Wow. A mother in America wants The Diary of Anne Frank to be banned from her daughters school because of a passage where Anne writes about discovering her own genitalia. I remember this was a text at my school in Year Seven, but that excerpt hadn’t been allowed to be published at the time. I think Anne Franks family had requested it be removed.
It’s quite a mature and insightful passage of self awareness and body exploration by such a young girl. Would this passage get you into hysterics if your young daughter read it? I personally don’t see anything wrong with this innocent paragraph of self discovery and curiousity around one’s own body. In fact for someone so young, she had incredible insight and perception into her own body! Read the section and see for yourself;
“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.”
This Michigan mother said the phrases made her uncomfortable and that the diary was “pornographic.” After reading the above paragraph what do you think? There seems to be such a hysteria about children learning about their own genitals and functioning. I don’t see anything pornographic about young people learning about their own biology do you?
