Just weeks after a controversy erupted over the potential banning of a children’s book that contained the word “scrotum” (as discussed here), a new dispute has emerged over the use of the word “vagina” at a high school event, as reported here by the New York Times:

‘Monologues’ Spurs Dialogue on Taste and Speech

CROSS RIVER, N.Y., March 7 — The three girls had been warned by teachers not to utter the word. But they chose to say it anyway — vagina — in unison at a high school forum, and were swiftly punished by their school.

Now the case of the three, all juniors at John Jay High School in this affluent hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, has become a cause célèbre among those who say that the school has gone too far, touching off a larger debate about censorship and about what constitutes vulgar language.

Is vagina, or the “v-word,� as some around here have referred to it, such a bad word?

“We want to make it clear that we didn’t do this to be defiant of the school administration,� said Megan Reback, one of the three girls, who all received one-day suspensions for using the word during a reading of “The Vagina Monologues� at the forum last Friday. “We did it because we believe in the word vagina, and because we believe it’s not a bad word. It shouldn’t be a word that is ever censored, and the way in which we used it was respectable.� [full text]

When children are directly or implicitly given the message that certain anatomical terms are “bad words” and generally inappropriate to utter, there is a risk that the anatomical parts themselves will be perceived as “bad” by association. And when children regularly experience and witness a strong negative response to the use of terms such as scrotum and vagina, there is a risk that such language will attain undue power and mystery but also evoke great shame. How is this healthy for children? How does this not constrain healthy and open dialogue about essential features and functions of the human body? Why, as adults and as a culture, do we maintain such archaic and repressive attitudes? What are we afraid of or ashamed about?