I was growing up, my mother taught us the proper words for everything from the beginning. We did not "pee-pee," we urinated. We had a "BM." We knew the clinical names for vagina and penis and we were given clear and honest answers to any question we ever asked.
So when I saw this article today in the NYTimes, I had to shake my head very much like my father does when he finds something completely ridiculous.
Apparently there are some librarians with their undies in a wad about the use of the word "scrotum" in a children's book called "The Higher Power of Lucky," by Susan Patron.
Patron is this year's winner of the Newberry Medal, the most prestigious award in children's literature, and there are moves in many areas to ban her book.
"The book's heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.
"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much," the book continues. "It sounded medical and secret, but also important.""
(my formatting sucks, pardon me)
I think it is absolutely ridiculous to ban a book which uses the medically approved name for a human's body part. The way Patron describes it through her character there is both hilarious and completely reasonable to me, and seems as if it would make the whole thing a little more humorous and light-hearted for a little boy or little girl learning about his or her body.
What say you, MotherTalkers? Would you be offended by your ten year old reading this? Do you not think they should probably already know the proper term for their scrotum by that age? Might this move to censor this book be a clear indication of how sex-negative our culture is, at a time when we clearly need full disclosure for the health and safety of our children?
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