"Am I actually seeing vaginas here, am I a pervert? I’m either a pervert or this woman was a pervert."
Said the schoolteacher, drumming up interest in art by describing how someone viewing a painting by Georgia O'Keefe might have felt. Allison Wint got fired for using the word "vagina" without prior approval as supposedly required by Harper Creek Middle School policy... though other teachers seem to be saying that what the policy requires is approval "before discussing reproductive health," and obviously the question of what a painting looks like is not about reproductive health.
I'd like to know the entire context, and so far I'm critical of the school for firing this woman, but I do have a few problems with what she said:
1. Please maintain the vulva/vagina distinction (especially if you want to rely on the claim that you were using anatomical terminology).
2. O'Keefe paintings looking like genitalia is trite and probably too cheap of a way to try to get adolescents interested in art, and
3. Don't use the word "pervert" to describe people who are interested in looking at the details of genitalia! "Pervert" is the real bad word here.
My dictionary — the OED —
defines it as "A person whose sexual behaviour or inclinations are regarded as abnormal and unacceptable" and gives as the earliest historic use of the word — I'm not kidding —
"The virulent fagotty-minded pervert Scheffler" (from 1856, R. A. Vaughan, Hours with Mystics ).
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