Yesterday, June 12th, marked what would have been Anne Frank's 84th birthday.  It was also on this day in 1942 that Anne Frank received a diary for her 13th birthday and wrote the very first entry in it.  The life she wrote within those pages has touched millions of people across the globe, not just as a chronicle of the terror of the Holocaust but as a candid look into the life of a teenage girl trying to understand herself. 

The first page of Anne's diary, courtesy of AnneFrank.org

Recently, a mother in Northville, Michigan, filed a complaint, demanding that the definitive, unedited version of Anne's diary be banned by the school district for its, well, frank language when talking about sexual matters.  Here is one passage that has her worked up:

"Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris…When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris."

Anne's writing desk in the Annex, courtesy of AnneFrank.org

Well, this is quite a description.  When read in this blunt block quote without truly appreciating the context or the young girl who wrote it, it is easy to see why someone might become uncomfortable.  However, I have two points to make about why it would be wrong to remove this passage or any other passage like it.

The sexual content in this book is of the nature of a young person being curious about sex, as every
young person is around this age.  In her diary, Anne is has depicted her own self-discovery, and part of discovering herself is discovering her sexuality and sexual identity.  Everyone goes through this at some point, and to censor Anne is to deprive today's young readers the opportunity to see that being curious about sex and one's anatomy isn't freakish; it is something everyone goes through and is completely normal.  It removes the guilt that might be associated with wondering such things, and it gives young people the opportunity to learn a little of what Anne learned without having to ask an embarrassing question. Anne even describes giving the "sex talk" to her crush, Peter, who has questions himself.

To remove these sorts of things is to also to remove a part of Anne and to make her seem other than she really is, to place her on a pedestal of sainthood.  It removes her humanity and her realness.  Editions leaving out Anne's more racy entries aren't depicting the real Anne but a false version of her altered to conform to society's mores.

Secondly, removal of sexual content from school books in order to "protect" children doesn't actually protect them; it instead makes them more vulnerable.  In places where young teens don't receive proper sexual education that helps them understand the process and the risks and are instead told only to abstain from sex in order to protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs, rates of HIV contraction and unplanned pregnancy are higher.  Let me just throw this chart up there for you:

Source

When teens, who are going to probably become sexually active whether adults like it or not, are uniformed about sex, they are unable to make informed decisions regarding it.  Censoring what Anne says about female anatomy amounts to pretending that it doesn't exist and telling children to just stay away from it.  It is overall unwise and unhealthy to suppress what a young girl has to say about her own questions about sex and the answers she found.  Pretending sex, sexuality, and sexual anatomy don't exist doesn't make them go away.

But this story has a happy ending.  I honestly can say I've never been prouder of our education system than at this moment, even if it was only one school district.  Instead of giving in to the pressure of uninformed parents, which has been a regrettable trend among states and school districts over the past several years, Northville Public School officials have stated that they will not remove the book.  Their reasoning?  Taking away the unedited version amounts to censorship.  If only certain portions of a book are banned, it changes the book altogether and presents it as something it's not, like those idiotic editions of Huckleberry Finn that censor the n word.  This is fundamentally wrong, and these school officials see that.

If you've not been fortunate enough to read the unedited version of Anne's diary, it really is an enlightening treat.  Anne becomes almost a whole new girl; she even has a period, talks candidly about the subject of sex, and forms sometimes harsh opinions about the people around her and their choices.  If you'd like to have a copy for yourself, new or used, just click here or look under the Shop tab at the top of the page.  Happy reading, and don't ever let book banning stop you!