Chant

Aaron and his friends spent some part of their time in the after-school program today chanting, “Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!” The poor head counselor was so distressed he was hardly able to tell Dale what had happened. This word is not distressing to me, and I was very curious about the whole thing, so we made it a subject of dinner table conversation. Actually, the first thing Dale and I did was re-enact the chant ourselves. We couldn’t resist! It was too good! And wow, did we impress the children. Jordan, having no idea why we would be doing such a thing, was stunned. Aaron unfortunately thought we were making fun of him and left the room nearly in tears. We got him back, and heard what he had to say about the chanting, but it was not a lot. He claimed he “wasn’t chanting very much.”

Well, a lot or a little, this is a word worth talking about, so talk we did. I asked Aaron if he knew what a vagina was. He said he did. I asked who has one, and he pointed at me. Check! I asked who else, and he said, “Girls.” Check! I asked if he knew where it was, and he indicated the general location of such. Check! Then I asked if he knew what it was for. He was a little blown away by this question. I said, “It’s for all kinds of stuff!” and Dale said, “For example, you came out of a vagina!” I think they know this, but prefer not to think about it. Okay. Still, though, we were going to have this conversation, in spite of the fact that both boys were obviously uncomfortable. Dale and I stated clearly that this is the name of a body part, like the elbow, and that it is very important to be able to speak clearly about every body part. We said that this is not a bad word. We said that because it is a word for a private body part, a lot of people think it should be a private word, and they do not want to hear the word. We disagree with this. People need to be able to use the right word for every body part, especially in case there is a problem, like if you got hurt. (I was also thinking about safety from sexual predators, but did not make that part of this conversation.) I said, “For example, what if a dog bit your penis? You would need to be able to tell Nurse Anita (the school nurse), ‘A dog bit my penis and it hurts a lot.’ If you go to Nurse Anita and say ‘Um, er, I have a problem, and I am too embarrassed to tell you,’ then that is not as good. You should just say the body part right out.” Of course the boys were laughing uncontrollably at this bizarre scenario, but that seemed good; it helped them relax.

I said that in the case of the after-school chant, I felt pretty sure there was not a need to say the name of the body part. Probably, Aaron and his friends were chanting this word in order to bother the counselor: they were trying to embarrass him and make him uncomfortable. This was not a good thing to do. Aaron said he would not do it anymore. (Personally, I think that this is in the category of things for which a counselor needs to have a well-rehearsed response. For example, in preschool, taboo words like poop were “bathroom words,” and were to be said only [and therefore incessantly] in the bathroom.)

I am tempering my language in this blog post in case any of my readers might be uncomfortable, but I tell you what, at the dinner table I was throwing around the V-word like it was my favorite word ever. After just a few minutes of this the boys were begging me to stop. They plugged their ears, they squirmed, they protested. Aaron wanted me to use a different word: his suggestion was “Mimimi.” I said “Okay fine, I will do it to help you be comfortable, but it is not a bad word.” Dale gave the example of our pediatrician friend, who, he speculated, would be happy to have joined us in our dinner-table chant. Then he remembered our friend the labor and delivery nurse, who surely has quite a bit to say about vaginas almost every day of the week. We gave the boys some examples of things she might say at work. They accepted this, but basically had to end the conversation just from sheer oversaturation. It was pretty funny.

The next morning, I said, “Since we were talking about mimimis last night [I said this with a dramatic flourish], if you like, I can show you a sculpture of a lot of different mimimis. Would you like to see it?” Aaron said, “I do not want to see that.” Jordan said, “Actually strangely I kind of do want to see that.” So I showed him the Great Wall of Vagina. He was fascinated, and asked some questions, including, “That’s a vagina?!” I kept up a pleasant patter about how all of these vaginas are different and all totally normal, that all penises are different and normal too, etc. After a minute or two he was finished looking at it and went back to horsing around with his brother. I am pretty pleased with this whole thing. There was some good content, and plenty of levity.