One of the greatest books I have ever read is “The Diary of Anne Frank”. That book wrecks me. I have nothing but the utmost respect for Anne Frank. When Justin Bieber went to The Anne Frank house and wrote:Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.” I wanted to rip him apart (more than I normally do). Then the pictures of him shadow boxing and wearing a hoodie and sunglasses in her house surfaced and I wanted him to be waterboarded and tortured.
That’s how much this girl and that book means to me. It means that much to a lot of people. That book is an inside look at the torture that someone experienced during one of the darkest times in our world’s history and it’s told with the purity of a child.
Gail Horalek of Northville, Michigan has declared war on this piece of history. Horalek wants the book banned. ”The problem is the school is giving the seventh graders inappropriate material and not explaining it to the parents.”
Horalek is talking about the unedited definitive edition of the book. At first Horalek said she thought it was “awesome” that her daughter was doing a school project on the book until her daughter told her the ”graphic passages” were making her “uncomfortable.” Firstly, no 12-year-old is going to use the phrase “graphic passages” and I highly doubt she’d say “uncomfortable”.
This is the passage the mother is objecting to:
“Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn’t realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn’t see them. What’s even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you’re standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you’re standing, so you can’t see what’s inside. They separate when you sit down and they’re very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris.”
She is objecting to a 12-year-old reading the word labia, clitoris, and vagina. I do believe I had to watch a “changing bodies” video when I was ten. I knew all of that language earlier than that….you know why? Cause I have a vagina and I explored it like an other young girl. That’s right–girl’s play with their vagina’s. I guarentee that this girl has touched her vagina and is well aware of the two sets of lips, the and the location of the clitoris. I’m sure some of her friends have even had sex or given head at that age. When I was in middle school in MICHIGAN in the mid 90′s two girls age 11 and 12 were pregnant.
Sorry, mom you can’t save your little girl from knowing about her vagina. You also can’t burn books. I thought we got over banning and burning books. I thought we evolved passed that. But I guess Michigan, the state I grew up in, is a little behind in the times.
Horalek is demanding that the school go back to teaching from the older, edited version of the book that doesn’t include the uncomfortable passages. You know what else is really uncomfortable? The fact that a young girl had to hide in her attic to try and escape being murdered for her religion. Know what else is uncomfortable? The way the book abruptly ends because she was found and sent to a concentration camp where she died along with 6 million others.That’s really uncomfortable.
Maybe we should worry about things that are really hurting our children.
In the journal “Sex Roles,” a study was done regarding “attachment parenting.” Apparently, feminists are more likely to defend “attachment parenting” than people who identify as “non-feminists.” And you know what I have to say about that? Hogwash … I call hogwash on all of this. I do not think that feminists are definitively for “attachment parenting” all across the board, and I’m going to keep using quotes because I find that title for that behavior ridiculous.
It’s been a while since there’s been a good, strong, well-done feminist film and I’m excited to say that ‘Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding’ is one of them. It stars Elizabeth Olsen, Catherine Kenner, and Jane Fonda, which is a winning combo, ladies. This movie chronicles three generations of women who are trying to find a way to understand each other after years of familial disintegration. Written by Joseph Muszynski and Christina Mengert and directed by Bruce Beresford, ‘Peace, Love, and Misunderstanding’ is a film about understanding, multi-generational empathy, and learning from both your mistakes and your success.