The Gendering of Earthy Language

[NicholeW.]

In the "->-bleeped-<-" thread it struck me that we have a paucity of earthy language to designate sexual pleasure for women, as opposed to numerous earthy ways of expressing sexual pleasure for men.

... we have tons of rather earthy words that define pleasure for males and very few that define pleasure for females. Wonder whassup with that?

->-bleeped-<-s

What IS up with that? Women experience "cunnilingus." I'm sure that if one were a fourth cento BCE Roman girl that the term may have been racy then. But, given the foundations of western civilization on the cobwebbed memories and lost glories of Rome and the medieval suzerainty of the spiritual and time-dictated degrading of Latin by the Church, Latin has become not only a "dead" language, but a rather technical and musty one at that.

Yet, the general use of "fellatio" or "phallolingus" (bastardized Greek-Latin construction for the persnickety) although used are never used in any but the most refined circles. In the less-refined ones "->-bleeped-<-" is a particularly to-the-point Anglo-Saxonish word that pretty much gets to the point and stays there.

And although I have heard and read some women who use that term rather than the more staid "cunnilingus," it's bi-gendered use seems rare and is often, given the responses on the "->-bleeped-<-" thread, even arcane to the minds of some who haven't a clue as to what's being said when the term is used to describe the act of a woman having her clitoris orally-stimulated.

"Cum" seems to have managed a bi-gendered transformation once the learned classes realized that women could have orgasms, but by and large, earthy language remains the purview of male experience.

Ideas as to why?

N~

[lisagurl]

Ideas as to why?

For men it is a physical thing mostly. For women it has to be more mental. Mental feelings are much harder to describe especially since they are different in different people..

[NicholeW.]

For men it is a physical thing mostly. For women it has to be more mental. Mental feelings are much harder to describe especially since they are different in different people..

Odd, I was under the impression that sexual activity may well begin as a mental/physical (I rather like the Buddhist psychological approach that sees the "mental" as a bit more subtle sort of physicality than sheer body-response,) but the actual cum seems to me to be physically as "real" for a woman as for a man.

I mean, when I orgasm I'm generally not in the habit of parsing it intellectually. I rather doubt that most women are, but not having done a exhaustive survey I cannot say for sure.

A cum is a cum, but I have to admit that the "full-body" shaking orgasm is much more my preference than the dick-centered cum of my earlier years.

N~

[FairyGirl]

by and large, earthy language remains the purview of male experience.

Ideas as to why?

N~

do you find this to be true in all cultures or just the patriarchal societies like our western ones?

[NicholeW.]

Well, tbh, I only live in the one: USA & Western Europe is the total of my experience living in culture.

So, the short and true answer, C, is "I haven't a clue." Maybe I should read up on Levi-Strausss, Malinowski, and Mead?

[FairyGirl]

my short answer would be that it's because of the male dominated religions in western culture that our language reflects largely male experience. In a matriarchal society (of which there were several in north America before white men arrived) it might be different, that is, the focus of language may be more female centric or at least not so one-sided as it appears to be in ours.
Post Merge: May 20, 2009, 08:57:15 AM
It would be interesting to study the languages of some of the matriarchal Native American societies, such as the Iroquois, to see if their language was similarly biased.

[Miniar]

I do believe that there's quite a Lot of references to cunnilingus available, from carpet-munching to eating-out, to things even far more obscure.
The thing is, women, in general, just seem to be less likely to talk about things in a "Lewd" sort of way and so use terms that are either cutesy or technical..

[NicholeW.]

my short answer would be that it's because of the male dominated religions in western culture that our language reflects largely male experience. In a matriarchal society (of which there were several in north America before white men arrived) it might be different, that is, the focus of language may be more female centric or at least not so one-sided as it appears to be in ours.

Not so sure about "matriarchal" among Amerinds, but certainly a number of their cultures valued women and our counsel and were at the least "gender-neutral" in matters of leadership: Abnaki, Iroquois, Hopi, Navaho among others, and were most definitely matrilineal with inheritance and position based on who one had as a mother.

The same sort of lineage-inheritance and deep respect for women seems to have played a huge role as best we can discover in the Western European "Celtic" peoples where women into historical times were respected and performed tasks for the tribe (including warfare) in similar ways to men.

I'm not sure whether the religion from the Middle East actually "made" societies patriarchal or simply furthered a process that was already well-defined for most European and Steppe peoples. There seems little doubt that Chinese, Indus, Dravidian, Mesopotamian, Bedouin (to include Hebrew) and Aryan cultures were quite patriarchal for a very long time into their prehistory.

There's some evidence through written literature of Classical Greece, pre-Classical Greece and Ancient Egypt that Minoan, early-Egyptian, "Old European" (although Gimbutus' research has been exploded in many ways by more recent scholarship) that there may well have been a time when the movers of a tribe were the women. Prehistoric evidence among pre-literate cultures (Cro-Magnon) also shows a prevalence of "priestly/shamanic" positions were probably held by males.

I often suspect that "nice women" have a lot to do with the ongoing prevalence of earthy language to be skewed male. The cult of hyper-femininity seems to me to very often be a continuation of "male pattern thinking" that predominated Europe for centuries and was codified more or less through Freud and other Victorian thinkers and has been given pride of place in so much of our lives.

And a lot of us (women, that is) appear to have the notion that maintenance of that is somehow a marker for "genuine femininity." To me it just seems like yesterday's patriarchal stew warmed and garnished and called "new."

N~