the higher power of the american prude

American censorship strikes again. You may disagree with me on this one, but I hardly find the word, "scrotum," offensive. It is the "official" name of a body part. That's what's written in school books, so what is up with all this unreasonable modesty?

Kids need to be taught to refer to genitalia in a manner that allows them to understand that these are merely body parts and not the "sin machines" that religion and culture dictate. Besides, refering to penis as "pee pee" and vagina as "porky" hardly sounds decent, either.

Banning Susan Patron's Newbery-winning "The Higher Power of Lucky" does not protect a child from whatever your imagination conceives that might cause harm. Neither does pretentious modesty.


“The people who are reacting to that word are not reading the book as a whole,” [Pat Scales]said. “That’s what censors do — they pick out words and don’t look at the total merit of the book.”



February 18, 2007
With One Word, Children’s Book Sets Off Uproar
By JULIE BOSMAN

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. 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.”
The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. The controversy was first reported by Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.
On electronic mailing lists like Librarian.net, dozens of literary blogs and pages on the social-networking site LiveJournal, teachers, authors and school librarians took sides over the book. Librarians from all over the country, including Missoula, Mont.; upstate New York; Central Pennsylvania; and Portland, Ore., weighed in, questioning the role of the librarian when selecting — or censoring, some argued — literature for children.

“This book included what I call a Howard Stern-type shock treatment just to see how far they could push the envelope, but they didn’t have the children in mind,” Dana Nilsson, a teacher and librarian in Durango, Colo., wrote on LM_Net, a mailing list that reaches more than 16,000 school librarians. “How very sad.” click to read the entire article...