Cervical cancer is pornographic now
Because vagina.
A mother is trying to ban a book about the true story of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her knowledge or permission and used to make some of the most important medical breakthroughs in modern medicine, “paving the way for treatments and cures for diseases including polio, cancer, and AIDS. At the same time, the book raises difficult questions about bioethics and race relations”.
Why does this woman want the book banned? Because vagina. Because the book describes Lacks’ discovery of a tumor on her cervix, via her vagina.
But it wasn’t enough for this Puritan mom that her 15 year old child got a different reading assignment so he wouldn’t have to learn about the horrors that vaginas exist. She wants the school district to ban the book, for everyone, so that the other 59,000 students can’t read it either. She “just feel[s} that strongly about it being out of the hands of our children.” And because she has feelings, everyone else and their educational opportunities are just SOL.
It reminds me of when in 2010, a school district removed the unabridged Anne Frank; The Diary of a Young Girl from the curriculum because a parent complained about Anne’s use of the words “vagina” and “clitoris” when writing about her self discovery.
Genocide is offensive.
A family being locked in an annex for two years, hiding from a gas chamber is offensive.
If you read Anne Frank’s story, and her vagina is what offended you, you need to find your missing humanity.
Cancer is offensive.
A woman being treated like a human petri dish at the only hospital that admitted black patients is offensive.
If you read Henrietta Lacks’ story, and her vagina is what offended you, you need to find your missing humanity.
This is the type of stuff I want to explore, unpack, and get others to think about critically in my Sex and Censorship museum (which I’m still fundraising for, by the way). Why are people seemingly so disturbed by sex but not brutal violence and dehumanization, like genocide and human testing? How did it come to be that one lone sex-phobe can yield such disproportionate power over others? How do issues of race, class, and gender come into play with censored sexual expression? Things I want to explore in my museum.