Anne Frank's Unabridged Diary

[xoxoxoBruce]

A woman named Gail Horalek, mother of a 7th-grader in Michigan, complained that the unabridged version of Anne Frank's diary is pornographic and should not be taught at her daughter's school. Her complaint is a section detailing Anne's exploration of her own genitalia, material Anne's father, Otto Frank, left out of the late 1940s publishing.

I had to look up what age kids are in the 7th grade(UK Paper). They're 12 to 13! They're only about a year younger than Anne was when she wrote of her 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!"

There cannot be a 13-year-old girl on the planet who hasn't had a root around and arrived at this exact stage of bafflement. I mean, I was so distressed by my fanny's apparent minusculeness that I conducted a series of experiments with travel-size Body Shop shampoo bottles (too big) and hairbrush handles (still too big). I eventually came to the conclusion that, in the presence of an actual penis, some pheromonal reaction would kick in and my vagina would magically expand like a lotus blossom (an illusion of which, sadly, experience deflowered me).

Sounds to me like a normal 14 year old checking out her body, probably considerably younger these days.

Horalek is, of course, wrong to call the passages pornographic. Pornography is material intended to arouse sexual excitement, and I very much doubt that was Anne's intention when she wrote to her imaginary confidant Kitty about her journeys of self-discovery.
But the reason Horalek gives for complaining in the first place is that the passages made her daughter uncomfortable. I can well believe this. I can imagine that if, age 13, I had been asked to read or discuss the passages in class, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable (my own nocturnal explorations notwithstanding).

Perhaps the girls discomfort was the result of her own explorations, she didn't want anyone to suspect?

And yet I can understand that the junior Ms Horalek would have squirmed and wished herself elsewhere when this was read in class. We live in a society in which young women are taught to be ashamed of the changes that their bodies undergo at puberty – to be secretive about them, and even to pretend that they don't exist. Breasts, the minute they bud, are strapped into harnesses, and the nipples disguised from view. Period paraphernalia must be discreet, with advertisers routinely boasting that their tampons look enough like sweets to circumvent the social horror of discovery.

From what I've read, most of the world is far less uptight about puberty.

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