Funny Names for Black Girls Vaginas
What Did You Phone call It?
THIS is the story of how a silly-sounding give-and-take reached the ear of a powerful television set 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 Beefcake" heard the grapheme Miranda Bailey, a significant doctor who had gone into labor, chide a male intern, "Finish looking at my vajayjay."
The line sprang from an executive producer'southward need to mollify standards and practices executives who wanted the script to include fewer mentions of the word vagina.
The scene, nonetheless, had the unintended effect of catapulting vajayjay (also written va-jay-jay) into mainstream spoken communication. Fans of "Grey's Beefcake" expressed their approval of the word on message boards and blogs.
The show's about noted fan, Oprah Winfrey, began using it on her evidence, effectively legitimizing it for some 46 million American viewers each week.
"I think vajayjay is a nice word, don't you lot?" she asked her audience.
Vajayjay found its way into electronic dictionaries like Urban Dictionary, Word Spy and Merriam-Webster's Open up Dictionary. It was uttered on the telly series "thirty Rock." It was used on the Web site of "The Tyra Banks Testify." Jimmy Kimmel said information technology in a monologue. Information technology has appeared in the Spider web publications Salon and the Huffington Postal service and on the weblog Wonkette.
"The Soup," which highlights wacky television and celebrity moments on E! Entertainment Television, broadcast bits chosen "Oprah'due south Va-jay-jay." One featured a prune from "The Oprah Winfrey Evidence" at the Miraval resort in Tucson in which Ms. Winfrey, fastened to a wire and wearing a harness around the lower half of her torso, swings through the air and announces, "My vajayjay is paining me." A YouTube video set the clip to electronic music, with Ms. Winfrey equally an unwitting M.C.
The swift adoption of vajayjay is not just about pop culture'south ability to embrace new slang. Neologisms are e'er percolating. What this really demonstrates, say some linguists, is that there was a vacuum in popular discourse, a need for a word for female person genitalia that is non clinical, crude, coy, misogynistic or descriptive of a vagina from a man's point of view.
"There was a need for a pet proper 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 Lexicon, "a proper noun that women can utilize in a familiar way among themselves."
Credence of the word, nonetheless, likewise reignites an old argument, ane most forcefully made by Eve Ensler in "The Vagina Monologues." Over a decade agone, Ms. Ensler wrote that "what we don't say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fearfulness and myths." Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is also ofttimes an "invisible discussion," one "that stirs upwardly feet, awkwardness, antipathy 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 tin can return women incapable of explaining their symptoms to wellness professionals. "I retrieve it's terrible," Dr. Livoti said. "It'due south time to start calling anatomical organs by their anatomical proper name. Nosotros 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 considering they retrieve it is more than descriptive than vagina, non because they are nice.
Technically speaking, the vagina is the culvert that leads from the uterus to the outside of the torso, 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 information technology is not inclusive enough. It does non, they take pointed out, include the labia and clitoris, the nervus-rich locus of a adult female'south sexual pleasure. "I'm hoping that the use of this new word is office of the objection to only saying vagina since it doesn't include all of women'southward ballocks, for case the clitoris, in the mode 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'southward Anatomy" — are middle-historic period African-Americans.
"The reason that vajayjay has caught on, I think, is because at that place is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names similar Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that," Dr. McWhorter said. "Information technology sounds warm and familiar and it well-nigh makes the vagina feel like a fiddling cartoon grapheme with eyes that walks around."
"A very elegant, heart-aged black woman used that discussion in my presence last week," he added. "It'due south a very O.K. word."
At the aforementioned time, it is a give-and-take that someone similar Joy Behar, a white comedian and a host on "The View," could non take popularized, Dr. McWhorter said.
There have been at to the lowest degree ane,200 terms for the vagina in the history of the English language, co-ordinate to Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and the author of "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature" (Viking, 2007).
This is considering sexual subjects are always "emotionally fraught," he said, and each new euphemism eventually "gets contaminated" and prompts "the search for nevertheless another euphemism."
HE calls information technology "the euphemism treadmill." Such words arise, he said, "considering people desire to brand it perfectly articulate to their listeners that they are not bringing upward the topic for prurient reasons."
The reduplication in "jay-jay" is childlike, he said, like "pee pee or doo doo," and that "cleans up" the discussion.
Equally Joel McHale, the host of "The Soup," put it: "Information technology'due south non derogatory. Information technology's not 'Y'all're existence such a vajayjay correct now.' Information technology's kind of a sweet thing."
"Vajayjay," he said, "is like your good buddy."
Ultimately, what makes any word take hold of fire is a mystery, linguists say. "Who could have predicted that the term for majority e-mail would exist spam, from a 1970s Monty Python sketch?" Dr. Pinker said.
Long before "Grey'south Anatomy" set up vajayjay on its course to being a T-shirt-worthy catchphrase, it was used by some circles of women, on blogs and, briefly, in Regena Thomashauer's book virtually pleasance, "Mama Gena's School of Womanly Arts" (Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Shonda Rhimes, the creator and executive producer of "Grey'south Beefcake," who brought the discussion into full public view, never intended to promote a euphemism or slang term for the female anatomy. Rather, she fought to utilise vagina in the script.
"I had written an episode during the second season of 'Grayness's' in which nosotros used the word vagina a smashing many times (possibly 11)," Ms. Rhimes wrote in an email message. "Now, we'd once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no i blinked. But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over. I retrieve no i is comfortable experiencing the female anatomy out loud — which is a shame considering our anatomy is half the population."
Ms. Rhimes asked the prove's writers for culling words, merely information technology was an assistant, Blythe Robe, who volunteered her own allonym: vajayjay. "As in 'I'm off to the gynie to see almost my vajayjay,'" Ms. Rhimes said.
David Fiske, an F.C.C. spokesman, said that the bureau does non penalize networks for the number of times the words vagina and penis are spoken. Only if the words are used in a graphic and explicit description of "sexual or excretory organs or activities," he said, it might contribute to a finding of indecency. "Context is a critical cistron," he said.
Ms. Rhimes said it is an "absolute surprise" how a give-and-take she introduced to gratify her network's guardians of taste has taken off.
1000. P. Anderson and Edward Boyd, executive producers of "The Soup," call back Ms. Winfrey is well aware she is promoting the word, based on the sassy way she utters it and how she looks into the camera when doing and so. (Ms. Winfrey declined to be interviewed for this article.)
"Information technology'south her 'truthiness,' " Mr. Anderson said. "She'll get it in the lexicon if it kills united states."
Some people are non waiting for that formality.
"Now, vajayjay's just a given for me," Ms. Rhimes said. "It's a word I utilize, a word my female friends use, a word I've heard women in the grocery store use. I don't even recollect about where it came from anymore. Information technology doesn't belong to me or anyone at the show. It belongs to all women."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/fashion/28vajayjay.html
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