Whatever you do, don’t call it the V-word

Three teenagers have been suspended for referring to their lady parts as the V-word.

A public high school has suspended three students who disobeyed officials by saying the word “vagina” during a reading from a well-known feminist play.

The honor students, Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson, included the word during their reading of “The Vagina Monologues” because, “It wasn’t crude and it wasn’t inappropriate and it was very real and very pure,” Reback said.

The controversy surrounds this sentence: “My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women’s army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s country.”

This is just the latest neurosis over the public naming of body parts. A woman in Florida prompted the renaming of the Vagina Monologues after her niece “offended” her by asking her what a vagina was. Librarians of all people recently vowed to ban The Higher Power of Lucky for the authors daring use of scrotum instead of something creative.

“What is wrong about the word ‘vagina,’ which is the correct biological term for a body part?” Ensler asked. “It is not slang. It is not dirty or racy. The fact that it was censored is an indication of exactly what is going on in American schools, where girls and boys are not being educated about their bodies in a healthy way. We’re pushing everything into the closet.

“We need open, healthy sex education where girls know and love their bodies,” said Ensler, who addressed the United Nations yesterday during an international conference dedicated to stopping rape as a weapon in conflict. (via emphasis added)

And we should start by publicly laughing at alleged adults who pitch fits about the use of proper names for various bodyparts.