Names.

[rivka]

Okay, I have to post something so that bad news doesn't stay on the top of my journal for the week that we're at SUUSI. (Laptop was stolen, remember, so no updates from the road.) After packing every imaginable item in the world, however - do you have any idea how much gear three people, one of whom is a toddler, require for a week's active vacation bracketed by a long and tedious car trip? - I am out of energy for posting anything particularly brilliant, so I think I'll just point and rant:

What is with parents who deliberately decide to teach their daughters cutesy names for female genitalia? Especially, for god's sake, "girl parts" - which seems to be one of the most popular options? Should I go back and try to expunge the word "elbow" from Alex's vocabulary, in favor of "bendy parts?" After all, as these euphemizers point out defensively, it's not technically inaccurate.

Also: Something is seriously wrong when women who have actually had a baby come out of their vaginas don't understand the difference between a vagina and a vulva.

Also also: Something is extra-specially wrong with the linguist who claims that, because adult women futz around embarrassedly with euphemisms, it's not linguistically "correct" to teach children the anatomical names, because "it's not what native adult speakers spontaneously generate." What. The. Hell?

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Love the icon. I have no idea about the parents or the linguist. Just seems nuts to me.

[platypus]

I don't really get the popularity of calling the genital area the "bottom." I had no idea that could mean something other than buttocks, and it seems like it could cause confusion in circumstances where you might need to be a little more specific. And while reading the Vagina Monologues, I encountered a bit about women who shave their "vagina" and nearly spontaneously crossed my legs, because OW.

[platypus]

I, uh, just reached the part where menstrual blood became "moon juice." Wow.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Maybe people make up cutesy words because they don't want the words for their small child's body to have any sexual connotation, so they won't use the same words that they use for themselves and their partners? I'm not defending the practice, but that's a guess. To me penis and scrotum and vulva and vagina are appropriate in many contexts, but some other expressions are just about adult genitals and I would be creeped out by using them for a child.

[lietya.livejournal.com]

I am not a linguist, but I am a descriptivist lexicographer - and I call bullshit. Any linguist who wanted to make that argument would have to present some pretty convincing evidence in terms of frequency of use and "generation," and I sincerely doubt that you could prove that those terms are sufficiently *uncommon* as to make them inaccurate. Most native adult speakers do not "spontaneously generate" the vast majority of their vocabulary, and yet presumably this person would not argue against teaching children "water" and "walk" and "eyeball" because native adult speakers don't re-invent the wheel on those words.

(I'm kind of depressed about the inability to differentiate vulva from vagina, too... but not as much as I was by the 19-year-old college female who had to have it explained to her in our lounge one night that you didn't HAVE to remove a tampon in order to urinate.)

[eeyorerin]

And then, years later, their daughters (and their sons) show up at Scarleteen and have no idea what to call any of the bits of their anatomy and/or are too embarrassed to use the correct terms, and we have to spend several posts asking for clarification and provide diagrams so we can understand what they're talking about.

The one I hate most is "down there." Where? Your vulva? Your knees? Your toes? The earth's core?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Eeeuw. Though I was amused by 'Fine China', because anyone who knows Restoration comedy, in particular Wycherley's The Country Wife, associates this term with what Horner is going to show a number of gagging-for-it ladies who have been left with him by their husbands, who have been led to believe that Horner can no longer get it up. (A rumour he has had carefully disseminated to just this end.)

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with your rant, but I think it's a bit misdirected and possibly unkind. What is with these women is that they live in a culture where sexuality, especially female sexuality, is considered dirty; where nudity and genitalia are automatically considered to be associated with sex; where the body as a whole even is vaguely dirty and not-to-be-spoken of. Where I am careful to not post pictures of my kids with any genitals showing on Flickr, and where a friend had to take down a (not at all prurient) picture of her naked 18 month old daughter playing in the pool because it was getting crazy high viewing counts. Where some people probably consider the fact that my kids see me and my husband naked and bathe with us to be child abuse. Where a stranger in the supermarket might view the fact that a child knows the word vagina as evidence that the child is sexually abused. Our culture is fucked up; these women were probably not taught anything but euphemisms for female genitals as children. To me, "girl parts" seems like a big step forward from "down there" or nothing at all, which were probably prevalent in the previous generation. The fact that they are being exposed to this discussion at all is positive to me - maybe some minds have been opened.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of the scene in Mel Brooks's High Anxiety where he's delivering a psychiatric paper and sees kids in the front row, so he uses terms like "pee-pee envy." I was mentally saying, "Why does he want to make this stuff understandable for those kids? It makes no sense!"

[naomikritzer]

I'm actually highly amused by the person who uses "fine china" as a euphemism for the genitals. That's a lovely way to avoid the kid embarrassing you right up to the point where they hear someone talk about eating dinner off the fine china in a conversation where they actually mean, you know, plates and stuff.

I use vagina, vulva, penis, butt, and other standard terms for body parts. We do say "pee" rather than "urinate," "poop" rather than "defecate," etc., so it's not all-anatomy-text all the time around here or anything, but I do make a conscious effort not to use the cutesy euphemisms.

First, I've read that kids who don't learn the proper terms are more likely to be victims of sexual molestation. I don't know if this is true or an urban legend (Rivka, you probably actually know this, is it true?) but it's easy enough to just teach them the right words for the parts of their body.

Second, it goes along with my general philosophy towards early sex ed, which I got from my mother. She suggested that I answer all questions about where babies come from exactly the way I would answer questions about the digestive system. If a kid asks where your food goes when you eat it, you just explain it, even though poop is gross and kids find it funny. You limit the level of detail but it's determined by your kid's attention span rather than "OMG we can't tell them about poop YET, what if they tell all the other kids at preschool tomorrow during show & tell?"

As a bonus, it's actually much easier to explain this stuff to a young kid, because a really young kid is just curious. There's nothing prurient when they ask, there's no embarrassment, they just want some factual information.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Oh gods. I have seen (on an LJ community) a grown woman refer to her pubic hair as her "lady garden". FFS.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I just blogged yesterday that in Saturday's WashPost Free For All, a woman wrote in complaining that referring to Christina Aguilera's pregnancy as a "bun in the oven" was demeaning. I remember when it was indelicate to talk about pregnancy, which is when all those euphemisms were made up.

It sounds like some folks still think it's indelicate to talk about genitals and such.