From “down there” to “shame lips,” the language of women’s bodies has never been neutral.

When it comes to the language we use for our most intimate parts, we’re up to our vajayjays in options. In 2001, researchers Virginia Braun and Celia Kitzinger collected 317 different female genital slang terms, from bits to hoo-ha and, truly, anything in between.

Depending on where and when we grew up, we may have learned vagina or vulva, down there or private parts, flower or honey pot. Some words are clinical, some are playful, some are crude (and some of us like that). Many of us learned these words in childhood, health class, the bedroom, or from porn. 

Gloria Steinem said she came from the “down there” generation. In the foreword to The Vagina Monologues, she writes that it wasn’t that the words vagina, labia, vulva, or clitoris were unknown to women then. They just didn’t use them. “I was told the name of each of its amazing parts except in one unmentionable area,” she wrote. “This left me unprotected against the shaming words and dirty jokes of the school yard and, later, against the popular belief that men, whether as lovers or physicians, knew more about women’s bodies than women did.”

What the Words Actually Mean

How do the words you use and hear shape the way you—and society more broadly—think about your body and sex?

The very word “vagina” comes from Latin vāgīna, meaning a sheath, such as that of a sword. (Guess what the sword could represent?) In essence, it’s a word for a structure meant to contain something else. 

Not very empowering. If only there were a word that spoke to a woman’s strength and majesty … oh wait, there is. Cunt.

According to sex historian Kate Lister, cunt, a term not for the faint of heart, was a fairly benign word back in the 11th and 12th centuries and even appears in the written record for hundreds of years in medical writing. Medieval England even had streets called Gropecunt Lane, generally in areas associated with prostitution. 

In her book, A Curious History of Sex, Lister writes that one theory traces cunt to a Proto-Indo-European root associated with “woman,” “knowledge,” “creator,” or “queen,” and suggests that cunt and cunning may “come from the same place,” with cunning originally meaning “wise and knowing.”

Context, of course, matters. “Wisdom” isn’t always the core of sexual fantasy and nobody goes to the gynecologist to get their “knowing” checked. We have many ways of talking about our sexual anatomy: euphemisms, slang, jokes, nicknames, and words that make something private, embarrassing, or simply difficult to say a little easier to talk about. But can a vagina by any other name be as sweet?

When Anatomy Becomes Shame

Then there’s the shame factor, which has also reared its head in our knickers for ages, including in medical terminology. Consider the anatomical term pudendum, long used for female external genitalia. It comes from the Latin pudēre, traditionally translated as “to be ashamed.” The term was removed from the second edition of Terminologia Anatomica in 2019 following objections to that shame-related root.

Not everyone agreed. Anatomist Matthew Zdilla has argued that pudendum referred to the external genitalia of both women and men, and that pudēre carried meanings beyond shame—modesty, respect, honor. The Dutch schaam is similarly slippery: it can mean shame, but it can also mean bashfulness.

The inclusion of that shame in everyday language stood out to me in the early months after my 2007 move to the Netherlands. I remember a Dutch language instructor teaching students words for body parts using diagrams of male and female bodies, with everything labeled: oog (eye), buik (stomach), knie (knee), and so on. There was also an arrow pointing to a tuft of hair in the pelvic region of both drawings: schaamhaar. Shame hair. I joked that the word was a particularly excellent candidate for the name of a speed metal band.

Perhaps because the word applied to both male and female pubic hair, it didn’t strike me as particularly offensive to women. I actually found it kind of funny. But over the last decade or more, the Dutch word for labia, schaamlippen—literally “shame lips”—has struck a chord with women’s groups and sexual wellness advocates, in part because it applies to only half the population.

Among those opposed to the term is a group called Schaamteloos (roughly “shame-free”), launched in 2024 by The Oh Collective, Pleasure Society, and The Vulva Gallery—an educational platform created by illustrator Sam Hil Atalanta that uses images of vulvas to celebrate their diversity. The initiative grew out of a 2023 Radio Pleasure Society episode featuring The Oh Collective co-founder Diana Lin, who learned the word schaamlippen during the conversation.

The campaign focuses on replacing that term with vulvalippen. Shari Klein, founder of Pleasure Society, acknowledged that schaamlippen was a little negative. “Every culture has a different way of referring to it,” Klein said. Lin herself shared that she was taught to call her genitals by the slang term mei-mei, which, in Mandarin Chinese, means “little sister.”

Viva Vulvalippen

The push to rethink schaamlippen is neither new nor easily won. In 2017, Belgian sexologist Goedele Liekens took aim at the term with the launch of the trotslippen.be challenge, inviting people to come up with an alternative. Her challenge wasn’t simply about finding a replacement, but about asking women to reconsider the language they use for their own bodies. Suggestions included liefdeslippen (“love lips”) and the whimsical poezewoefke and funflaps.

However playful, for Liekens, the underlying issue was pride. “Many women don’t think their vagina is beautiful. How can you be proud of a part of your body that has been given the prefix ‘shame’?”

Then in 2021, Dutch sexologist and professor Ellen Laan weighed in on a then-Twitter conversation about labiaplasty, where women were discussing the shame surrounding the appearance of their vulvas. “Maybe we should therefore call them vulvalippen,” Laan wrote. “An anatomically correct name. We don’t call them shame-balls either. Who will help push this new name?”

The good news is that the shame tides do appear to be turning. This year, vulvalippen was added to the online edition of the Dikke Van Dale, a definitive Dutch dictionary.

“Inclusion in the dictionary is not an endpoint, but a beginning,” said Klein. “A word in the Van Dale does not, on its own, change how people actually speak. That only happens once the word is truly used.”

Whatever words you use should be yours. Most of ours weren’t.

As Steinem wrote, “What a long and blessed way from a hushed ‘down there.'”