Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Some people have no sense of humor. Some people find obscenity where there is none. Case in point: Earlier this year, parents of a kindergarten student in the Annville-Cleona School District made a complaint about The Dirty Cowboy, a humorous picture book that their child brought home from the school library. The parents felt that Adam Rex’s illustrations of the cowboy’s partial nudity in the book were “pornographic” and wanted it banned. In April, the school board agreed with the parents and voted unanimously to remove the book from school libraries in the district.
Note: Before the school board’s vote, the district’s book review committee voted 5-1 to remove the book, with Cleona librarian Anita Mentzer voting against it. Other committee members included Annville-Cleona Superintendent Steven Houser, the assistant superintendent, the technology director, and Cleona Elementary’s principal. (School Library Journal)
There were protests against the banning of The Dirty Cowboy by free-speech organizations and an online petition in favor of repealing the ban that was signed by more than 300 people. The National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression sent a letter to the district asking that the book be returned to school library shelves.
An excerpt from the letter:
The practical effect of acceding to any request to restrict access to materials is to invite others to demand changes to reflect their beliefs, which would leave school officials vulnerable to multiple, possibly conflicting, demands, and leave the library in tatters. T he role of the library is to allow students and parents to make choices according to their own interests, experiences, and family values. No one has to read a book simply because it’s on the library shelf. We strongly urge you to keep The Dirty Cowboy in Annville-Cleona elementary school libraries. The decision to remove the book not only accedes to a specific viewpoint about the acceptability of nudity, but also deprives the entire student body of access to a highly praised book that many students, and their parents, would wish to read. Those who object to this book are entitled to their view, but they may not impose it on others. Any other decision threatens the principle that is essential to individual freedom, democracy, and a good education: the right to read, inquire, question, and think for ourselves.
Tim White reported in the Lebanon Daily News that despite outcry from the community, national media coverage, letters from the American Library Association and other organizations, and numerous pleas to reconsider, “the board refused to take up the matter again, citing concerns of causing a counter-controversy.” The board “stuck to its decision that the book was too dirty for young eyes.”
I’ll let you judge the book in question. Following is…
- A summary of The Dirty Cowboy taken from an article that appeared in School Library Journal
- a link to a Macmillan website where you can view illustrations in the book
- three videos on the subject of the book banning
- a list of honors and awards the book has received
Book Summary (SLJ)
The award-winning book tells the tale of a freckle-faced cowboy who decides to take his annual bath in a nearby river and asks his dog to guard his clothes. But the two get into fracas when the dog doesn’t recognize his fresh-smelling owner and refuses to hand over his clothes. The illustrations carefully conceal the cowboy’s private parts “while still keeping a G rating,” according to SLJ‘s review off the book.
The Dirty Cowboy illustrations
The Dirty Cowboy’s honors and awards include the following:
- Parents Choice Gold Medal
- Golden Kite Award (SCBWI – For Excellence in Picture Book Text)
- First Prize in the 2004 Marion Vannett Ridgway Awards
- International Reading Association 2004 Notable Book
- Bulletin Blue Ribbon (The Bulletin for the Center for Children’s Books)
- Finalist for the Spur Award (Western Writers of America)
- Finalist for Southeast Booksellers Association 2004 Book Award
- Nominated for Georgia Picture Book Award
Comments made by Amy Timberlake, author of The Dirty Cowboy, during an interview with Blogging Censorship:
If one or two parents can get books removed from a public library, where will it stop? Will there be any books left in the library? I tell you, everybody has opinions about books, and everybody has gotten offended now and again by a book. (If you haven’t, you’re not a reader.) It doesn’t mean the book shouldn’t be on the shelves.
Anyway, this is one of the reasons we hire people with special training to care for our libraries. Librarians have a process for choosing and buying books for everybody (and in the case of schools, these books also support the teachers’ curriculum).
It’s one thing to free shelf space because a book is not being checked out, but it’s quite another to have a well-used book banned because of the objections of a few parents…
Some Questions
- Do you think the illustrations of the cowboy’s partial nudity border on obscenity?
- Do you think a book should be banned from a public school library because the parents of one child object to it?
- Do you think that one or two people or an organization should have the right to impose their views of literature and art on others who may have different perspectives from theirs?
SOURCES
PA School District Bans ‘The Dirty Cowboy’ for Partial Nudity (School Library Journal)
A-C board to vote tonight on book ban (Lebanon Daily News)
‘The Dirty Cowboy’ author: Book ban ‘ridiculous’ (Lebanon Daily News)
COLUMN: Book ban is not community’s desire (Lebanon Daily News)
A-C residents complain about ‘The Dirty Cowboy’ ban (Lebanon Daily News)
American Library Association opposes ban of ‘The Dirty Cowboy’ (Lebanon Daily News)
U.S. News: School District Bans ‘The Dirty Cowboy’ Book (Newsy)
School districts shouldn’t ban books (Partiot-News)
Annville-Cleona School Board stays strong on decision to ban ‘The Dirty Cowboy’ (Partiot-News)
‘The Dirty Cowboy’ mess is about a lot more than one book (Patriot-News)
Nancy Eshelman: ‘Dirty’ pictures lead to banning of book about a bath (Patriot-News)
Pa. school board, parents spar over banning of Dirty Cowboy (First Amendment Center)
The So-Not-Dirty Cowboy Author Speaks (Blogging Censorship/National Coalition Against Censorship)
Letter to Members of the School Board Annville-Cleona School District (National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation)
Mike,
My respect. How did Monica get that stain on her dress?
Blouise,
I have told you lately just how awesome you are?
I say we vote Tyrion Lannister/Blouise on an independent ticket this time around.
Blouise,
Way to go!!!!
Fortunately, we didn’t have parents/people in my school district who wanted to ban or censor children’s books. Once in a great while, a parent expressed concern over a book his/her child brought home. Usually, the parents just felt the books were inappropriate reading for their children. They didn’t ask/demand that the books be removed from the library. They just didn’t want their children taking them out of the library again.
Mike,
It’s about patriarchy for sure–but I think it goes even further than that. These people also want to have dominion over men who do not have the same beliefs as they do.
Elaine,
I just got off the phone with our local Librarian who, after checking her files, told me they had one copy of Timberlake’s “Dirty Cowboy” and that it is checked out regularly and listed as in “average” condition. So I went on line and purchased another and had it sent to the Library as a donation.
I know it doesn’t help the children in the Annville-Cleona School District but it made me feel better.
(So as not to appear too reactionary, I also bought three additional titles that she told me were popular and listed in “poor” condition. I’m a sucker for Librarians in need and they all see me coming. 😉 )
Father’s Day is off to a good start.
Elaine’s fine guest blog and Malisha’s referencing the Michigan Legislature incident are all on of the same continuum. Fired by the peculiarities of Fundamentalist Christianity and frightened by the emergence of women’s understanding that they are entitled to be treated equally to men, there is a wholesale attempt to turn the clock back to the age of Patriarchy. While there is a good deal of political demagoguery involved in the Republican legislators action, we should also be aware that many of them are actually ignorant enough to be offended by the word vagina and/or any reference at all to sexuality. I think the answer to why lies not in religion, or in politics. It goes to the basic mores of sexuality that have guided America for hundreds of years and the fact that the origin of these mores lies in the sexual immaturity of patriarchal males. I think this is true for other countries, but I’ll stick to the US.
When Bill Clinton said “I didn’t have sex with that women” he was speaking the “truth”, or at least the “truth” from the perspective that surveys have shown is one shared by a majority of America males. This truth regards intercourse as sex and everything else as mere prelude. The fact that numerous studies have pretty much proven that women achieve orgasm more frequently from stimulation other than intercourse is irrelevant to men holding the “intercourse is sex” mindset. It is irrelevant because their chief interest in sex is their own pleasure and they are content with a positive answer to “was it good for you?”,
when the fact is that they have no real clue as to whether or not it was “good”.
In America, and in possibly many other places, many heterosexual men measure their virility (thus their worthiness as males) by their ability as “Cocks-men”, rather than as a lovers. The two are very different notions. The first is a notion that a man “takes, ravishes, overwhelms” a woman sexually and she is to be a passive receptor of his sexual largesse (unless HIS fantasies require other responses from her) and a grateful recipient. This is of course premised on the idea of male superiority as a sex and is reinforced in fundamentalist religious doctrine.
The second notion of being a “lover” is that sex is a mutually agreed upon experience of sharing one of life’s great pleasure and that each participant is responsible for both their lover’s and their own pleasure. This notion (“lover” I know has different connotations but this is my meaning) is one of equality between the sexes and the understanding that patriarchy is merely oppression.
I my opinion this is the psychological underpinnings of the ongoing debate about the oppression of females in this country. This debate, from those who consider women to be inferior and/or somehow “unclean” temptresses (this includes some women believers as well), takes many forms of which the abortion issue is today the leading player. I have believed that this issue as it has grown since Roe v. Wade has been one designed to punish women for their sexuality and in reaction to women’s correct demands for equality.
When it comes to banning of books for purported sexual content it mainly frames it as protection of children, that is since the 50’s when the Supreme Court struck down the banning of some of the greatest books of the 20th Century such as James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Until then, those books with sexual content were deemed harmful to women’s and children’s “moral fiber”. After SCOTUS asserted that sexuality in books should not be repressed from the viewing of any adults, then these pompously, hypocritical purveyors of “morality” re-framed their argument to make it about hurting children. We see that in the case presented by Elaine.
Malisha’s comment and link is but another facet of this movement toward the return of patriarchy. While it is ludicrous on its face and inherently anti-democratic, there are unfortunately many who would deem it as appropriate. It is my contention, perhaps expressed out of the anger that this type of behavior evokes in my, that all those exhibiting it have either lousy and/or nonexistent sex lives, despite the lies about their prowess that their lovers deceptively bestow on them.
Rep. Lisa Brown
Malisha 1, June 17, 2012 at 9:56 am
Thanks Dredd. Lisa Brown was commenting on a bill and she used the word “vagina” and it caused such a firestorm that she’s banned now. A legislator is banned from speaking IN THE LEGISLATURE. So I don’t think we should have any doubts about where we are heading…
http://jezebel.com/5918493/female-legislator-who-dared-say-vagina-during-abortion-debate-banned-from-speaking-on-house-floor
I would welcome seeing a thread start up on the incidents that have been occurring in the Michigan Legislature right now. Anybody?
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Vagina is a word that’s in the dictionary. “A sheath or sheathlike structure; specif., in female mammals, the canal between the vulva and the uterus.”
I dare you to say the word penis.
As a state legislator, I have spoken out often and passionately on the things that matter most to me and my constituents. I have spoken out against the defunding of our public schools and against tax increases to middle-class families. So I was shocked to learn Thursday that the leadership of the Michigan House of Representatives had decided to silence me and keep me from doing my job because I had uttered the one word they couldn’t stand to hear: vagina.
(My Vagina Monologue). I bet they use that word in some of the sex education or biology classes in the “dirty cowboy” school district.
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What about the Mayans cutting their wankers so they could bleed on a piece of paper, then burn the piece of paper? I think that should mean no!
You now, Lisa Brown mentioned on the floor of the Michigan Legislature the fact that in Hebrew law, when there is a pregnancy at which point the life of the mother AND the unborn child are both in danger, Hebrew law decrees that the life of the mother must be saved, “every single time,” regardless of the stage of the pregnancy. I had not known that, I had not studied Jewish law on abortion. Thinking about it led me to wondering what the Hebrew law was designed to promote, and quickly, I realized that it was probably designed to promote the preservation of the life of the mother because the mother was also considered possibly (or even probably) the mother of other children, so in the general welfare, losing the mother would cause a lot of mischief in the society. When these laws were written, the society did not have much stress upon it regarding class warfare. The big issue was elsewhere. Preservation of the mother meant not only that her children who had already been born continued to have a mother, but also that her husband continued to have a wife, and this was very good for business. If, for instance, he had to get another wife, there would be expense, a time lag, etc. If he were rich enough to already have more than one wife, then of course he could spare one, but really, that does also create problems among the children, some of whom are step-children upon the death of their own mother.
This think-up led me to begin thinking about the strangely dominant issue of abortion in our culture right now. I used to refer to the argument that “fewer children from the women who most often have unintended pregnancies can only be GOOD for the society because a child is more expensive for the society than an abortion is” but then…
Then I realized that I had not factored in our very obvious shift from the society we are clinging to now with our fingernails and the skin of our teeth to the society my descendents (may they remain at the number 1) will live in, a techno-feudal society, 1/6 incarcerated and another 2/3 “effectively incarcerated” in their daily hand-to-mouth scramble for sustenance — and I realized why abortion is being outlawed right now.
20 years from now, this society will need an underclass that is (a) so easily targeted and abused; (b) so cheaply incarcerated; (c) so effortlessly killed in the case that individual members really “rise” and step out of line; (d) so mercilessly exploited; and (e) so quickly turned one against another in deathly “let’s you and him fight” wars, that the rulers need not fear any form of effective revolution.
To have that, you need millions of unwanted young people. Literally millions, just as they have in the Arab countries that find it so easy to churn out suicide bombers. Life just HAS TO BE CHEAP if you want to run a whole society on the misery of the underclass and limit the danger that they will effectively organize and rise up against you. There will be plenty of violence, of course, but with the help of the corporate privatized armies, and the occasional (protected) George Zimmerman out there — also drawn from the exploitable classes, as his and Shellie’s images clearly announce — the society will work in its lunging-along, ugly way for quite a while, at least until some other big foot comes down on its neck or until the climate change hands us another Noah experience.
Yeah, so now I think I understand what the anti-abortion thing is ultimately about. I’m sure this could never be proven using standardized sociological research procedures. But it’s what I think.
Thanks. Elaine…..Scarry stuff….
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57454431/mich-lawmaker-barred-for-vagina-comment-in-abortion-debate/ Silenced by the GOP
So it just struck me — banned books leads to banning as an acceptable — even as a legitimate — and oh so important — activity. You just look at a meeting of those very serious people discussing whether or not they should allow children to read about the schmutzadicke cowboy; wow, what power, what authority! Each of them a judge!
Although perhaps I think, at times, that it would be great to get another free decade or two lopped onto the end of my life-term, sometimes these signs of what is to come make me think…nah.
No one is talking much about the republican war on women lately …….
Thanks Dredd. Lisa Brown was commenting on a bill and she used the word “vagina” and it caused such a firestorm that she’s banned now. A legislator is banned from speaking IN THE LEGISLATURE. So I don’t think we should have any doubts about where we are heading…
http://jezebel.com/5918493/female-legislator-who-dared-say-vagina-during-abortion-debate-banned-from-speaking-on-house-floor
I would welcome seeing a thread start up on the incidents that have been occurring in the Michigan Legislature right now. Anybody?
Banned Books Week 2011 (Top Ten Banned & Challenged Books of 2010)
Thanks elaine…… Maybe to the first question and definitely not to the remaining two…..
Whenever I read stories of people seeing thinks that are not there or hearing things that were not said (back masking and hidden messages in songs etc) I think of BF Skinner.
As a grad student he worked over nights at a ‘mental hospital’. He found an old wax cylinder victrola. The cylinders were all scratched to the point they only had random hiss, pop and clicks. He played them for patients and asked them what they heard. He discovered that he could identify their diagnosis by what they imagined they heard.
Like ink blots, what you imagine you see reveals more about you than the image
Elaine,
It isn’t limited to schools unfortunately.
Here is a case where a woman legislator was censored for saying the word vagina on the debate floor:
(My Vagina Monologue). I bet they use that word in some of the sex education or biology classes in the “dirty cowboy” school district.