This morning during breakfast, I asked a friend if she uses the German term Vulva to refer to the outer female genitals. For my birthday in March, she had given me the comic The Origin of the World, in which the author, Liv Strömquist, describes the cultural history of the vulva — so this question did not come entirely out of the blue! Her answer was yes, but she also mentioned it is hard to do so. Instead of Vulva, almost everyone, including doctors and midwives, uses terms that only refer to the opening, like Vagina (same as in English) or even more commonly Scheide (which translates to sheath in English). The latter term is particularly intense because Scheide is also used to describe the container that a sword is put in!
It produces immense cognitive dissonance within me. I’m SO used to these terms, they seem entirely normal. And yet they seem to reduce the function of female genitals to a penis container, with the additional very uncomfortable yet difficult to shrug off indirect war metaphor (comparing the penis to a sword).
We then continued to talk about the labia, which is Schamlippen in German, and really the only common word used to refer to them. Scham means shame in German. We didn’t want to jump to quick conclusions and looked it up. Turns out it really does mean shame the way we commonly understand it. The Latin term for it is labia pudendi. Labium means lip and pudere means to be ashamed. For both sexes the pubic area is called area of shame in German.
Just crazy weird.(ఠ_ఠ)