Lions and tigers and scrotums, oh my!

Well, I'm late to this party but I keep seeing it floating around the internets so I have to mock it, particularly in light of the recent "Balls!" post. It appears that a number of librarians have fainted clean away over a word that appears on the first page of this year's Newberry Medal winner, Susan Patron's children's book The Higher Power of Lucky.

Scrotum.

As in:

The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

Maybe if she'd just followed TK's example and used the word "balls," she wouldn't be in this kind of trouble. But now that I mention it, what kind of trouble is she in?

“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.”

And then Higher Power zoomed from the high 600's on Amazon to the top 40. Nice trouble, if you can get it.

But back to the librarian. Is she serious? I mean that. I don't mean to mock her individually, but when I read that quote I really saw it as a symbol of the increasing silliness of American society. That, and I suspected instantly that it wasn't about the kids at all, but about librarians' own discomfort with the word. Because I have to tell you, any ten-year old that doesn't know -- or hasn't at least once heard -- the proper name for the sack in which a male's testicles reside has not been properly educated. It's really just that simple.

And though it's not remotely the point, let's not kid ourselves that most ten-year olds don't know what we're talking about here. As Tony pointed out at lunch the other day, "Scrotum? Are you kidding? My eleven-year old already knows what teabagging is." (For those of you who -- ahem -- do not, go here to find out.) But like I said, not the point.

On a larger scale, the real problem with this attitude is that it's a symptom of how twisted the American view of sex is. An author uses the correct word for a sex organ (on a dog, no less), in a piece of quality writing, and hysteria ensues. But the stuff discussed here is all over the place. In short, I'm tempted to conclude that many Americans are most threatened by authentic, earthy depictions of sex and life. As long as it's superficial and as tawdry as possible, we're good!

This phenomenon is also reflected in the public breastfeeding debates. In our society, this is considered ho-hum:



But if you really want to stir up shock and controversy in this country, put this image on the cover of your magazine:



When that image appeared, this is what happened:

"I was SHOCKED to see a giant breast on the cover of your magazine," one person wrote. "I immediately turned the magazine face down," wrote another. "Gross," said a third.

In a poll of 4,000 readers, nearly a quarter were negative. The linked article also observes:

The evidence of public discomfort isn't just anecdotal. In a survey published in 2004 by the American Dietetic Association, less than half — 43 percent — of 3,719 respondents said women should have the right to breast-feed in public places.

So I ask you, what is the world coming to when a children's book can't use the word scrotum in an entertaining, non-lascivious manner?

(Commenters tempted to be peurile about the images -- and you know who you are -- please don't prove my point that easily. If you can't make a substantive comment, kindly shut the hell up.)