What Word Makes You Squirm?

My daughter offered me a stick of gum last week. It was 5’s Dare gum. When she handed it to me, she said, “You have to either answer the question or do the dare.” I guess this is gum marketing’s version of True or Dare that I used to play as a middle schooler. I don’t remember the “dare” the gum wrapper made me do…something about doing the Robot dance, or maybe it was the Running Man…but I certainly remember the “truth” question. It said, “What word makes you squirm?”

That word is Vagina.

Ironic, isn’t it then, that the title of our new nonfiction book is The Medieval Vagina? Truth is, we chose that title on purpose to attract attention. And it has worked. Peoples’ interest is piqued as soon as they hear that title. It seems, as we suspected, there is something deliciously naughty about the word “vagina”

The medieval vagina, however, is a bit of a misnomer. The word “vagina” is a Latin term that did not enter the English vernacular until sometime in the mid- to late-1600s, about a century after the unofficial end of the medieval era. Etymology, vagina means a sheath or scabbard and the term is a derivative of an even older word, “voziu” which translated to mean “to cover something with a hollow object,” much like a sheath would cover a sword.

So here is where the meanings become metaphorical.

The word “vagina” was then assigned to the birth canal of women…the same birth canal that men use for sexual pleasure. It is not too much of a stretch to envision the man’s penis as the sword and the woman’s vagina as the sheath, or protective covering. What is implied, then, is that the penis is fragile and needs sheltering and that the best way to do that is to safeguard it in its natural protective wrap, the vagina.

What we like about the word origin is that it is empowering to women. And yet, many people, myself included, squirm at the word. We are more comfortable with an ameliorative of the word “vagina”, like va-jay-jay or V or vag. In fact, we toyed with changing the name of our book to The Medieval V, just so we wouldn’t feel so squirmy.

But we also know that there are no inherently bad words, only words onto which society has places a negative connotation or stigma. Although “vagina” falls into this group, it is certainly not the worse word in the bunch. It’s a medical term, for goodness sake. It is time to push through the squirmy feelings and say it out loud. VAGINA.