SKIRMISHER

High school students Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson, who for convenience we’ll just call by the romantic moniker, “The Three Vaginas” or 3V, have become sort of famous for actually saying the word “vagina” during an “open mike” reading of The Vagina Monologues. Which is very wrong as any mature person knows that when you have to read The Vagina Monologues, all you have to do is let your real vagina do the talking.

Their principal at the John Jay High School in New York suspended them, resulting in a backlash that rankled despite school board president Peter Breslin assuring the public that “I have no problem with the word vagina. I eat pussy, too!”

The excerpt that got the girls in trouble, which they repeated on TODAY, reads: “My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women’s army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s country.”

Principal Richard Leprine has said the suspensions, which are being reviewed, stemmed from the girls’ insubordination, not from their use of the word itself. He said the girls broke a promise not to include the word in their reading.”They just said the stanza wasn’t appropriate to say at an event that was open to the community,” Reback told Today host Meredith Vieira. “In reality, it was only 9th-grade students through 12th-grade students, and parents who were there. There weren’t any young children.”

Stahl said she and her two classmates felt it would be inappropriate to read the passage without the “V word.” “It really upheld the message of the monologue, the moral integrity of the piece of literature, and better represented women across the world,” she said.

We could have spared ourselves all this trouble if only people were content to let the already agreed-upon and nevertheless-a-hit “hoo-haa” stand on its own.

Stumble it!