Time for some cunning linguistics
In case my first post didn’t make it clear, you’ll find quite a few profane words on Philosophilia (vagina isn’t a swear word; do you find it profane? I do—more on that in a moment). When your subject is the ways in which civilised societies exaggerate, entrench and enhance the structural vulnerability of gestators—hear me out—or rather, those built to function as such, and the power that impregnators (or rather, those built to function as such) can physically wield over their other and thus over the rest of the world, well, you come straight up against our deepest taboos.
In the future when Philosophilia has the resources, I plan to produce study materials on the politics of penetration that are suitable for use in schools—but that’s not today’s project. Today I want to tell you why I hate the word vagina.
Vagina is the Latin word for sheath. This is not merely a descriptor of form, but also of function: something else belongs in a sheath. Something is sheathed; that’s the nature of the word. But the passageway from a woman’s uterus to the outside world is not a sheath. It is a way in, and a way out; it is not a freaking scabbard. No object belongs in there. It is the most phallocentric label imaginable, reducing the great channel of a woman’s power-centre to “where I stick my dick”.
In fact, I wish I never had to say or write or hear or read that damn word ever again—or at least that it be given the status of profanity, not because it names the obscene but because it misnames the sacred. It takes ownership of women’s reproductive agency away from them and allots it to men, to penises, to the phallus. It’s a blight on the western world’s understanding, forgodsake.
But what chance does anyone have of changing it? And then, of course—the world being the adorably messed up, gloriously resilient place it is—along comes Eve Ensler with The Vagina Monologues—an inspired, inspiring, straight-from-life account of how deeply and drastically women’s possession of gestatory organs can define and compromise their experience (a reality many feminists don’t want to acknowledge any more than conservatives want it discussed)—and a noble attempt to reclaim the Latin medical term for polite conversation. But you can’t reclaim something that was never properly yours; ‘owning’ a word that defines you as auxiliary compromises your actual right to ownership. Of course, my quibbles with problematic etymology aside, I would give The Vagina Monologues credit for its frank, respectful, subversive gynamory (no, you will not find that in the dictionary but you can figure it out), and for its flexibility of production. It’s a perfect example of how complicated everything has gotten.
So, if we don’t call this passageway a vagina, what should we call it? Well, some people prefer vulva. From the Latin for to turn, roll, revolve, curve around, vulva would be a fair choice (though descriptive merely of form, not function) to replace vagina if it wasn’t already in use nearby. It now commonly refers—with again cheerful disregard for etymological niceties—to the entire female external genital area—labia majora and minora, clitoris, opening to the vagina, urethra, perineum. Originally, though, in the Latin, it was even less specific, referring in genital context to the whole shebang (so to speak)—womb, vagina and exterior genitalia. So, to replace vagina, vulva is a problematic candidate but not an unreasonable one.
But maybe we need a new word—a feminine word, obviously; a Greek or Latin derivative, necessarily, if it’s to stand legitimately within mainstream discourse. A word gynaecologists and obstetricians and your GP can plausibly adopt, if we argue for it. I’m no classics scholar (my all-girls high school didn’t offer Latin), but I have a decent Latin-English dictionary. The best we could do from Latin, as far as I can tell, would be transita, feminising the Latin for a passageway. Everyone born female has a transita, then, from her uterus to her labia.
But then, if Latinate medicalese makes you, as a feminist, grind your teeth for reasons like, I don’t know, vagina, I could try to make an argument for diadra, from the Greek diadro, a route. I don’t know Greek either, of course, and can say nothing about the etymology of diadro, but route is from the Latin rupta, a way made by breaking (ground), which is not inapposite given that passage in either direction—penis in, baby out—may involve some degree of ‘breakage’. But we’re back to Latin and also that suggests it’s a man-made passage. Maybe someone with better knowledge of classical languages can help.
One last question, or rather pair of questions. I wonder is there any connection—some apparently logical slippage—between the Greek colpo, womb*, and the Latin culpa, a state of error? Might such an evolution of belief have contributed to the final fall of the goddesses? Plenty of major modern nations still recognise one God or another, two thousand years later, but none has officially recognised a Goddess—not in the west, at least—not since the Roman Empire. Hardly surprising; if this etymology is correct and, according to the tapestry of linguistic history, possession of a womb renders one intrinsically wrong, that is surely how women—and the feminine—lost the capacity for divinity. Allegedly.
*You can chase the etymological trail of kolpos all the way from “bosom” (perhaps in the archaic sense of a protective heart), through lap, gulf, bay, inward curving enclosure, to sinus, and then back to colposcopy, a vaginal and cervical examination.