Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  This phallus-centric perspective goes far beyond genitalia words. Just think of some of the most common verbs used to illustrate sex: bone, drill, screw. In the world of these words, the person with the erection is both the star and the narrator. If one were to describe sex from the vagina’s standpoint—to say something like, “We enveloped all night,” or “I sheathed the living daylights out of him,” or “We clitsmashed”—it would be such an exceptional rebellion against mainstream sex talk that to many listeners, it would be a real head-scratcher.

  These implications aren’t exclusive to slang; they’re embedded in official dictionary entries and medical literature too. At the time I’m writing this, one of the definitions of vagina from TheFreeDictionary.com’s medical glossary reads, “An organ of copulation that receives the penis during sexual intercourse.” This is not a political view of the vagina, it’s a medical one. And yet, I would invite a doctor to try telling a lesbian that her vagina is “an organ that receives the penis.” See how well that goes.

  Inspired by Jonathon Green’s naughty time line—and genuinely curious to learn what genitalia words my personal friend group likes, uses, and avoids—I conducted a small-scale survey of my own. On Facebook, I asked people to message me lists of their favorite and least favorite genitalia terms, both technical and slang. (In retrospect, I probably should have been more judicious about my data collection method; some of the most enthusiastic answers came from my highly Facebook-active aunts, and let me tell you, having my parents’ sisters tell me what they like to call their vaginas is probably one of the most uncomfortable research experiences I’ve ever had.)

  In the end, I was able to gather genitalia terms from about twenty people, ages nineteen to sixty-three, both men and women, queer and straight. In addition to the classic dick and cock, their penis word lists included dong, schlong, sausage, pickle, lollipop, prick, joystick, sword, staff, sniper rifle, pocket rocket, rod of pleasure, cyclops, torpedo, and anaconda. Aside from good old pussy and cunt, vagina names included va-jay-jay, vag, honey pot, snatch, clam, box, cave, garage, taco, ax wound, coochie, snake pit, beef curtains, meat wallet, and cum sponge.

  Interestingly, when it came to the vagina, I noticed that my non-straight female friends tended to prefer more explicit terms, like pussy, while my straight friends often went for PG nicknames—va-jay-jay, vag. I wondered if this might be because queer women are more comfortable with the vagina itself and possibly with female desire in general.

  Personally, I’m inclined to think yes. Throughout my depressingly heterosexual teens and early twenties, I always felt perfectly chill about, even delighted by, our many slang terms for the penis—dick, pickle, ding-dong, even plain old penis. But I was never able to find a word for vagina that didn’t make me squirm a little. I often defended my position with the argument that the word vagina itself is long, cumbersome, and lacks the plosive opening that makes penis so fun. Until I was seven, I actually pronounced the word “bagina” with a b, and when I discovered it actually started with a v, I suddenly liked it way less. Perhaps even my tiny self found that snappy b sound, the voiced sibling of the p in penis, more whimsical and inviting than the unwieldy v.

  Realistically, though, I know my issue with vagina was more complicated than that. And I am far from the only person who’s ever been put off by the word. Take it from Shonda Rhimes, creator of the hit TV series Grey’s Anatomy, who once told O, The Oprah Magazine that in an early episode of Grey’s, the word penis appeared thirty-two times and nobody blinked an eye, but when they tried to work vagina into the script just twice (and, again, this is a medical term), the higher-ups at broadcast standards objected.

  This is actually the very reason why the word va-jay-jay was invented in the first place. Rhimes heard an assistant use it on the set of Grey’s in the mid-2000s and instantly thought it was “the greatest phrase [she’d] ever heard.” After it was written into the script, America fell in love with it overnight. Soon, va-jay-jay became the vagina alternative of choice for gynecologists, moms, even Oprah herself. (“And YOU get a va-jay-jay, and YOU get a va-jay-jay!”)

  I think part of what people loved about va-jay-jay was that, unlike so many other slang words for the vagina, this one was female-invented and felt like it belonged to women. Plus, the sound of the word was friendlier than vagina (and certainly friendlier than something like cunt or twat). That repetition of jay-jay is reminiscent of baby language, like goo goo, ga ga, and hoo hoo. It made it sound cuter and more welcoming—“it” being both the word itself and the general concept of female sexuality, which has a long history of censorship, linguistic and otherwise.*

  All that said, there is technically nothing scary about the word vagina itself. Most of the replacements our language offers are much more frightening: ax wound, snake pit, beef curtains. These sound like something out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And it’s not like the more passive alternatives are much better—box, cave, garage. I don’t know about you, but my va-jay-jay is not just some lonely, empty pit waiting for a rod of pleasure to come fulfill its purpose. Adorable, friendly va-jay-jay doesn’t actually do it for me, either. After all, why must the idea of female sexuality only be palatable when it’s branded as cute? Not to mention, technically, the vagina is just the space connecting the uterus to the outside world—the canal itself, the “place to put a penis.” The vulva’s erogenous zones (the G-spot, the clitoris) aren’t even a part of how we refer to women’s genitalia at all.

  When it comes to the language of sex, our dick-centrism is so deeply ingrained that most people’s interpretation of the word fuck inherently involves a penis, even though the term itself does not actually suggest one. Before the fifteenth century, “to fuck” meant “to strike,” which has intense physical implications, sure, but not necessarily phallic ones. As a queer friend of mine named Molly once put it, our penile associations with fuck exist only because “people think you can’t fuck without a dick. Like lady sex is dainty and not real because there’s no man. Cisgender man on cisgender man sex? Real sex. Vagina on vagina sex? Not really real. I’ve totally been told by men that I can’t ever be fucked by a woman, which is so laughable to me that I don’t even get riled up about it.”

  All things considered, it is really no wonder that having grown up under the impression that a vagina is nothing but a vacant receptacle for a penis—a cum sponge, as it were—it takes most people who have vaginas decades (if they ever figure it out) to learn how to shtup* in a way that’s fun and satisfying, and not boring, depressing, or an unspoken mystery.

  There are linguists who’ve tried to understand where the language of our contemporary sex education went so wrong. Among them is a pair of scholars named Lisa Bland and Rusty Barrett (quirky names, quirky research), who broached the topic in a 1998 examination of sex advice from a handful of best-selling self-help books. A key topic in the books they investigated was teaching primarily heterosexual women how to “talk dirty” as a way of improving their experiences in bed. The authors of these books spent a lot of time urging women to get over the “guilt” of using “taboo words” by, for example, paying attention to the dialogue in porn, calling phone sex operators, and reading romance novels out loud.

  A woman named Barbara Keesling authored a 1996 book titled Talk Sexy to the One You Love, and in it she urges her readers to make written lists of sexy terms and practice saying them aloud. “Now, in the lowest of whispers, whisper the word ‘penis,’” she writes. “Whisper it again and again and again. Keep your eyes closed and keep thinking about your lover’s penis. . . . Whisper the word a little louder. Louder still. . . . Repeat this process for all of the words and phrases on your ‘penis’ list.” Next, she teaches her readers how to work these words into coherent conversation. “Sexy nouns can certainly spice up a sentence,” she writes, “but a nasty noun sitting dangerously close to a hot adjective or a sizzling verb can taste like five-alarm chili in your mouth.” (You can’t make this stuff up.)

  Th
e most advanced of Keesling’s steps is to practice what she calls sexual “bad libs,” which the reader can use as a script with her partner in bed. Some examples from the book:

  Your (noun) makes me so (adj.).

  Stick your (adj.) (noun) in my (adj.) (noun)!

  I need to feel your (adj.) (adj.) (noun) inside my (adj.) (adj.) (noun).

  (Verb) me like a (adj.) (adj.) animal!

  As gut-wrenchingly awkward as this advice is, it’s still better than that given by 1995’s Mars and Venus in the Bedroom. This self-help gem comes from John Gray, the same guy who wrote 1993’s best-selling Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Gray’s theory about why heterosexual couples aren’t having good sex is because men and women are hardwired to have such different desires and communication styles that they might as well be from different planets. Every piece of his advice stems from the notion that women don’t let men have sex with them enough and that men don’t provide enough emotional support to women for them to want to have sex. “Just as a woman needs love to open up to sex, a man needs sex to open up to love,” he writes, offering tips for how to negotiate this conflict, including that couples add “quickies” (aka brief sexual encounters where the woman doesn’t cum) to their sexual routines so that a man’s needs can be met without a woman having to put in too much effort.

  The problems with Gray’s advice are innumerable, but the first is that men and women are, in point of fact, not from two different planets. The reason why his heterosexual female readers are not enjoying their sex lives and are buying these books in the first place is not because they are from Venus, some distant celestial body where people are inherently unable to desire sex or orgasm. It is because on planet Earth, where we all live, there are social inequities that cause a power imbalance in the bedroom (or living room, back of the minivan, wherever), which makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for women to see themselves as a protagonist in sexual scenarios and have a vocabulary to express that.

  While one can argue that giving women advice on how to better enjoy sex is a feminist move, where Keesling’s and Gray’s tips fail is that they encourage women to accommodate to the heteronormative narrative of men’s taste and behavior, instead of attempting to help them restabilize this underlying sexual power imbalance. They do not give women a vocabulary of “dirty talk” of their own. As one paper on men’s and women’s sex talk from 1994 put it, “The domination of male culture over female, through such things as media representations of heterosexual relations . . . ensures that women see themselves to some extent through men’s eyes. Women have no discourses with which to speak about female sexuality and female desire.”

  This 1994 paper was written by a trio of psychologists named June Crawford, Susan Kippax, and Catherine Waldby (henceforth CKW). They conducted a study about the differences between how men and women talk about their sexual encounters and what these disparate speech styles say about Western sexual culture at large. For the study, CKW collected and analyzed nineteen separate all-female and all-male group discussions of sex experiences from their past. Many of the conversations included stories of awkward dates and first-time fondling, but some of the most interesting data came from men and women recounting very similar interactions with wildly different takeaways.

  In one of the discussions CKW analyzed, a man named Ian recalls a story from his teenage years when he and two friends picked up a group of girls at the beach. Ian describes having wanted to pair off with a girl who ended up going with one of his friends. To his disappointment, Ian was instead “left with this fat thing” (another girl) while his buddies “wandered away.”

  Another discussion CKW collected was a separate but very similar story from a woman (let’s call her Amy) about a time she and her friends, age sixteen, were hit on at the beach. One of Amy’s friends, Helen, could tell the guy she ended up with didn’t like her: “Ken was told that he could go with Helen . . . he didn’t seem too pleased about it,” Amy recalls. “Helen felt very embarrassed, she didn’t know what to do . . . she didn’t say much—the others told Ken that Helen liked him but that only seemed to make things worse . . . Helen felt that Ken believed that he had been allocated a totally unattractive social misfit.”

  Beyond the similarity of the two circumstances (the beach, the pickup), what these stories share is that the woman in question has no voice; her feelings are conveyed to the man by other people, if at all. Meanwhile, the man is expected to take the active role. He’s expected to be the initiator, the expert, and the girl is expected to go along with whatever he decides to do. In the latter story, both Amy and Helen wonder about Ken’s feelings, but never once in Ian’s account does he mention how the girl might have felt. Her humanity is so irrelevant, in fact, that he refers to her as a “thing.”

  And yet, even though the women in these stories (Helen, Amy, and likely the unnamed girl from Ian’s story) feel as though they understand the guys’ points of view, they do not attempt to share that out loud. They don’t say, “Hey! I can tell you’re not into me, and—good news—I’m not into you either, so how about we just don’t put ourselves through this, okay?” Instead, they follow the (unfortunate) unspoken rules of these sorts of interactions, which say the woman must “accept her status as object.” Her fate is determined by what the guy chooses to do. And according to our cultural standards of heterosexual masculinity and male sex drive, he is expected to want the sex and to pursue it, whether either of them actually wants it or not.

  The narratives of male and female desire that most of us grow up with say that it isn’t possible for a woman to want sex without also wanting some sort of commitment. That’s relevant because as CKW point out, it could be part of the reason why in casual sex scenarios, a dude so often fails to connect with what the woman wants. With her humanity. Sometimes he does, but that’s the exception. “Men seem to feel an obligation for commitment if they relate to their female partner as a person,” CKW determine. “She may be content with a one-night stand, but would prefer it to be with someone to whom she can relate person-to-person as well as body-to-body.” (Which seems fairly reasonable to me? Again, is this why lesbian sex is better?) Yet, it appears that on the whole, men often relate to women person-to-person only within ongoing relationships, not casual sex. Whether it be because the culture has taught him that all women are stage-four clingers or that his orgasm is the only real goal, a dude in a hookup scenario might unconsciously feel he must treat the woman like an object, or else he’ll trap himself into a serious dating situation instead of simply, I don’t know, becoming better at sex.

  CKW conclude their study with this vision for the future:

  A discourse of sex as pleasure, separating pleasure from procreation, and acknowledging women as active desiring and sexually assertive subjects, not necessarily centered around the erect penis, will challenge and confront established power structures. What is needed is a new mythology, one which speaks about mutual exploration, communication, discovery, and pleasuring one another, where penetration is not an end unto itself, but one of the many possibilities for erotic enjoyment.

  A big part of that new mythology is surely a reimagined lexicon of sex (a sexicon!) that allows people who aren’t cisgender dudes to talk about their bodies and desires from their own perspectives. In some communities, that lexicon is already being invented, and it starts where this chapter started: with what we call our genitalia.

  Lal Zimman has devoted a great deal of research to observing how self-identifying your own junk on your terms can be sexually empowering. His work has focused specifically on transgender communities, who take the challenge of genitalia renaming one step further by calling into question what we consider male and female bodies in the first place. To a trans person (one who hasn’t had gender confirmation surgery*), a doctor or dictionary might classify their bodies one way; but when you consider what we learned back in chapter 2 about the cultural baggage we bring when interpreting a person’s body, the logic behind that b
lack-and-white classification starts to unravel.

  If someone identifies as a woman even though they were assigned male at birth, can’t they call their junk a pussy if they want to, even if a physician might call it a penis? Can’t they use the language that feels most comfortable and affirming to describe their own bodies?

  As Zimman’s research has revealed, they can, and they do. He has carefully studied trans folks’ genital naming practices by looking at them in their most explicit, unfiltered state: on the internet—specifically in chat rooms, forums, and Craigslist hookup ads. In practice, trans people often use genital terminology that breaks the link that usually exists between gender and genitalia. If you look at dictionary definitions, they’ll typically list a description of a body part’s function and make a connection to the gender it “goes with” (e.g., “The part of the genital canal in the female”). What trans people often do, however, is select only one of those semantic elements when talking about their own bodies.

  The folks Zimman studied sometimes used both normatively male and normatively female terminology, depending on the context—and that included more technical terms, like vagina and clitoris, as well as vernacular terms like dick and pussy. “When they use traditionally female terminology, they’re referring to the structure,” Zimman explains, referencing these quotes from trans guys: “I’m not the only one who’s filled with hatred over his vagina, am I?”; “I feel utter revulsion toward my vagina”; and “I hate the idea of vaginal/anal penetration, and I tried to explain that I’m not a virgin and that I’ve just never had vagina sex before ’cause I’m just not comfortable with that.”

  What’s more common is for people to follow the opposite pattern and use slangy male terminology to refer to body parts that would normatively be seen as female, and same for slangy female terminology to talk about normatively male parts. In the first season of the Amazon TV series I Love Dick, a female character named Toby performs oral sex on an androgynous character named Devon, who has what a doctor would probably call a vagina; but as Toby is doing her thing down there, she refers to Devon’s junk as a cock. Trans YouTuber Alex Bertie does something similar, referring to what’s between his legs as a dick, even though he hasn’t had any surgery.