Let's Talk About Scrotums

I have a scrotum. I know that will come as a surprise to any right wing Christianists who might be reading this blog. I have a scrotum, a penis, an anus, and lots of other biological parts that the maker bestowed upon me in all his/her wisdom. If you've seen "Borat", you might want to call it my "testes satchel".

Dogs have scrotums, too. Ever notice how a dog will contort his body and lick his penis and scrotum for what seems like hours? As George Carlin once noted, "If I could do that I'd never leave the house".

And now a children's book has a scrotum (registration required). More specifically, a little girl in a children's book overhears a conversation that describes how a dog was bitten in the scrotum by a rattlesnake. Shit happens.

It turns out that the children's book, written by a librarian and geared to the 9 - 12 age group, has won The Newbery Medal, the literary equivalent of a film winning the best picture Oscar. It also turns out that since the book won the award, people are dissecting every word on every page, as would be expected when the spotlight is focused so brightly.

When "the word" was discovered, librarians all over the country began banning the book.

“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.”

Susan Patron, the author of "The Higher Power of Lucky", based the passage in the book on a true incident involving a friend's dog.

And one of the themes of the book is that Lucky is preparing herself to be a grown-up, Ms. Patron said. Learning about language and body parts, then, is very important to her. “The word is just so delicious,” Ms. Patron said. “The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.”

The repulsive outrage over this biological term for a canine body part is symptomatic of the mass hysteria created by the Christianists who are trying to de-humanize society, to make people into sexless, God-fearing zealots. Scrotum?? Scrotum???? If anything, there should be an outrage that the author used the word "scrotum" instead of the word that the kids almost definitely used in real life - "balls". The dog got bit in the balls, and it probably hurt like a bastard.

When is it OK for children to learn that humans and animals have genitalia? Are we now to start putting diapers on little Fido so that when he starts humping daddy's leg, we can explain it away as something like, "little doggie's doing his exercises"? Are we now to start putting blinders on children who grow up on farms, so they cannot see copulating pigs, or, worse yet, a well-hung horse?

Grow up, America. This is the year 2007, we appear to the rest of the world as a nation of sexual retards, where pornography and graphic violence permeate the culture, yet we are grossly uncomfortable with the sight of a female nipple, or the mention of the word "scrotum". The damage that we are doing with this blatant double standard is beyond measure. Soon we will have an entire generation of children that shave their heads, get tattoos and shun rehab. Eventually all these mixed messages will confuse them so much that they will completely reject society, religion and politics, in exchange for some sort of counter-culture existence.

Organized religion is already losing its youth (Google it, I feel too lazy to find the facts to support this, but it's true), and the reason is that the messages coming down from the zealots have no basis in reality, and the kids are looking elsewhere for the meaning of life.

It all comes down to the word "scrotum". It's a perfect symbol of the nonsensical argument that censorship is necessary for the "sake of the children." I can tell you first hand that a 9 to 12 year old kid is fully aware of what a scrotum is, boys check out boys, girls check out girls, boys check out girls, and girls check out boys. It's called normal sexual development and curiosity. It's not "dirty", it's healthy to want to know what those funny little parts between out legs are designed to do.

It is not the first time school librarians have squirmed at a book’s content, of course. Some school officials have tried to ban Harry Potter books from schools, saying that they implicitly endorse witchcraft and Satanism. Young adult books by Judy Blume, though decades old, are routinely kept out of school libraries. Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”
“At least not for children,” she added.

It's a dog scrotum, lady. A dog scrotum. If you really believe that there is any kid alive that has not seen a dog scrotum, then you are completely detached from reality and need to get to the planet Tralfamadore immediately where you can put all the stark realities of the world behind and live in a fantasy bubble of your own design. Or perhaps you are already there.

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