Dirty words and filthy language.

Last week I wrote an article about our local State's Attorney's legal opinion that so-called “happy endings” don't count as prostitution given how Vermont statutes define “prostitution.”

When reporting the news, you have to present to the reader a clear picture if what's being talked about, but that can be difficult when the subject matter is X-rated and your publication is PG-13. In this case, the crux of the story was a specific type of sex act, namely “happy ending massages” as they're called. I had approval to print “hand job” if needed, but I was able to avoid using that phrase. “...contact between one person’s hand and another’s genitals” is what we went with, which makes it pretty clear what's being talked about without being too lewd.

I bring this up because this is not the first time I've been confronted with this problem. A few years ago a teenager was charged in criminal court after he allegedly behaved lewdly in front of a younger child. I can't find a link to the original article, but the alleged act was something of a nature we wouldn't print. I wrote “lewd act” or something similar and left it to the reader's imagination.

And that's the problem I see with being vague. People's imaginations can take “lewd act” to all sorts of places, many I'll bet are worse than what actually was alleged to have happened. I've always felt that some level of specificity, even if disturbing, is better than nebulous suggestions. That said there certainly is a limit to the level of detail that should be provided and that's the kind of thing my colleagues and I discussed Friday afternoon when the “happy ending” article was written.

The problem we ran into with “hand jobs” is there's no polite term for it that really works. You could say “manual stimulation” I suppose. As opposed to automatic stimulation? According to an online dictionary, a secondary definition for masturbation would have fit, but when most people read that word they think of something else entirely.

We've printed “oral sex” in the recent past as part of a series of articles that garnered a lot of feedback from the community, and while I didn't write the bulk of them I did receive a prominent Benningtonian's opinion on our use of the phrase. He didn't care for it. To loosely paraphrase/misquote him, “We all know what prostitution is.”

Do we?