Three NY High School students ignored directives from their teachers to not read excerpts from The Vagina Monologues at an open mic night. They were then suspended for daring to utter the V word. One of the students, Elan Stahl said:
“Our aim was not to get in trouble. We want to put the word (vagina) out there and make people comfortable with using it.
“If they can just admit that the word vagina shouldn’t have been censored because it’s not lewd or obscene … then that apology would be gladly accepted,” she said.
Congrats to these girls for being so switched on.
Still, how depressing that vagina is a word that people find offensive. I suppose if they’d changed it to ‘pussy’ or ‘hoo-ha’. It would have been alright *sigh*.
March 21, 2007 at 3:19 am
This sort of thing pisses me off so much. And you’re spot on, Anna, when you say that the sistuation would probably be different if they were using ‘pussy’ rather than ‘vagina’. The word ‘pussy’ is no threat to conservatism because it plays right into a male-oriented, sexualised lexicon of contemporary pop culture. At worst, it might be seen as slightly smutty, tacky. But ‘vagina’ is not sexually symbolic as much as it is directly relating to sexuality, childbirth, anatomy … it is a fairly concrete term. VAGINA. There’s nothing symbolic about it — and that’s what threatens conservative values, the use of language which is direct, no-bullshit, anti-patriarchal, etc.