The Blue Flag

The Diary of Anne Frank is a staple in most schools’ English departments. I read it in school; it’s likely that most of you did, too. It’s just a fitting book for middle schoolers or young high schoolers to read. It is a direct source to explore young Frank’s self-discovery and thoughts as a teenager, and it’s extremely historically relevant.

There is so much that one can intellectually get out of reading Anne Frank that I have to believe that someone who complains over the book’s “sexually explicit” themes is… missing the point, to put it lightly.

The complaint was towards the unedited version of Frank’s diary — the one with all that naughty vagina talk — from a parent of a student that was reading the book as an assignment. In response to a complaint from one parent, the school district ran scared and replaced the book in their curriculum with the older edited version of the book as soon as they possibly could. Describing that as an overreaction doesn’t even begin to describe how ridiculous that is.

First of all, the quote that was apparently horrendous enough to justify pulling the book is probably the least arousing sentence you’ll ever read about a vagina:

“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!” — The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, quote gotten from AllGov

Hardly a pornographic sentence. It makes sense. Anne is a young girl, and I would imagine that that sentence reflects the wonders and thoughts of many of the middle school girls in this school district as well.

More importantly, this kind of sheltering is a result of the worst kind of ignorance. These kids have already heard worse than that, and to think otherwise is to ignore the openness of our sexuality in modern society. I’m sure that this parent watches TV shows with their child in the room where much more than the “discussion” of sexual themes occurs — but it just couldn’t be that, because the “corruption” of their own child couldn’t possibly be their own doing. In an age where six year olds want to be “sexy” and 13 year olds are having pregnancy scares, I’m fairly certain that every preteen in America — boy or girl — has heard of a vagina, and probably can roughly estimate its appearance, too.

The Culpepper County School District in Virginia, like so many other school districts, media outlets, and parents themselves, has lost a critical opportunity. Reading Anne Frank’s own explorations into her sexuality and the more “forbidden” parts of her anatomy could be enlightening for children to read. Children have these own questions themselves, and these questions need to be answered, as the confusion that results from lacking an answer to these questions is what leads to unprotected sex at young ages and other problems that are of much greater concern than this innocent sentence about the female anatomy. We’ve all been children — we all know that if a child can’t get an answer to their questions from you, they’re going to get it elsewhere, regardless of how. Unfortunately for the children in Culpepper County, these questions may remain unanswered — instead of using the content of the book to launch a valuable lesson on sexuality and sexual self-discovery, the school has closed the curtain on the book entirely and unnecessarily shielded their students’ eyes from the “sexually explicit.”