The Guardian reports some southern California school districts have banned Webster's Dictionary because of it's "graphic" definition of oral sex as "oral stimulation of the genitals." Banning books in a hysteria over sexual content has truly, truly reached a new low.
This strikes me as the perfect thing to post on a blog called Geeky Sex -- it's an attack upon sex and upon geeks. I mean, who else would look up oral sex in the dictionary, right?
I could point out how ridiculous this is on a number of levels: for instance, it is so non-graphic a person who had no idea what oral sex is probably couldn't picture the act from this definition and would at the very least need to look up "oral" and "genitals" as well.
But what would be the point of explaining how ridiculous it is. I would rather talk about the fact that sex-phobics have become so frightened of sex that they have started attacking words, rather than ideas, and attacking them in the most basic, elemental way. In the past they've been content to ban ideas that are adjacent to sex -- for instance, the 779 pages of Ulysses that don't contain explicit sexual imagery. But that no longer is enough. Now they will not be content until they have banned the entire English language, for it isn't until children are condemned to a state of total illiteracy and ignorance, able to communicate with each other in only through grunts and gestures, that they will be safe from knowledge of sex.
On the side of poetic justice, there are going to be very innocent children who want to know why they suddenly don't have dictionaries anymore. Which will lead those innocent children to ask, perhaps for the first time, "What's oral sex?"
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