Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

7 Sex and bodily effluvia
This chapter examines the language for sex, gender, sexuality, sexual behaviours,
tabooed bodily functions and effluvia from the organs of sex, micturition
and defecation (SMD organs). Sexual activity is tabooed as a topic for
public display and severely constrained as a topic for discussion. The language
of sexual pleasuring and copulation gives rise to a great deal of verbal
play and figurative language. Rather curiously for something that is indulged
in for fun, as we saw in Chapter 3, it is also a source for terms of heinous
insult; this is presumably a hangover from a time when all sex was unholy,
except as necessary for procreative purposes between married couples. Our
discussion of the language of bodily functions and effluvia makes a special
study of the menstruation taboo.
Sex, gender and sexuality
It behoves us to define a few of the categorical terms we use. Sex is
anatomical, and most people are born to one or the other sex (though a few
are born sexually ambiguous and must be surgically altered to one of the
sexes if they are not to remain that way). A person’s gender is his/her identity
as a certain kind of social being; gender normally coincides with sex, but it
does not necessarily do so. People whose gender does not match their sex may
choose to become transsexual and be chemically and/or surgically changed.
All possible combinations of female, male, masculine and feminine occur; for
instance, female-to-male transsexuals who prefer relationships with gay
males! This last is an expression of sexuality: having certain kinds of sexual
desires. 1 The two classic orientations are heterosexuality and homosexuality;
these terms came into use in the mid nineteenth century, although the practices
have been with humankind since the beginning. At first, heterosexual
sex was any kind of non-procreative male–female sex, including oral sex.
Today, it is used of any kind of sexual intercourse between male and female.
Homosexuality is a degree of sexual intercourse between individuals of the
same sex. However, as we shall see, the true picture of sexual relations among
human beings is nothing like so cut and dried.
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