As you have probably read by now, Michigan state Representative Lisa Brown was disciplined by House leadership and barred from speaking on the floor of the House when during debate on an abortion bill she made a speech that referred (in part) to her own vagina. Accounts vary of course about the rationale behind the ban and the political fallout of same, though it was curious to many that the moderately clinical vagina had become a word so charged that it presented a threat to decorum; this initial account of the flap from the Detroit News includes perhaps the most entertaining response (or the perhaps the most tone-deaf, though the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive) to the whole affair:
“What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, R-Nashville. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”
When this news broke, I of course immediately thought of an article from psychiatrist Mildred Ash, “The Vulva: A Psycholinguistic Problem,” in the Winter, 1980 issue of Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression (Maledicta of course being the premier Legmanian journal for the study of obscenity), an article in which she argues that vagina has in fact become a sort of euphemism people are taught as a substitute for the external female genitals more properly referred to as the vulva. Ash notes,
I have reviewed the astonishing absence of the word vulva from our vocabulary. It remains unknown and unheard, unspoken in polite society, while the word vagina passes with almost as much ease as the word penis into common use. The word vulva is not being taught to children early in life, so it cannot become acceptable as the word penis is.
After rereading Ash’s article, I would suggest that vagina has become the accepted public face (so to speak) of the entire female reproductive system to such an extent that it causes a certain amount of lexical confusion, so that when Rep. Brown might more accurately have referred to the regulation of her uterus in her speech on the floor of the House, she instead substituted the quasi-clinical polite formulation vagina; to those who instead profess to have heard in the parliamentary vagina something impolite or unfit for mixed company, perhaps the problem was that the term evokes unconscious associations with the taboo vulva (or as Ash suggests),
Men use the word vagina because using this scientific word enables them to master their fear of people who have no penis and do mysterious things like menstruate and have babies. [Ash is if you have not already guessed something of a Freudian.] To both sexes the word vulva seems more closely related to obscenity.
One of course need not be concerned with the finer shades of politeness surrounding the public discussion of reproductive organs to find something of interest in Maledicta, though having at least a passing interest in how we talk about the reproductive act certainly seems in order. Early numbers of the journal include such gems ranging from “Attacking Deviations from the Norm: Poetic Insults in Bono (Ghana)” by D. M. Warren & K. O. Brampong (in the second issue, the Gershon Legman festschrift), to “Sacre Quebec! French-Canadian Profanities” by Nancy Huston, to “Malediction and Psycho-Semantic Theory: The Case of Yiddish” by James A. Matisoff, to L. Herrera’s “How to Judge People’s Character by Their Farting Styles.” Early examples of collections of gay slang, ethnic insults, etc. also abound.
Updated and edited to note, I had a set of the first twelve volumes available for purchase but it has since been sold. The description is given below in the interests of historical curiosity.
Reinhold Aman, editor. Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression. Waukesha, Wisconsin [later Santa Rosa, California: The Maledicta Press, 1977-1996. Volumes I-XII (in 15 bound volumes), original printed yellow wrappers. The famed scholarly journal that carries on the spirit of Gershon Legman, with numerous articles on various and varied forms of obscenity and other uses of “verbal aggression,” ranging from ethnic insults to genital slang to informal glossaries of Domino’s Pizza employee slang. Irregularly published, initially in two numbers per annual volume, with some gaps in time (viz. Volume XI, 1990-1995) but no gaps in sequence. Some light dust-soiling and wear and sunning; in very good condition.
