[Education] Public Enemy Number 1: The Word "Vagina"

I'm sorry if this blog is going to sound redundent when you read it. Yes, I have already recently discussed the banning of words and I have separately dealt with student rights, but this story, if nothing else, should just prove my point again.

Three 16-year-old high school girls from John Jay High School in Westchester were each handed suspensions for saying the word "vagina" during a performance from Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" at an open mic nite sponsored by their school's literary magazine. The worst part is, the prinicpal told the girls when they auditioned that they would not be allowed to use the word during the show, though he denied that he was censoring them. Journal News reports.

The problem, Principal Rich Leprine, is that you gave them permission for their performance with a caveat focused on the single word that is at the heart of the show. If nothing else, banning use of the word "vagina," given that it is central to the title of play, is practically endorsing plagiarism. I mean, how else will they properly identify the source of the material they are performing?

But obviously the real problem is censorship, totally asinine censorship. School officials claim that they did not suspend the girls because they violated a censorship policy, but because they had agreed not to use the word and demonstrated insubordinance by using it. Arguments like this, and the people who make them, are making our kids stupider. Of course you were censoring them. If you weren't censoring them, what were they being insubordinate about?

It's just a word, and a scientific word at that. Individual words are not our enemies, and society needs to stop treating a single word as if it has value outside of its context. If you are going to hold linguistic grudges, make them against the context of words and the specific individual's use of them. John Jay High School officials gave approval to the context: the message of empowerment within the play, and instead they made the enemy the single operative word of the piece. If there is an argument against the performance of the play at a school-related function it should be in acknowledgment that the blatantly sexual nature of the materil is inappropriate for underaged girls (who cannot legally engage in intercourse) to be performing at an event that was being videotaped by a local cable channel.

Too bad the school tried to go the nuanced censorship route and now look completely fascistic, not too mention totally foolish.