You can’t say ‘Vagina’ in the USA

Today smacking: Stupidly ironic censorship

So in recent news, three girls were suspended from a New York high school for using the word ‘vagina’ while reciting the script of popular play, The Vagina Monologues. Hold on to your hats, folks, I think we’re rocketing past the irony barrier at warp speed, and that noise in your ears is the rushing wind of two thousand years of genitalia hysteria.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last ten years, The Vagina Monologues is a play which celebrates real women’s relationships with their vaginas in an attempt to shake off our continuing aversion to talking about it. So why is it that this particular word – ‘vagina’, a perfectly acceptable and medical term – is, to some, equally as unacceptable as the myriad truly offensive ways we have found to describe it? And what’s next on the censorship list? ‘Spleen'? ‘Cornea'? ‘Molar'? Will other famous plays be similarly censored? Instead of Hair, will we be lining up to see Dead Cells that Grow in Keratinous Strands from Follicles in Your Skin on Broadway? Where does the ridiculousness end?

In 2007 it disgusts and appals me that any females – let alone teenage girls in the midst of the thunderstorm of puberty – are still being taught, whether explicitly or otherwise, that their sexual organs are to be treated with a hearty measure of censorship and shame. I realise the many different cultures on our smoggy earth are at varying levels of enlightenment about the power of Our Divine Ladyparts, but surely the USA could at least try not to be completely arse-backwards about it. (Alas, I don’t know why I ever get my hopes up about America spending more than a nanosecond of half-thought on any topic that concerns primarily women before forming a vocal and uneducated opinion about it. I guess I’m just optimistic like that.)

Anyway, in light of the above news article, I’m sending out a big “Fuck you!” to the censor in question at John Jay High School, New York. Fuck you with a big, juicy vagina, all wrapped around your head with vacuum suction and squeezing your skull with the vicelike grip of a thirtysomething single woman practising her PC muscle exercises before her first date in ten months.

So in closing, here is my summary, which I have chosen to present in the style of the Being John Malkovitch infinite recurring vortex, except I’m calling it Vagining Vagina Vaginovitch, and it goes like this:

Vagina? Vagina, vagina. Vagina vagina vagina, vagina vagina. Vagina vagina? Vagina, vagina! Vagina vagina? Vagina.

Yes, I think there’s something we can all learn from that.


Addendum: there’s an older, but related, even more hysterically ridiculous article here.