Brouhaha over Hoohaa.

[elfs]

A theater in Atlantic Beach, Florida, was recently the subject of much noise after it briefly changed the name of the film "The Vagina Monologues" to "The Hoohaa Monologues." Apparently, a slangy, degrading term is better than the technical term.

The name change was provoked by a woman who had to field a question from her niece as they drove past the theater: "What's a vagina?" (Keith Olbermann: "It's a common item you find lying around the house.")

Maybe it's just me, but I'm rather sure that Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan had the names for all their body parts by the time they were literate, and they were literate by the time they passed four.

Which means I would have had to deal with the question, "What's a monologue?" I would probably have had to deal with questions about why anyone would want to talk at length without interruption about their vaginas, and could have easily distracted the question by bringing up other body parts such as noses and toes and asking them to make up long, boring monologues about those body parts. Really, to kids at that age, all body parts seem to have more or less the same level of interest. And telling them they have to come up with a long, boring monologue means that, usually, they won't!

Still, the theater has had great publicity, and some woman is living in a huff, outraged in the knowledge that not only did she fail to "protect" her child, but she failed spectacularly.

Comments

[mo-hair.livejournal.com]

this story killed me. i'm trying to imagine a young girl traumatized by sexual assault unable to communicate to a doctor what has happened to her because she is unable to effectively describe her own anatomy.

argh... yet another reason dh and i teach sex ed to 13 year olds (and thank god they come to the class fairly well informed. every week they tell us that the crappy health teacher has been forced to omit from "family life" class at school.)

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the old joke. Two five-year-olds are talking to each other

5YO#1: I found a condom on the verandah.

5YO#2: What's a verandah?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

And, of course, making a big stink about a word being, "bad," pretty much guarantees that the kid will want to know it and use it.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

What pisses me off about this whole thing is that in essence this woman was trying to pass of the authority of parenting onto the public/government/corporations. She doesn't want to take the responsibility to parent the child (c'mon, she can't just say, "ask your mom" if she's that uncomfortable????), so she sloughs it off on other people. If people can't be responsible for the parenting, they don't belong being parents.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Apparently, a slangy, degrading term is better than the technical term.

Technical? No... Latin? Yes.

Because in English, if you want to be delicate about a subject, you use a word from another language (often French. See also: Tampon). If you *really* need to be delicate about it, you use Latin. Especially considering that most medical or scientific terms for biology are Latin, they're considered the "proper" words.

What I think is the real problem with that woman, isn't that her *child* was scarred by the public use of this word, but that *she* was embarrassed.

And after all, if you don't want to look selfish when you really are, you use your children as the excuse.

"How..."

[(Anonymous)]

"How am I supposed to explain THAT to my 5-year old child?!"

I like to imagine laws forbidding the use of calculus and the Theory of Relativity in public.

For now, I just plan to tell children, "The derivative? That's just something you might learn about when you're older."