When I was writing It isn’t Rude to be Nude I started like this, much the same as the book is now:
”It isn’t rude to be nude
Everyone has a bum
Nipples are normal
Willies are not silly…”
And then I came to female genitalia, and there just was not an equivalent word to willy. There’s fanny, but that has some negative connotations, and means bottom in the US, so that wouldn’t work. Then there’s the cute words - noo-noo, front bottom, twinky, etc. And then the not so cute - clunge, tw*t, c*nt, the anarchic euphemism cunny (which I actually quite like, but I don’t think can single handedly bring back). And of course vagina, a ‘proper’ word, but it’s often used to incorrectly describe all of the female genitalia when it is just one part (I actually used this in the first iteration of the book, before I’d found a publisher, but was never very happy with it).
If you compare the list above to the words we have for male sex organs then I think it’s fair to say that men get off relatively lightly. Yes they can be d*cks, and c*cks, but are those the worst insults you can think of? No, you’d call a really awful person a c*nt (I mean I do).
I think willy is a good and useful word, and that boys are lucky to have it, and I wish girls had something as neutral and free of baggage, which is why I used vulva. It is the anatomically correct word for the external female genitalia, and it’s little used, so I thought it would be good for children to learn and use it as a more neutral word if they’d like to.
Some reviewers and readers said they would have preferred it if I’d used the correct words for all body parts, and it’s true that if children know the correct names then they are better able to describe what’s happened to them if they’ve been abused.
I think this is very interesting and valid, but it did not make me want to change my language. There is nothing stopping parents from reading my book and having a conversation with their children about the ‘proper’ words for their bits. My book is not an anatomy book - there are plenty of them out there already. Instead it’s a lighthearted, funny book that uses language that children are mostly familiar with to introduce a topic that can be difficult to talk about. I did not want to use bottom, penis, or breasts, and vulva was used because I did not have a better word.
Gender
Some readers and reviewers have picked up on the fact that I do not use the word boy, girl, man or woman in the book. This is very much on purpose. I feel quite strongly that we are too attached to the binaries of gender and sex, and believe that this is unhealthy.
Although we live in an era of increasingly gender equality, we also live in a world of exaggerated gender performance, where hyper feminine and masculine bodies are idealised, and where babies are given gender reveal parties while still in utero.
When I first heard of these parties, I honestly thought they were for people who were transitioning to make their new identities official. But actually, children are indicated as pink or blue before they’ve even taken their first breath, and their clothes are colour coded as soon as they’re out in the world, because (I think) the ambiguous gender of babies makes people uncomfortable. How can you condition for gender if you don’t know the sex of the child?
Anyway, back to the book. I did not want to say that boys have willies and girls have vulvas, that girls grow boobs. I wanted to keep open the possibility that anyone could have these genitals, or may or may not grow breasts.
Other language
I’ve always had ‘imperfect’ skin: I have freckles, lots of moles, two birthmarks, and a skin condition. So in the book I liked the idea of rebranding these perceived defects as just part of the amazing variety that humans come in:
“Bodies come in all shapes and sizes / And in lots of different colours and markings”.
Why shouldn’t we think of ourselves in the way we think of other animals, who are celebrated for their variety? Why can’t vitiligo or a scar be seen as as individual as a beautiful tattoo, and skin colour to be just the shade that you happen come in?