Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics theein at theallusionist.org/debuts.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, have to keep language going above 50 miles per hour or it’ll explode!
Thanks for joining me in 2023. This episode is the first of several this year on the theme of renaming: products, streets, towns, buildings, mountains, concepts, occasions, all sorts of things - if you’ve been involved in a renaming project of some kind, I’d love to hear about it; get in touch. Today’s episode is about renaming certain body parts and activities to do with them - and it’s not getting rid of the old terms, it is expanding the range of ways to talk about things, as my guest describes it, telling other stories.
Content note: this episode contains discussions of sex and the associated body parts. In the second half, towards the end of the show, there’s discussion of consent which includes references to rape, there are no descriptions of acts or anybody’s experiences. But I’ll mention when we’re about to arrive at that part of the conversation, so anybody who needs to duck out before that will have some warning.
It’s this show’s eighth birthday, and you’re all invited to a celebratory livestream, 14 January 2023, 10-11pm UK time (other timezones are available); we’ll gather at youtube.com/allusionistshow and I’ll be reading from a dictionary and doing some live Tranquillusionist with Martin Austwick playing the music, and it’ll be a lovely time, I’ve been doing these livestreams regularly with Allusionist patrons, but this one is open to everyone. But if you do want to patreonise the show, I’m not going to stop you: patreon.com/allusionist.
And now, on with the show.
HZ: There’s been a recurring theme on the show over the years, of filling gaps in language, removing stigma and bias, finding better ways to express ourselves and talk about our feelings and our bodies.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: My name is Kalle Rocklinger. My pronoun is she. I work as a sexuality educator for RFSU, the National Association for Sexuality Education in Sweden. We've been around since 1933, working to promote sexuality education, both in practice, but also in policy. So we do a lot of sex ed in both formal and informal settings. We have a clinic and we have lots of international work where we team up with partners in all different kinds of countries, in all continents. And we do a lot of policy work to sort of promote sexual politics and make everyone's life as happy as possible, you know, enjoying their bodies and their sexualities.
HZ: That's amazing, 1933. I'm trying to think of what sex education might have been happening in Britain then. It was probably just hit yourself in the crotch with a Bible until the urges go away.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: “Just don't do it!” The first lesson in sex ed that we've found is from 1897, I think, here in Sweden, and it's at a girls' school, and it was the first female doctor in Sweden who insisted on it. So in the beginning it was mostly girls who were supposed to be educated, to sort of keep control over the boys and their sexuality. But we've had compulsory sex ed in school since 1955. And if you look at the content then and now, it's really not that different. The questions are sort of the same all the time.
HZ: How does the vocabulary compare between the 1950s and now?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: There is a difference in the vocabulary just generally. In the 1950s you could see a lot more talk about morality and being sort of a good husband and father, or becoming a good wife and mother. So it's very normative and very, very Christian, sort of. Then we had a still very heteronormative phase, but more gender equal in the 1970s, where you talked about the right to your body and the right to decide, and relationships should be equal and so on. We've had the start of the AIDS epidemic where it became very much focused on STIs and prevention and sort of risks. And then actually after a while, there was a lot of development into risk assessment and harm reduction that came from the work with AIDS. So it became a lot more realistic and sort of closer to people's lives.
And now I would say we're in a weird spot where there is some sort of medicalization going on again, where I find that you talk a lot about risks. I mean, there's always this tension between risk and wanting to promote a positive view on sexuality. But now we're in some sort of medicalization where you talk about pornography or masturbation harming your body or your brain in different ways. In the 1950s you might have talked about it harming your morality, but now it's sort of harming your body, because we're health fixated, I would guess.
One thing that we've seen over the years is that the focus and the worry when it comes to young people's sexuality is mostly around young men. And that sort of repeats generation after generation. We worry about young men's sexuality and how it will affect society. Will they become, you know, good husbands and fathers and members of society? And from the beginning, girls and women were a little bit more hidden, and then they got more and more into view. And of course it's all still incredibly binary in Swedish, as well as in most other languages, I guess. We do have three gender pronouns now in Sweden, and it's still very binary.
HZ: The work that RFSU does has included, over the past three decades, coming up with new terms, to fill gaps in the vocabulary or provide more options for talking about sex and bodies.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Sometimes it's to highlight or make something visible that's not been really talked about. Sometimes it's to change norms in society in some ways, and sometimes it's been sort of a really strategic choice for us in our political work to refuse a certain term or way of describing things, to tell another story, so to speak.
HZ: Which words have been added to people's vocabularies?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: The one word that has had most success, I think, would be the word snippa, which is a word to describe the vulva and vagina of a child. We had a word for the penis of a child, snopp, like a willy; but we didn't have really a word for the vulva/vagina of a child, which meant that people would say "down there" or "in the front", "the front butt" was one of those words that was used. And of course, when you don't have a word for a part of your body, then you can't really talk about it, and you can't ask questions and you can't say if something is hurting or if someone is hurting you. And it becomes shameful somehow.
HZ: The choice of ‘snippa’ is attributed to social worker Anna Kosztovics in Malmö, who, when she was pregnant in the late 1990s, started thinking about how her unborn child might need a snopp/willy-equivalent word for the vulva, a term that was neither too formal or medical nor too sexual or crude. A friend had heard another friend using 'snippa' so Anna tried that word out.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: It's a play off of the word for willy, that's called snopp. And this doesn't have any other meaning.
HZ: That's the sweet spot for a new word: that it sounds familiar enough that people get it, but it doesn't already have meanings. Well, there were a few similar Swedish words.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Like ‘snipa’ with one P, which is a kind of bird and a sailboat.
HZ: Oh, with one P - the bird, and a fish.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Oh yeah. There might be a fish - there are so many fish. I think we have a thousand words for fish
HZ: There was something I was reading in a academic paper saying that in, um, the south of Sweden, it used to refer to cows' and pigs' genitalia in the early 20th centyry.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: That could very well be possible. That's more than I know actually.
HZ: It's before your time.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: very much before my time
HZ: Or maybe you just weren't really talking about pig vaginas at the time.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Not, not at that time. No. No. I should have, you know, being a sex educator, but…
HZ: But you weren't alive yet, it's not your fault.
HZ: Having settled on the term 'snippa', Anna was funded by RFSU in the year 2000 to visit 50 preschools in Malmö to get them using the word, and from there it took off - with a bit of concerted effort.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: We had a campaign where we said, "It's called 'snippa'," basically. And we had some ads out and things like that. And it gained momentum within days. It gained so much traction in media, and we even had journalists from all over the world calling us, talking about this. There are kids' shows that talk about the snippa and the snopp. Now we have songs about the snippa and the snopp:
SONG CLIP:
Snippe-dipp-dipp-snippedi-snopp!
Popi-dopp-op-snippedi-snopp
Hänger och slänger på en liten kropp
Snippe-dipp-dipp-snippedi-do
Snippan är häftig, Baby I Love You.
HZ: That was a bit of the 2015 hit 'Snoppen och Snippan', written and sung by Johan Holmström for the kids' show Bacillakuten. In the English version of the song, Snoppen and Snippan are translated as Willie and Twinkle.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: There seemed to be a need for the word in several languages, because there was so much interest. It's one of those examples where there was a need and the need was filled, rather than us sort of inventing a word to highlight a need.
HZ: ‘Snippa’ was entered into the official Swedish dictionary in 2006.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: And it's very well established now. It's actually so well established that it's been reclaimed by grown people, so that grown people who want a neutral and non-sexualized word for their vulva/vagina will use the children's word. Which find a little unsettling: I really want children to have their own word. Like I want it to be filled with the meaning for children. It should not be burdened with grownup feelings, somehow.
HZ: What do you think it means that grown-ups are using it? Is it people's discomfort talking about that body part even as adults?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: I think that there's partially that, you know, that there's a discomfort, especially for those of us who grew up without that word. But also that people are lacking knowledge of a variety of words. You might want a word that is not sexualized but also not super formal, like maybe not a word that you use with your doctor, but also not the word that you use with your lover. So you use snippa as something in between. And maybe we need just more words.
HZ: More work for you to do.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Yeah! Truly there are very few just neutral words for genitals, or for sex in itself, or for sexuality. At some point we, I think it was early 2000, we did a little bit of work on sort of reclaiming words. And we started using fitta and kuk for genitals. So Fitta is pussy, and kuk is cock, and they're pretty sexualized words, in Swedish at least. And we would use them in our sex ed. So we would say, "Let's talk about the pussy!" And it was so provocative for so many people. But I do think that we sort of, well, partially I think we sort of reclaimed it; now we can talk about pussy and cock more openly. But I also think that one thing that happened was that we maybe desexualized the words a little bit, and you needed new words to sort of have that tension of sexuality and sort of lust and pleasure. Which is weird, because somehow, it sort of needs that taboo to become really interesting. I don't know why.
HZ: Yeah. But that would make it not the right vocabulary for when you're talking to six-year-olds about how to express their own bodies.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: No, no, definitely, don't use pussy with six-year-olds!
HZ: As well as terms for body parts, the RFSU has been working on the vocabulary around things you might do with them.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: The old Swedish word for virginity is also very laden with sort of religious guilt and shame, and that you're losing something that you can't get back.
HZ: The word was oskuld, which means ‘innocence’.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Being sex positive and also thinking that it's important that that young people can explore their bodies in their own terms, we wanted to change that, to undermine the idea of virginity being a thing that you only lose and that happens once. So we started with calling it ‘having your sex debut’ instead.
HZ: Ah! Sounds so grand.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: I know! It does sound a little grand. And it also means that you get to pick yourself what action, what practice you're actually doing when you have your debut. Because the virginity idea is also very connected to penetration and penis vagina sex. Virginity obscured a lot of sex that, for instance, queer people were having. It also meant that if you had a bad first experience in some ways, then you were stuck with this. But with the debut, you can pick yourself; or I can have several different debuts, so I can have an oral sex debut and a masturbatory debut or a penetrative debut. It's a way of undermining the importance of one specific occasion and of the hierarchisation of different sexual practices.
HZ: I hope ‘sex debut’ sees off many of the revolting synonyms like ‘deflower’ - although that originally meant culling passages from books. The RFSU has also been working to debunk falsehoods about the hymen - which is not derived from Hymen the Greek god of marriage, although they do share a Proto-Indo-European root that meant to sew or bind together. But the hymen in the vagina etymologically just meant 'membrane'.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: We've stopped saying ‘hymen’.
HZ: Great.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Partially because it's medically inaccurate. There is no sort of shield or coating that you need to pop or break. But also to sort of free it from moral guilt and shame.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: So instead we say vaginal corona.
HZ: It sounds like space!
KALLE ROCKLINGER: I know, and it sounds a little royal, I find. But it's to highlight the hollow circle, uh, around the vaginal opening where you have sort of mucus membrane that can sometimes grow a little bit together. And so if you get a small tear, you can have a little bleed sometimes. But it's medically more accurate and also not connected to any idea of being a maiden or losing anything or so on.
HZ: What was the original Swedish word?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: So the original Swedish word was mödomshinna, which is basically a maiden hymen, and then we changed it to slidkrans, slid being vaginal and krans being corona. And that one has actually also taken off. It's taken a little bit of time, but it's getting there. And it sort of helps us talking about norms and rules around virginity and culture around sexual shaming and gendered oppression and such things. But one thing that we have learned is also that it's not enough just to invent a word. Like just because I go out and say, "Oh, no, no, you know what? There is no hymen, there's a vaginal corona!" doesn't give people more sexual freedom. For instance, kids whose sexuality is controlled by their, their family or larger community, they will say like, "Well, uh, good for you. Will you tell my parents that? Will you explain that to them? Because it doesn't matter what I say; they will say, of course there is a hymen. And of course it pops. And of course it bleeds." So it's truly been a lesson for us also to remember that it's not only the words, like there is something else also. But this helps us see that and sort of work on that as well.
HZ: Presumably with this one, there weren't the songs for children helping you get it into people's vocabularies.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: No, no. For this word, we had a lot of help from different professions. So partially we have youth health clinics in Sweden called ungdomsmottagningar, who work with sexuality and sexual problems for children, also distribute condoms and birth control and so on for young people. And they've been a great help in this. Also social workers, they've been our ally in renaming this part of the body. We also have peer educators, slightly older young people, like 25-year-olds, going out into schools talking, and their work has also been invaluable in this. So it's been a slow renaming. And for those growing up with these notions, they will call it slidkrans instead of mödomshinna, and slowly there is a change.
There's a lesson for us, because there was an effort to use our new word for hymen, slidkrans, to promote it internationally or in English as well. So I think that there was this effort of starting to talk about the vaginal corona. And that has definitely not caught on, which I think also is a lesson for us that we should not be inventing English words. English is not our language. We should invent Swedish words. And hopefully, you know, English will find them; but it's not our job to find good English translations, because we will fail.
HZ: Well, also it's dealing with a very different set of societal attitudes.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Exactly. And we might not know that, so it's one of those things where we should probably let people pick words in their context.
HZ: Or you can say what you've done and to encourage them to also work on it.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Yeah. Well, yeah. We work in partnerships with organizations all over the world, supporting their needs from where they are and what they need right now. And I do think that that's really important: that even if the questions are usually the same and the bodies look the same and function the same all over the world, but good sex ed needs to be grounded within the context and culture where you are. So we can't just take our sex ed and just send it out into the world. It has to be grounded and developed in different places.
But I do wish that we would see each other more and talk more about words and about the development of words and how we use the language to sort of describe what we are doing.
During 2015 when there were a lot of immigrants coming into Europe, there was all of a sudden a lot of need for information in several different languages. Not everyone spoke English or Swedish. So we had a project where we did basic sexual health information in 17 different languages, I think, the biggest migrant languages. And we did this is how you get an abortion in Sweden, this is sort of the birth control that you can choose from; this is if you have problems with getting excited or if you have erectile problems, this is where you go and this is how it works. This is gender identity. This is how you go if you need help figuring in your identity out, lots of information, both leaflets and then videos. And we used an enormous amount of translators. And of course, there was this realization that sometimes there wasn't a good word, or we would do a translation that we couldn't ourselves check because we didn't have that language in-house.
And then someone else came and said, “Did you know that this brochure on in Farsi talks about homosexuality as sodomy. Is that really your purpose?” So we had to really work on doing and redoing translations and checking them over and over again. One thing that I know we talked a lot about was, oh, I wish we could have an international network. Because a lot of organizations were doing this all over. What if we could sort of exchange good translators or word lists. Like, "This is how we have translated this, and what are you using?” "Oh, my contacts in the queer community in Cairo says that these are good Arabic words for this and that." And I still think that we would love that.
HZ: To gain more terms for masturbation, about eight years ago, the RFSU asked the public for their suggestions, and received more than 1200.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: So Sweden had gender neutral terms for masturbation, and we also had some that were clearly about masturbation with a penis, and we lacked some about masturbation with a vagina, or more specifically the clitoris. So we wanted a word that also made the clitoris seen, and that helped us talk about the importance of clitoral stimulation when you have sex with someone with a vagina or vulva. We asked around; we asked people to give us suggestions; and they got to vote.
HZ: You know that if this vote had taken place in Britain, the winning term would have been Wanky McWankface. But not in Sweden.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: And the one that won was klittra, which lies close to clitoris; it has the same first three letters and it sounds a little bit like glitter, it sounds very positive in Swedish. And it highlights that that's the part of the vulva that most people are interested in touching when they masturbate.
HZ: That's a much more fun term than ‘masturbate’ as well, which always sounds very serious.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: I know. And the most commonly used word for masturbation is ‘onani’ in Swedish, which is of course a biblical term.
HZ: The eponymous Onan was slain by God for ejaculating on the ground rather than into his brother’s wife with whom he was having sex - yes, he wasn’t even masturbating, despite the term that bears his name; but he averted the possibility of procreating and that was a capital offence in the book of Genesis. Although killing someone for not making a baby seems, as always, a contrary attitude to the value of a life. The word masturbation also carries a fair amount of disapproval etymologically, it meant ‘manual defilement’.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: So we also, again, wanted to release it from this heavy burden of guilt and shame.
HZ: Speaking of which, there’s the Swedish word for labia.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Labia in Swedish is blygdläppar, which means ‘shame lips’. And so we have started talking about [??] instead, which is genital lips, to get the shame out of there. It has caught on a little bit within some sort of sex positive medical circles, but we still have a ways to go. But that's one of the ones that we have right now that we're talking about.
I have one more, which I find is lovely, which is from the 1990s again when there was a wave of feminism going over Sweden and there were some of our peer educators who started getting irritated about the term 'penetrative sex', which they thought put too much focus on the penis and depicted penises as very active and doing something, and vaginas and women as very passive.
So instead of saying ‘penetrative sex’, they started saying ‘omslutande sex’, which is sort of embracing sex, or enclosing or surrounding sex, putting the focus on the vagina embracing whatever penetrated it. Also highlighting the amount of active will there is and amount of muscles working when a vagina embraces something, especially if it's a penis of plastic, a dildo, then there's clearly something very active there. I wouldn't say that it has caught that it has caught on that well; people still say penetrative sex. But I do think that it was a very useful pedagogical tool, that when you said that you also got a chance of talking about norms and preconceptions among young people, but also, you know, a chance of them being like, "What, wait, what did you say?" And you could sort of turn their heads upside down quickly. So I love that one.
HZ: Anything else that's coming up?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: There is this English term that I really want us to have a word for, and it's outercourse. I think it's a lovely, lovely word. We do plays on sex with oral sex, vaginal sex; we also do solo sex instead of masturbation sometimes. And we have something that we call sort of like rubbing sex, when you rub your bodies together. But it doesn't - I mean, outercourse has this specificity that your genitals are rubbing against each other, but there is no embracing or penetration. And I wish that we had that, but we don't. We have that very non-descript rubbing sex, gnuggning sex, which I think that we should develop.
HZ: Do you work on words that are more targeted to people who have penises?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Well, that's a good question. What words are you thinking of?
HZ: I was just thinking more because what you've been talking about is ways of reframing a lot of things that have been quite misogynistic before. And I was just thinking of ways in which that plays out for the people who have penises as well, like these attitudes that are ingrained, or perhaps discomfort with their own bodies that they have absorbed, and whether they need vocabulary as well to enable them to talk in a more healthy way.
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Well, that's very true. And I think that that is something that we will have to work on going forward. Swedish is, for example, lacking a word of for having sex or feeling aroused without having an erection. The idea of being aroused is so intimately connected to erection for people with penises that I think that we should actually have a word that sort of clearly separates the two, also to highlight that sex is so much more than erections and penetration. So that is a word that I would love for us to invent.
HZ: I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that we’d be talking about consent with references to rape, and this is that part of the discussion. There is nothing graphic or personal, but if you need to do so, skip the next 1 minute 40 seconds. [Or if reading, skip from hereon to the set of three asterisks like these ***]
KALLE ROCKLINGER: These past years, there has been a lot of talk about consent, and rightly so; I'm very happy that we are talking about consent. Me Too hit Sweden also, and it's been revolutionary and we changed our law so that you have to actively say “yes”, and if you don't say “yes”, it's rape, instead of having to say “no”, and if that's ignored, then it's rape. But we were hoping that ‘consent’ would not be the word to describe this. We were hoping for more a plethora of words, and also more specific words to describe certain things - like mutual understanding, interaction, communication - that we would use more words. Consent, at least in Swedish, samtycke, is a legal term and in the law you can sort of consent to something without wanting it. So I can consent to going to prison, or to having to do something even though it's not actually what I want. So I was wishing we had a lot of different words that we wanted to sort of talk about when we talked about consent to sort of diversify the conversation. But that did not happen. So that's one of those where, where we sort of lost out.
HZ: Maybe it's not happened yet, but maybe it'll come?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Yeah. Yeah. I hope so. I hope so. And I think that now that we have a new rape law, then we will actually spend more time talking about consent. There is also, I mean, during the campaigning for a new law and stronger protection for people who have been subjected to rape, you needed easy and quick messaging and consent was very useful there. But I'm also longing a little bit for having conversations about consent in all its complex parts. I think that consent should be complex.
***
HZ: What difference do you think all of this makes to society?
KALLE ROCKLINGER: Well, one thing is that I think that more words around your body and your sexuality, and just sex in general, does broaden your perspective of sex. So when I say ‘embracing sex’ instead of ‘penetrative sex’, people will be like, "What is she talking about? What?" And they will stop and think a little bit. And maybe that will also make them wonder about what other words you can use for sex that they usually don't use. But I also hope that it challenges people's notion of what is and isn't possible, that it tickles their fantasy and their brains into thinking about their own gender identity or their own attractions or their own notions about what sex should be like, or what practices they want to try out. I think that our aim is to sort of broaden and we do it by sometimes just sneaking in a new word and sometimes changing the meaning of a word and sometimes just surprising people with words. And all of those strategies together, I think will sort of shake people up and make it more possible. That's my hope, at least.
Bit of exciting news for you if you’re in Australia - the excellent British singer Grace Petrie is currently touring there, and there are still some shows you can catch, check the places and dates at gracepetrie.com/gigs. I’ve done a few shows with Grace on the comedy circuit here, and if you like laughing and crying at the same time, I highly recommend seeing her play. That’s gracepetrie.com/gigs.
Don’t forget to join me for the Allusionist’s eighth birthday stream with dictionary readings and live Tranquillusionist at youtube.com/allusionistshow, and if you want more regular livestreams, and to keep this independent podcast afloat, become a supporter at theallusionist.org/donate. You also get to hang out in the Allusioverse Discord community, where we share our joy and despair and artworks and travel tips, and we’re watching the current season of Great Pottery Throwdown together, because Keith Brymer-Jones’s tears of ceramic-induced emotion are healing.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
dittography, noun: unintentional repetition of words or letters by a scribe or printer in copying a manuscript.
Try using dittography dittography in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. You heard from Kalle Rocklinger, sexuality educator for RFSU the National Association for Sexuality Education in Sweden; find out more about their work at rfsu.se. Thanks so much to Helen Jones for setting this one up. Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com makes the music for the show, as well as podcasts Neutrino Watch and Song By Song.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor an episode in 2023, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
Find @allusionistshow on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. And you can hear or read every episode, get links to more information about the topics, and donate to the show and join the Allusioverse community, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
