SEXIS WRONG

er talking to the couple who use Baby and Home for penis
and vulva. With much laughter and side glances, they told
me about a card he had drawn for her showing a small house
with a path leading up to it and a baby crawling up the path.
Here’s another story:
When I went up to visit him at college, he said,
“I’d like you to meet the new Peter.” [Peter J.
Firestone; see quote above.] And I said, “Aw,
c’mon.” Standard joke. And he came back from
the shower…with a pair of sunglasses on the
suspended penis, hanging out as if it were a nose,
and then of course he’s got hair down there and
his smiling scrotum underneath, and it was the
funniest thing I ever saw in my life!... [T]hat was
“the new Peter”—the new look.
Talking and Not Talking About Sex. Genital pet names can
also help people talk about sex in the broader sense. Many
kids are not taught the “correct” terms for genitals. They may
grow up with only expressions like dickey bird for penis or
muffin for vulva—or with no words at all. 10 Girls especially
may not know vulva, clitoris, or vagina. Or the youngsters
may know the words but not be able to use them. I heard one
story from a teacher in the Midwest about an eighth-grade
boy who told dirty jokes and used four-letter words, but who
became very upset when the teacher used penis in normal
conversation.
“He calls mine Hot and Juicy, while
I call his My Favourite Member.”
Even when adults know all the words, they still may be uncomfortable
with both correct and slang terms. Certainly, penis,
vulva, and vagina can be associated quite unpleasantly
with doctors and textbooks. But genital slang conjures up
those dirty jokes. One woman in her late thirties expressly
told me that she was uncomfortable with all four-letter words.
Another admitted, “Because of the kind of people that we
were [when she was twenty, in the 1950s], it was awfully
hard to talk about sex directly.” Sex educators working on
college campuses have told me that although the students
in their twenties may be using dirty words, they don’t like to
mix them with intimacy and romance. One educator said that
nearly 50% of her classes in New York City gave some sort
of idiosyncratic synonym or name when asked for terms for
genitals:
I said [to the classes], “What are the advantages of
these names? Why have another name for it?” [The
names were] very similar to the street language,
except the street language has no lovingness in it,
and doesn’t have that personalization that a pet
name has.... They associate a lot of those [street]
words—they’re not positive words all the time.
They’re used to insult someone. And they’re too
common. I think most people feel special about
the body. They don’t want to use one word used
by 87 million people.
The following comment in my files echoes this:
He calls mine Hot and Juicy, while I call his My
Favourite Member. When I first met him I simply
referred to it as Peter, but I soon wanted a name
which would be unique and original in that it
probably isn’t used by anyone else.
So here is why I found so few duplicate names. Nearly everybody
wants something special and different. Thus, even if
1001 Nifty Names for Naughty Bits were published, it would
be more likely to inspire readers to come up with original
names than choose any from the book. Because genital pet
names are private, owners and their intimates have ultimate
freedom in choosing them. They can pick Agamemnon—or
Happy Fella (real examples). They don’t have to keep up with
the Johnsons’ johnson.
A colleague of mine, a marriage counselor for several years,
told me:
One of the things we frequently encountered
were people who were having a great deal of
difficulty verbally communicating about sex,
and the reason was that they were
extremely...uncomfortable with what
they considered to be profane words,
and they were uncomfortable with the
official Latin terminology. And what was typically
going on, then, was just nothing. With lack of a
label, people weren’t talking.
So...after playing around with it for a while, I
thought about the possibility of using made-up
words. So we started doing that in therapy, and
we found it to be very successful. A lot of couples
who had had trouble before really got into it,
found it very enjoyable, and developed a whole
new vocabulary for sex organs and sexual acts....
From a therapeutic point of view, it was a very
good idea, because, in addition to giving them
a label that they could use to communicate and
increase the effectiveness of what they were
doing,... it [also] created a very nice thing for them
to do together. The process of thinking up names
and developing this whole new vocabulary was a
278 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG