Hi horny readers! Thank you so, so much for reading ADULT SEX ED, a newsletter about the stories behind our sexual beliefs—where they came from, who invented them, and why they stuck.
I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a filmmaker, writer, and performer. A while back, I started to ask myself a question: why do we think what we think about sex? Expect investigative articles, weird sex history, and sharp humor, delivered to your inbox every week. Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!
For the second year in a row, August is Say Vagina Month. But why would we need a whole month dedicated to saying the anatomically correct name of an organ?
Saying, or writing, the word VAGINA online can get you shadowbanned, suppressed, and restricted on the same platforms where it’s very much OK to be a literal Nazi. For sex educators, doctors, or anyone else who tries to market anatomically correct products and content aimed at women, that makes things very hard. What we end up with are hoo-has, nether regions, cooters, pleasure places, doo-dahs, and other terms that make you sound like Ariel from The Little Mermaid went into porn.
Medical professionals who use the word penis online face far less digital backlash, and erectile dysfunction ads have been running basically everywhere for years. Offline, using proper terminology helps patients communicate clearly with medical providers, leading to better diagnoses and breaking through feelings of shame or embarrassment, which is harder to do when you’re used to describing your organs as “down there.”
We can learn a lot about the evolution of cultural attitudes about women, bodies, and sex by exploring the history of slang. I did a deep dive on the history of euphemisms for the vagina for a live show I hosted in 2019 and published it here. There were many more euphemisms for female body parts than male body parts because they’ve always been taboo, preventing honest conversations about women’s health for millennia.
The slang timeline starts with a word much maligned and much celebrated—cunt. If you think it’s particularly edgy, please be advised that this slang term has been around since the 1200s, and our moms have been yelling at us ever since. It’s probably the most taboo slang term for vagina in the U.S., but an ironic term of endearment among close friends in the UK. It’s social-media-ban-worthy, unless you’re a groyper sending a woman a DM.
My favorite slang term for vagina from the 1300s and possibly of all time is a quaint. It’s sounds so dainty and conveniently rhymes with taint! By the turn of the 16th century, things were a little less genteel and vaginas were often compared to receptacles:
trench, dock, oven, leather purse.
Later in the 1500s, we’ve reached our playground phase. Likely to get you kicked out of my bed are the words:
pleasure place, bung hole, nonny nonny
By the 1600s, vaginas again sounded like they were named by Ariel in The Little Mermaid:
what-do-you-call-it, you-know-what, flapdoodle, crinkum-crankum
She’s a bit of a twat, which came into the English language in 1656.
In the 1700s, this country’s founders were locking up ownership of the new nation, and people on both sides of the pond were super into real estate:
tenement, cock loft, cock lane
By the 1800s, the only thing that was clear was that the vagina was much enjoyed, but you might get trapped:
man’s pleasure garden, cock trap, pleasure pit, the enemy
The enemy?!
In the 1900s through today, many of the new slang names were rooted in entertainment, like:
stairway to heaven, breakfast of champions, orphan annie, golden doughnut, Hairy Potter, and the batcave.
The euphemisms weren’t always given to the vagina as a whole. Nicknames for a vulva include bits, penis fly trap, pink taco, and beef curtains. I pointed out in Discovering the Clitoris that the clit received euphemisms of her own, like bean, nubbin, love button, sweet spot, and the devil’s doorbell.
What’s crazy to me isn’t that someone called a vagina a golden doughnut and possibly still got laid. It’s how consistent the slang has been over time. While the euphemisms for a penis through time have often been some kind of weapon or useful tool, vaginas have often been infantilized or compared to receptacles, homes, or holes.
There’s no excuse for an anatomically correct term for a body part that more than half the world has to result in online restrictions. Some of these nicknames are fun as hell, but when a gynecologist starts a TikTok account to combat the false information spread on the internet, they should be able to shout the word VAGINA and not resort to Sigourney Beaver (OK, that’s a personal favorite of mine).
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