I bet your pants fit like a glove, don’t they? 
Seriously, I think it’s important to realize that no matter how forthcoming you might think you are being, how matter of factly you explain that these are just different body parts or how earnestly you explain why the child must use these terms with care, there will still come a time when your 5 year old daughter will pull up her shirt at dinner and say “See my boobies?”. Usually this time will be when your parents or grandparents are over.
This post attracted 573 comments. I think I recognised a few dopers in there. The ‘delicate’ gag is pretty good. Even women confuse their vagina and vulva, irishgirl, proof, if proof were needed, that an educator’s work is never done.
And, most important of all - Dethreaderata…
Until I was about 9 or 10, I thought “moving your bowels” referred to throwing up. See, we only talked about that when somebody was sick to their stomach…
I would have known what “poop” meant, though.
When I was growing up we called it “doodie,” and my father had a “pischaloo”.
I’ve taught my children the proper names for their body organs. After all, there are no cutesie names for your nose or your elbow, so why give one to your penis or vulva?
They do learn as they grow up those parts are “different.” I can get my son out of a bad mood by simply placing my hands on his shoulders, looking deep into his eyes, and saying solemnly, “Scrotum.”
He can’t stay mad after that.
I never can tell when you’re serious and when you’re not, roger. I’m going to assume, then, that you’re not being serious when you say this. For your sake, you know.
None of the smileys really get across my facial expression right now - it’s a mixture of astonishment, confusion, and an eyebrow raised quite high. Imagine that I somehow mashed together this guy, :eek:, this fella, 
, and good ol’ Mr. Dubious, :dubious:.
Exactly what health problems do you believe stem from restraining one’s flatulence, Guinastasia? Because I think part of growing up and becoming socialized means not just being toilet trained (does that cause health problems too?) but learning to hold a fart in when it comes at an inopportune time. Do you have any evidence - or even any reasoning - to support your claim? Because it strikes me as entirely bizarre.
But there’s no term for the hoohoodilly or the magic no-no spot that has the neutrality of “hand”. Which is probably not something you can do anything about - we tend to have strong feelings about our gigglesticks and weewees (and those of others as well, under some circumstances.) It’s probably hopeless to try to convince people to somehow bleach the connotation out of these words. But I simply can’t see the term “penis” as neutral in the way “ear” is.
I bet that would work on me, too . . .
As a rule, I’m serious about things I really care about, like cricket.
As for the quoted bit, one half of the sentence reflects my beliefs pretty accurately, while the other’s meant in jest.
Mind you, you know what they say, “Many a true word…”. So who knows?
I don’t know about you, but most of the time, when I have really bad flatulence, it’s because my stomach is upset, and I have to fart, or my stomach hurts. Of course, if one is in public, one should TRY not to release it, but little kids don’t understand this yet. That’s all.
Very cool, thanks!
Yeah, but that’s because these area aren’t comparable to a hand or a nose and they aren’t neutral. You can prove that yourself by walking around in public exposing your hand and nose, then try walking around exposing your breasts or penis. Really this thread seems like a convoluted way of debating whether nudity is acceptable in public. We could have that debate, but ATM nudity is illegal and as such the bits that are illegal to expose are qualitatively different to the ear or the nose. Not surpsingly the words for them are also different.
I can’t really see much of substance here. We don’t have ‘neutral’ words for parts of the anatomy that are not commonly exposed. We similarly don’t have a neutral word for almost any internal antomy. Stomach might be the closest we have to ‘hand’ or ‘ear’. Liver, spleen heart etc are also not comparable to hand nor to penis. The inherent value of the terms is set by the usage they receive. In this soceity we don’t expose or openly discuss our genitals in public and not surpsingly that reflects the words for them. We also don’t commonly discuss our pancreas sinmply because we have no need to, and that term is also affected by the use it recieves.
Was there any deeper point in drawing attention to this or was that it?
Yes. Taught my kids “bowel movement” and “urine”. Beleive it or not, one teacher called to complain, as the youngest had raised his hand and asked to “go to the bathroom as he needed to take a bowel movement”- cuasing great hilarity amoung his classmates (at that age, almost anything along those lines will cause great hilarity). I replied- when he goes to see a doctor, do you really want him to say “I have a problem doing #2?”. She was speechless.
Yes, you should teach your kids about “penis”. I had a great routine of Mr Rogers teaching his little viewers “penis” once (Mr Rogers voice: “can you say penis, sure, of course you can”) that brought down the room.
The mixing in a single utterance of two registers, the informal and the scientific, and two styles (the use of euphemism (‘bathroom’ for ‘toilet’) in the first clause contrasting with the bald-on-record nature of the second clause) would have most people in stitches. Your son has the makings of a comedy script-writer.
Are you a 16-year-old boy?
I get the same reaction when saying “Fart” to him, also very solemnly. I think there’s something that tickles his funny bone, especially when his OMG Mother! is saying it.
But that’s because the problem is not with the words but with the thing they refer to. It’s not that the word “penis” is “not neutral”, it’s that we’ve been conditioned to think of that body part as requiring “special terminology” because it refers to something that itself is not “neutral”.
Going back to “ear”: was the first word you learned to describe the things on the side of your head you hear with a cutesy baby-talk euphemism or a vulgar, rude or obscene synonym for “ear”? No, it was very likely just “ear”. OTOH, for a whole lot of people, “vulva” or “penis” is one of the * last * synonyms added for their vocabularies to refer to the respective body part… after years of learning you don’t mention those body parts in polite company.
The “scientific” term, to me, IS a “neutral” term… hell, what could be more value-neutral than technical nomenclature?
Agreeing with[bold]JR’s/bold] post above, the “scientific/clinical” term serves as neutral to the modern mind.
I’m working from a base of being taught those terms right up front, by biologist parents. We kids were taught the basics of sperm meets ovum when wondering where babies come from,around four, then penis/vagina intricacies when wondering around seven years old.
The only confusion came when I was reading a book about whales at age four, coincident with the sperm/ovum talk, and was totally confused as to what a (sperm) whale had to do with making babies. I remember thinking that that was very strange, how did the whales get to the eggs???
After all that was cleared up, the basic terms were always accepted with; “OK”. Then run out and play. Six kids educated thus, and I don’t remember any of us blurting out inappropriate words in public. We were told that it was not right to do that, simple.
As much as I admire CS Lewis, I think his words in the OP quote are far from what is applicable for a modern child, exposed to more sexual language than kids in Lewis’ day through media and schoolyard. Sex Ed is important now as basic education, and the basic scientific terms are the acceptable means .
Did you miss where I said this?
Pretending that just because “penis” or “vulva” is technical nomenclature that it carries a neutral connotation is silly - why would that make them “neutral” in any sense? They’re not neutral, and it’s silly to think we’ll ever have a neutral term for them.
In other words, Excalibre, there will NEVER be a “neutral” word that you can use in polite conversation to refer to the penis, scrotum, testes, vulva, vagina, clitoris, etc., and that when spoken wbyy a child will not cause scandal?
I see, though, that we agree the problem is not with the words but with how we feel about the things they name. Where we disagree is that I feel that if the word being used is not obscene, vulgar or rude, then dammit, the word is neutral, and the problem is with the offended person’s attitude.
I don’t buy that it’s a “problem” at all, because (to me at least) that suggests that it’s something other than the basic state of affairs. I’m no anthropologist, but I don’t think our attitude that our genitals are “special” and something not to be necessarily shown off or discussed loudly in public is anything unique to our society. Specific rules about what’s supposed to be covered in public exist in every culture I’ve heard of. Sure, the amount to be covered varies, but that doesn’t change the fact that certain stuff is supposed to be covered up.
Magically changing inborn attitudes like this may have been a laudible goal if you were starting a commune in 1968, but I think they’re basically silly and fruitless. Some theorize that the uniquely human trait of covering up our naughty parts exists because we’ve lost the other mechanisms used by mammals to signify sexual receptivity, and so we replaced them with clothes to physically hide or display our genitals. It’s not a big leap from that to think that our attitudes around discussing those parts are influenced by our genetic makeup as well.
The fact that the “Penis Game” exists demonstrates that people’s attitudes towards discussing our naughty parts still exist when we’re using the “scientific” terminology. It’s clear that the word is anything but neutral in its connotation. You can argue about what it should mean, but arguing that it doesn’t mean something it clearly does seems silly to me.
Not really. There were, until recently, numerous groups of people without any such rules. Some, like the Tasmanians, simply lacked clothing altogether. Other groups on mainland Australia or Malaysia had clothing but considered it entirely optional and were normally naked in summer. The strangest case was a tribe from Columbia that apparently had strict rules that everyone had to wear a belt, and that’s it. The people were completely naked, but it was a great offense to appear in public without a belt, which signified social status amongst other things.
Which kind of puts paid to the idea that taboos against nudity served any essential social purpose. It may have helped smooth over social problems but it certainly isn’t essential for a perfectly functional human society.