Filthy English, page 11
Where, though, is the clitoris in our slanguage? There are, it’s true, various slang words for something that is, after all, so useful. Taking my reading and listening as a fair, if clearly unscientific, guide, the most popular non-scientistic words for it seem to be ‘clit’, followed at some distance by ‘bud’. There is also the descriptive ‘(little) man in the boat’ which Ayto and Simpson’s Stone The Crows: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang dates back to 1979.
I’m also certain there are a boundless number of private terms for it – words so intimate that they might not even be shared with a sex partner. But a general, well-known word that could be written on walls to shock, thrill or titillate? As cunt is, still, in English. As landica was, in the brothels of Pompeii? No. If the Roman clitoris occupied what is, to us, an incomprehensibly elevated position in the classical pantheon of bad language, so the English clitoris is quite remarkably absent from our dirty words chart. The Roman clitoris might have been a bad thing but its presence, if worrying, was at least acknowledged. The English clitoris, in slang terms, has been an absence. The thing that isn’t there – barely, anyway.
I’m not the first to wonder about this. In 1943, New York psychoanalyst Abram Blau raised the question in a paper entitled ‘A Philological Note on a Defect in Sex Organ Nomenclature’. Psychoanalysts and therapists can be a good source of sexual and scatological slang. Classical Freudians were particularly interested in early experience and sex, of course. All that wee and poo. Freud’s own life was, he wrote, shaped by seeing his mother naked on a train. After that, he always had something of a train phobia.
Blau noted, dryly, ‘psychoanalytic observations offer abundant empirical evidence that the clitoris receives a great deal of attention from the female child and adult’. Then, having checked the dictionaries, he asked the question: ‘Is it not therefore surprising that, except for scientific technology, there seems to be no vernacular, slang or obscene word in the English or American language to designate this organ?’ From his desk, at the depth of wartime, he searched the world, making ‘inquiries among natives of other countries, psychiatrists and lay people’. He reported the German Kitzler (tickler) but otherwise, his respondents all came up blank or, in his words, reported ‘a similar linguistic deficiency’. That is, it’s not just English-speakers who have no popular clitoris-word, it’s everyone – in Blau’s survey at any rate.
What he found was confirmed, mostly, in a subsequent paper by his colleague Dr Leo Kanner, which appeared two years later, as the war was drawing to a close. While generally agreeing with Blau, though, Kanner did find a lot more clitoris-words. He listed three in ancient Greek – none of them clitoris and one of them a fruit metaphor, myrtleberry. He quoted an eighteenth-century German list of no fewer than fifteen Latin words, including columella (little pillar), virga (twig), oestrum veneris (sexual frenzy), tentigo (something which can erect itself) and mentula (penis). No place for landica, though. Probably because, as Kanner admits, these were all probably words used by Roman ‘scientists’ – while landica was popular and therefore obscene.
So, noting that most English-language dictionaries of slang ‘steer prudishly clear of any reference to voluptuous jargon’, he went on to study the pages of Anthropophyteia, a German publication which collected European ‘Idiotica’ – popular words and phrases. Here, he found the Italian allegria (gaiety), the southern Italian ribrenzulo (seat of shivers), the Czech postivacek (little thriller), the Prussian Schiepe (little strip), the Westphalian Kujon (bad man) and the Dalmatian Slavic sjekilj (tickler).
He also found one word for the clitoris common right across German-speaking central Europe: der Jud, the Jew. Which, given what was going on in that part of the world at that time, is something of a surprise, not to mention shock. In Viennese German, there was even the phrase, ‘Am Jud’n spiel’n’. Like all early psychoanalysts, like Freud himself, when faced with uncomfortably direct sexual expression, Kanner retreated into fanciful Latin, translating the phrase as ‘fellare vel irrumare clitorem’. In simple English its meaning is clear: ‘play with the Jew’. Or rather, play with the male Jew. If this clitoris were female, it would be die Jude. But it’s not. There, I guess, is the derivation. The reference is to the glans of an uncircumcized penis. Which suggests that at least some central-European German-speaking women must have known the visual reality of their masturbation metaphor.
Kanner found a few more clitoris-words beyond Europe: the Abyssinian ginter (tickler), for example. I found a few myself, through reading and asking around. There weren’t many, though. Hardly any, in fact – and I’m certain it’s not just because it’s a man doing the asking. In Menomini, a native American language, it’s ne: nake: hsêh, little penis. In both Maori and Samoan, it’s tona – wart. In Yapese, a Micronesian language, it’s qathean – a small fish. There’s a local joke about it.
Speaker one: Ku gu waen nga fitaaq’ fowngaan. (I went fishing last night.)
Speaker two: Mang ea kam koel? (What did you catch?)
Speaker one: Qathean. (Small fish/clitoris.)
‘Only one conclusion is logically tenable,’ Blau wrote in his original paper. ‘This imperfection in language must indicate a form of cultural evasion. Such avoidance must be significant.’ And this significance is, Dr Blau? That the not-naming of the clitoris is a ‘magical’ way of hiding it. ‘With a name, an object becomes a more definite part of objective reality; without one, it is obscured.’ But why? As a good classical Freudian, Blau rejects the idea of social or cultural pressures. If it were merely a case of ‘cultural discrimination against women regarding sex’, then there would still be slang words for the clitoris. Anyway, this obscuring seems universal – which means it must be human and individual rather than social.
So? Again, Blau is his classical Freudian self. He points the reader to what he saw as every child’s ‘exaggerated evaluation of the phallus and a reciprocal depreciation of its absence in the female.’ He outlines his theoretical precepts: penis envy in women, castration anxiety in men. He says these would inevitably excite shame and anxiety. And: ‘We would then understand this verbal ostracism of the clitoris, by both men and women, to indicate that organ as not only being unworthy of notice but as requiring special repression and concealment.’ Yet, I find myself thinking, we don’t bother repressing or concealing the inconsequential. We reserve that for the kind of stuff we take very seriously indeed. Others take a more feminist view, that the lack of clitoris words is a patriarchal denial of female sexual pleasure. Both Greek and Roman society, though, had the words and were at least as patriarchal as late nineteenth-century Europe. Also, the women in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell et al. never don’t enjoy sex. It’s the word that went missing, too, not the thing itself.
And women still struggle, though, to find words for their … bits, their vaginas/vulvas, in particular. ‘There is still no playground equivalent of willy, no descriptive term that isn’t clinical, coy or misogynistic,’ wrote Libby Brooks in February 2008. ‘Fanny is too twee, pussy too porny – and cunt remains the most shocking word in the language.’ Michele Hanson is a grown woman who worked as a teacher in London and who writes a newspaper column. One week, she wrote about her friend Rosemary who could not even say ‘breast’, preferring the six-word circumlocution ‘upper body and not my heart’. Hanson felt the same. She can’t say ‘the V, P, N, G or B words in public or private.’ Vagina, penis, nipples, obviously. B: breasts and bottom, I suppose. But G? Groin? Gash? Gusset? She admitted to being ‘stuck’ on ‘chest’ and ‘front bottom’. As I said, Michele Hanson is a grown woman.
C. S. Lewis wrote: ‘As soon as you deal with it [sex] explicitly, you are forced to choose between the language of the nursery, the gutter and the anatomy class.’ Not just in English, either. In French, there is con (offensive if used to refer to the thing itself rather than to an idiot) and there is vagin but between them nothing, no word that is simple, direct, both non-scientific and non-obscene. I had a conversation about this – at a friend’s birthday lunch on a Chinese boat-restaurant – with a London-based French investment banker. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. ‘In French, as in English, there is no middle word for it.’ He laughed. He remembered that there is, kind of, a French word for it. It’s le moyen – the middle. Which leads me to think that the cunt/con difference doesn’t mean that there is a total distinction between English and French attitudes to the thing itself. If French women (and French men) were actually as easy about vaginas as the use of the word con might indicate, then they wouldn’t also be stuck in le moyen without a regular word for ‘it’. On the other hand, as an insult con does mean stupid while cunt always means something far stronger.
So what word could, in English, sit comfortably and usefully between cunt and vagina? Could there be one that had no connotations of violence, the consulting room or silliness – and still retained a certain sexiness? In early 2009, a group of women novelists got together and published a collection of ‘unashamedly sexy stories’ entitled In Bed With. Not so unashamed, though, that they’d use their real names. (Pseudonymy: sounds like a perversion, doesn’t it.) Knowing one of the editors, Maggie Alderson, I got her to send me an electronic copy of the book. I did a count of the words they used, for their own parts and their partners’.
In this 334-page dirty book, there are: seven cunts, four pussies, three vaginas, three labias, three bushes, one vulva, one fanny but no twats or front bottoms; five tits (all in the same story), four titties (all in one other story), twenty-two nipples and fifty-seven breasts (four stories have seven apiece); fifteen clitorises (four in one story) and two clits (both on the same page). Men? There are forty-three cocks (seventy-four per cent of them in just four of the twenty stories), nineteen penises (ten in one story), one dick and no pricks; nine balls but no bollocks or testicles. Sexual activity? No cunnilingus or fellatio and the only bugger is a non-sexual expletive. Fucks and fucking? There are forty-five sexual ones (thirteen in one story, a tale of revenge) and eleven non-sexual ones. There is one roger, one bonk and five shags, all of them humorous or dismissive. And there are ninety-one kisses.
A fair picture, I’d say, of which words are used for what by literate, educated, middle-class twenty-first-century Englishwomen – when their noms de porn lull them into thinking no-one’s counting. In particular, you can’t help notice how they seem to elide the fact that they don’t really seem to have words for their own sexual parts by avoiding them all together. They have no such difficulties, though, with words for male genitalia.
I shared my stats with Maggie. She laughed, then talked about cunts. ‘In a sexual sense, it’s a really sexy word. Women find it sexy because it’s really filthy and rude. Yet also, in those four letters there are more sexual politics than in any other word in the English language – which is what makes it such an incredibly powerful word when used by both men and women.’
We talked about the paucity of words for female parts and about what she felt about the words that there were. ‘I think twat is quite a good word. I think breasts is really sexy while tits I find offensive. I hate pussy.’ She reminded me that ‘there’s no word for female ejaculatory fluid’ and no slang for g-spot. ‘It’s a really terrible name for it, isn’t it, g-spot. Really, really 1970s.’ Not many for clitoris, either. ‘Pleasure button,’ she said. ‘And pleasure pearl. I’ve heard both of those recently.’ And she went off to collect her child from school.
So does ‘cunt’ still carry the weight it has for so long or is it going the way of ‘fuck’? I found out in the mid-summer of 2008. I was in Cornwall. Flicking through the What’s On section of the local paper, I saw an ad for The Vagina Monologues. It was playing at the Hall for Cornwall in Truro, about forty minutes’ drive away. ‘The Worldwide Sell-out Success’ said the ad. As if it were, say, an Andrew Lloyd Webber show. And: ‘Now in it’s 10th amazing year!’ As if it were an ice spectacular perhaps. And: ‘The Ultimate Girls’ Night Out!’ As if it were a troupe of male strippers.
It was running the whole week. Two shows a night on Friday and Saturday. Somehow, I’d never seen it. I bought tickets for Wednesday – four in all, for my wife, my daughter and her French boyfriend. As I drove to the theatre, I thought: I’m taking not just my wife but my daughter and her boyfriend to see a stage show which I am sure will be, essentially, gynaecological. Shouldn’t I be more than a little worried about this? Is this a normal thing for a father to do? Or at least an acceptable one? And I thought: well, yes, I know my daughter’s a woman and I know what that involves – not that we’ve ever talked about it or ever would. That would be unacceptable. Almost to my surprise, I just didn’t seem concerned and nor did anyone else. It’s possible we all talked ourselves into calm, telling ourselves we’re adults, this is all part of all our lives, any other view is illusion. If that’s so, it worked. It’s true I was a little worried, but mostly about how her boyfriend might find it. The father and son-out-law relationship will always have its own complexities and silences. There was some tightness in the car on the drive up, I think, but you’d have to be one of us to have spotted it.
I’ve long had a soft spot for Truro. I spent one of the best holidays of my childhood there, in hospital. Playing on a rocky beach about an hour to the north, I’d slipped on a rock, cracked my head on another rock and spilled a lot of blood. I didn’t shout ‘Fuck!’, though – to my parents’ relief, I expect. I was probably too shocked. I was taken, at some speed, to Truro General and spent most of the rest of the holiday there. I loved it. I was in no pain, as I told everyone who examined me. They should have guessed anyway. About ten minutes after the accident when blood was still sheeting down my face, someone handed me that traditional 1950s British miracle medication, a cup of hot, sweet tea, I said: ‘No thanks. I don’t take sugar.’ I was that kind of child.
I was allowed to read books all day in the hospital. It was warm – far warmer than our holiday camp chalet anyway. The nurses were attractive and attentive. There was a monster child in a side room – or so ward whispers had it. My sister wasn’t there. Nor were my cousins. When my parents came to pick me up, I did my best to hide my disappointment. I don’t think I did a very good job. I was that kind of child.
So Truro’s always been a kind of madeleine for me. A brick-stone-and-mortar memory of the best bits of my childhood. An adventure on the beach which ended bloodily but happily. In fact, I think I would have liked the town anyway. It has some fine Georgian streets, a clumsy cathedral and a central square with a quayside from which, despite being nine miles inland, you can take a ferry down to the sea. In most other ways, though, it could be any pleasant, middle-class town that’s a bit out of the way, a bit behind the times – and not where I would expect The Vagina Monologues to play for eight shows in one week.
The Vagina Monologues premiered in 1996, in the basement of the Cornelia Street Café in New York’s Greenwich Village. On 3 October, it moved eight blocks or so south down 6th Avenue to HERE, a tiny arts centre. It had a cast of one: its 45-year-old writer, Eve Ensler. Abused child, former alcoholic and drug addict, lesbian, political activist, Ensler composed it, from 200 interviews with women, to ‘celebrate the vagina’. A series of monologues unlinked by anything beyond the title, it’s most often performed by three actresses on stools, in simple, modest black and bare feet. There is as much violence in it as there is sex, maybe more. ‘I’m obsessed with women being violated and raped, and with incest,’ said Ensler in an interview. ‘All of these things are deeply connected to our vaginas.’
I remember hearing about the show shortly after it opened. I remember thinking that it all sounded very late 1970s/early 1980s downtown Manhattan – a bunch of monologues in search of an audience. Feminism, the reality of violence against women, forthright sexual language – they always had a place on the fringe but never found one in the mainstream. I thought no more would be heard of it. At most, maybe it would enter the pantheon of consciously gynaecological feminist artworks – Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, for example, a 39-place table setting for famous women, each represented by a plate containing some kind of ceramic vagina. Or rather, vulva – to correct the same inside-outside confusion that Ensler makes in The Vagina Monologues. Her show is far more concerned with external appearance than internal narrative. A ‘Vulva Club’ wrote to Ensler about this anatomical mistake, pointing out that it should really have been called The Vulva Monologues, adding that naming it after the vagina was like calling our lips our mouth. Still, the word ‘vulva’ itself has already migrated south. It was originally the Latin for womb.
I was completely wrong about the nicheness of The Vagina Monologues, though. It moved further and further uptown. From HERE to the Westside Theater on West 43rd to, eventually, Madison Square Gardens. In England, it progressed from a few weeks of Ensler herself performing it at the King’s Head, a north London pub theatre, to the West End and several national tours. Around the world, it’s played in at least 119 countries in at least 44 translations. It was made into a TV show, with Ensler herself – made by HBO, banned in Malaysia. In 2001, there was a Mormon version. It was renamed Sacred Spaces: Mormon Women’s Faith and Sexuality.
It’s won enough awards that you’d have to take your shoes off to count them. It’s contributed £25 million to its off-shoot charity, V-Day, founded by Ensler. It’s made itself a major place on the cultural landscape. You can tell that because it’s a regular in punning headlines – The Obama monologues etc. It’s attracted many a famous actress, eager to dress in simple black and talk about vaginas, rape in Bosnia, facts about the clitoris and the opportunity to lead an audience in a collective chant of cuntcuntcuntcuntcuntcunt. If that’s not social change, what is?
