What's in a vagina...I mean word

Today, one of my fellow province-men, Saskboy, asked people to write a blog entry with the word vagina in the title to show solidarity with three 16 year old girls who were suspended for saying the word vagina while reading from, get this, the Vagina Monologues during a school performance (the school says that they were suspended for not following the schools orders to emit the word from the reading, not for saying vagina...).

All I can say about this whole thing is that when future anthropologists look back through our records, they will wonder - why do they suspend people for saying the word vagina, when anyone who can operate a computer can pull up millions of picture of them? This whole, faux prudish, won't someone think of the children thing is just such, um, what's the word, bullshit. What are we trying to protect them from? You can't corrupt a kid by saying a word that relates to a natural part of the female body. Hearing it doesn't make an 8 year old kid want to rape his dog or jerk off to amputee porn, in fact, all it will probably do is make a kid snicker because he knows that it is a naughty word in our society - shhh...don't talk about your elbow...it's dirty. It is almost beyond words how absurd the whole thing is.

Me, I love to say/write words that make people flinch. Fuck is the most versatile word in the English language. It is a noun, a verb, an adverb and can pretty much be used as any form of speech. But in the end, it's just a word - the word has no power on it's own, only what we give it. My five year old nephew likes to make poop and pee jokes because those words have power to him - they aren't full fledged swears, but they are words he "shouldn't say" and one's he can at this point get away with saying until he gets older and can start in on "shit and piss" jokes. If no-one reacted when he said these things, how long do you think he would get satisfaction saying them for?

Some have argued that this is a free speech issue, but I think it's more than this - this is about the power we give words and how misguided we are when assessing which words should have power and which shouldn't. As this article shows, let's forget the swear words and those that describe sexual organs, let's focus on the hateful and destructive things people say instead (h/t to Cletus for the link).Recommend this Post