I have a vagina and I am proud of it.

[spicedogs]

I remember watching a specific Grey's Anatomy  episode that got my goat. Dr. Miranda Bailey was in intense labor, but refused to push her baby out, because her husband (who was injured and she didn't know it) was not there with her. (Yeah, yeah, it's a soap opera, OK? Not real life.) An intern, Dr. George O'Malley, started coaching her, because he knew that the fetus was in jeopardy. (Why Dr. Bailey, who was his superior, did not know this, is beyond my comprehension.) Dr. Miranda suddenly exclaimed, "Dr. O'Malley, stop looking at my vajayjay." 

In real life, none of this would have happen. Even if the doctor would have been irrational enough not to push the baby out because her husband was not there to witness the birth, she would not scream at another doctor to stop looking at her vagina. Doctors are used to seeing naked people; and besides, pregnant women completely loose their inhibitions during birth. I know, I lost mine twice already.  But let's just suppose that she did feel uncomfortable about an intern viewing her vagina. As a doctor, she would have said, "O'Malley, stop looking at my vagina."

I am not afraid to say it folks: I have a vagina. My husband has a penis. Those are the proper names. Let's call it what they are. You want to censor dick, cunt, pussy, and prick, I'm OK with it. I am not OK with censoring the actual names of the genitalia. Maybe I should not talk about my nose. From now on, it is my noseyebosey.


This rant was precipitated by this article:

What Did You Call It?

 

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

Published: October 28, 2007

 

THIS is the story of how a silly-sounding word reached the ear of a powerful television producer, and in only seconds of air time, expanded the vocabularies—for better or worse—of legions of women.  

 

It began on Feb. 12, 2006, when viewers of the ABC series “Grey’s Anatomy” heard the character Miranda Bailey, a pregnant doctor who had gone into labor, admonish a male intern, “Stop looking at my vajayjay.”

 

The line sprang from an executive producer’s need to mollify standards and practices executives who wanted the script to include fewer mentions of the word vagina.

 

The scene, however, had the unintended effect of catapulting vajayjay (also written va-jay-jay) into mainstream speech. Fans of “Grey’s Anatomy” expressed their approval of the word on message boards and blogs.

 

The show’s most noted fan, Oprah Winfrey, began using it on her show, effectively legitimizing it for some 46 million American viewers each week.

 

“I think vajayjay is a nice word, don’t you?” she asked her audience.

 

Vajayjay found its way into electronic dictionaries like Urban Dictionary, Word Spy and Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary. It was uttered on the television series “30 Rock.” It was used on the Web site of “The Tyra Banks Show.” Jimmy Kimmel said it in a monologue. It has appeared in the Web publications Salon and the Huffington Post and on the blog Wonkette.

 

“The Soup,” which highlights wacky television and celebrity moments on E! Entertainment Television, broadcast bits called “Oprah’s Va-jay-jay.” One featured a clip from “The Oprah Winfrey Show” at the Miraval resort in Tucson in which Ms. Winfrey, attached to a wire and wearing a harness around the lower half of her body, swings through the air and announces, “My vajayjay is paining me.” A YouTube video set the clip to electronic music, with Ms. Winfrey as an unwitting M.C.

 

The swift adoption of vajayjay is not simply about pop culture’s ability to embrace new slang. Neologisms are always percolating. What this really demonstrates, say some linguists, is that there was a vacuum in popular discourse, a need for a word for female genitalia that is not clinical, crude, coy, misogynistic or descriptive of a vagina from a man’s point of view.

 

“There was a need for a pet name,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, “a name that women can use in a familiar way among themselves.”

 

Acceptance of the word, however, also reignites an old argument, one most forcefully made by Eve Ensler in “The Vagina Monologues.” Over a decade ago, Ms. Ensler wrote that “what we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths.” Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is too often an “invisible word,” one “that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.”

 

Dr. Carol A. Livoti, a Manhattan obstetrician and gynecologist and an author of “Vaginas: An Owner’s Manual” (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004), said vajayjay and other euphemisms and slang offend her and can render women incapable of explaining their symptoms to health professionals. “I think it’s terrible,” Dr. Livoti said. “It’s time to start calling anatomical organs by their anatomical name. We should be proud of our bodies.”

 

“It seems like a step backward,” she added.

 

In a voice-mail message left for a reporter, Gloria Steinem said she hopes the women using vajayjay are doing so because they think it is more descriptive than vagina, not because they are squeamish.

 

Technically speaking, the vagina is the canal that leads from the uterus to the outside of the body, a fact that has led both Ms. Ensler and Ms. Steinem to write that vagina—while not a word that should be stigmatized—is inadequate because it is not inclusive enough. It does not, they have pointed out, include the labia and clitoris, the nerve-rich locus of a woman’s sexual pleasure. “I’m hoping that the use of this new word is part of the objection to only saying vagina since it doesn’t include all of women’s genitalia, for instance the clitoris, in the way that vulva does,” Ms. Steinem said.

 

Another view was offered by John H. McWhorter, a linguist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who pointed out that the women associated with introducing the word—Ms. Winfrey, the Miranda Bailey character on “Grey’s Anatomy”—are middle-age African-Americans.

SOURCE: New York Times.

 

Comments

[augrah.livejournal.com]

I had to read this because of the subject line and wow - this is so stupidly random. I hate this. I agree with you entirely, that just use the word.

VAGINA!!

See, I'm still here. Haven't drop dead. So strange.

[spicedogs.livejournal.com]

Yes, the vagina monologues should hit TV programs