An NHS trust in Scotland has called for parents to stop using euphemisms for genitals and, instead, “tell it like it is”. A motivational video accompanies this propaganda drive showing a cute little girl explaining to her father (who is, perhaps symbolically, peeling the mottled outer layer of a potato to reveal the soft white flesh within) that “I have a vulva and boys have a penis.”
This coming entirely out of the blue, the father looks taken aback and starts peeling his potato in a panicky fashion. In the next scene, clearly having given the matter further consideration, he announces confidently. “That’s right! Boys have a penis and girls have a vulva!” He looks mightily pleased with this discovery and she awards him a “Good Dad” sticker for his prowess.
It is a peculiar video, not least because the child chooses to mention that she has a vulva rather than a vagina, which is rather like saying, “Daddy, did you know boys have a foreskin and a glans?”, which is true, but doesn’t paint the complete picture.
The thrust of the video is that we should stop using euphemisms with our children to describe facts of life that we find uncomfortable. This strikes me as a shade dictatorial. I used to have some right-on friends who sternly insisted that at all times their children used – as the NHS trust suggests – the words “penis” and “vagina” to describe what I was still referring to, for the sake of my children anyway, as a willy and a twink.
It wasn’t so much that I objected to the medically correct terms. It was more that I felt the words “penis” and “vagina” came with a certain amount of linguistic baggage. This is not to say they are bad or ugly words – more that they don’t connote the emotional relationship that one has with one’s genitals in prepubescence. This relationship is not sexual, but neither is it clinical. It might be better described as companiable.
For euphemism is not only about avoiding embarrassing facts; it is also about a softening of language, a softening that consoles us, and certainly our children, in the face of a blunter reality. There is, in other words, a certain compassion, or tenderness, in the use of some euphemisms in front of children.
To use the words “winkle” for boys or “tuppence” for girls is to present a certain aspect of reality as friendly rather than as at odds. Winkle and Tuppence are chums. Penis and Vagina are more like furious rivals or partners in a highly adversarial law firm.
Euphemism is ubiquitous and useful but problematic. Saying “Grandad Joe has gone to sleep” seems a more sensitive way of imparting difficult information than saying, “Grandad Joe is dead and will shortly be consumed by fire or worms.” However, this use of “sleep” as a euphemism may cause confusion in other circustances, such as, “Mummy, why did you just pour battery acid all over Daddy’s brand new car?”
“Because he slept with my sister.” Exit child pondering why such drastic action should be called for because of a sleepover.
Anyway, I don’t know how we can plausibly lecture our children on euphemism when we so often use them ourselves – calling a screaming row as a “disagreement” or saying “Mummy’s been let go from her job” instead of sacked. Euphemism is the warm water in which we swim.
Some insist our children’s dips into reality should be a lot more bracing. But I think, to be entirely honest, that such people are misguided. I wouldn’t go so far as to call them a bunch of pedantic vulvas, it’s more that they have their heads stuck up their inter-gluteal clefts.
