Why Doctors Can’t Name Female Anatomy
In season 4 of The Sopranos, Tony is struggling to understand the birds and the bees. He’s having a hard time dealing with the fact that Valentina, the well-coiffed art dealer he’s currently chasing, is also dating his rival Ralphie. Tony can’t stand the idea of sharing a woman and tries to break it off, but Valentina assures him that Ralphie doesn’t like sex in the traditional way. So Tony asks his therapist if that could be true: “A guy like that is going out with a woman, he could technically not have penissary contact with her Volvo?”
Tony is not the only one confused about female anatomy and what to call it. A tangled web of taboo, ignorance, and linguistic confusion conspire to make many of us uncomfortable with saying words like “vagina” and “vulva” out loud. And even if we don’t have a problem with the words themselves, we often use them incorrectly, conflating the vagina—the muscular tube that connects the uterus to the outside—with the vulva. Meanwhile, everyday words for this region skew vague and euphemistic: think “nether regions,” “private parts,” or “down there.”
But we can at least take solace in the fact that our doctors know what they’re talking about. Right?
If I say I have pain in my elbow, my doctor shouldn’t think I’m referring to my shoulder.
Not exactly. It turns out doctors are not exempt from society’s general lack of understanding around this part of the body. And in medicine, the consequences of such linguistic murkiness can be far worse. Today, some anatomists and
