Most of us have names for the things between our legs. I generally think of mine as my bits, short for ‘women’s bits’, and if I refer to them, that’s the term I normally use. There are exceptions. When I see the doctor, I call it my vagina, and if I want to shock someone, my cunt. Sometimes, just for fun, I call it Sophie, but it’s always an ‘it’, and never a ‘her’. Other women call it their pussy, which isn’t a term I use myself, though I can see it’s fun.
If I were a man, I could still call the thing (or things) between my legs my bits, except that it would be short for ‘men’s bits’, and not women’s. The most usual vernacular term would appear to be ‘cock’, frequently in conjunction with balls.
In my stories, the terms the characters use reflect their nature. Gladys, in Ginger, calls her bits her thingy, the kind of euphemism that a woman of a certain age might use, and when she laments her long dead first lover, she thinks of his willie. Willie is also the name that young Billy uses for his bits in Billy And Rosie. For her part, Rosie differentiates between the inside, which she calls her cunt, and the hairy outside, which she describes as her pussy cat.
Mary, in The Virgin, opts for the anatomical ‘vagina’, and ‘penis’, having learnt about the latter mainly from books in the library.
The middle aged brother and sister in Butcher And Baker are strictly mainstream, apart from the incest, and the fact that he’s gay, going for cunt and cock. Peter and Em, in Post Mortem, also go for cunt and cock, quite literally, all the way to the end and beyond.
In Milk, the hormonal changes that Jan undergoes in pregnancy are accompanied by a change of nomenclature. She begins by thinking of it as her vagina, or genitals, and ends up thinking of it as her cunt. As for the male equivalent, in Milk, it’s mostly just a banana.
There are a host of other names for them in both sexes, some of which are fun, like bearded clam or one-eyed trouser snake. My lovely friend and fellow blogger billierosie pointed me to a website with a number of historical names for both lots. Her favourite is ‘altar of Venus’, and mine’s ‘Petticoat Lane’, which rhymes with Lady Jane, another of my favourites. However, outside of erotic romances, I have yet to meet a woman who refers to hers as ‘the core of her womanhood’, or a man who refers to his as his ‘length’.
What’s yours called?
