It probably won’t surprise you to hear that a lot of body parts are named after men. They’re named after the men of scientists who discovered them centuries ago (spoiler alert: the scientists were men) or even Greek gods.
Leah Kaminsky has penned a piece for the BBC arguing that this is highly problematic. In her piece The Case for Renaming Women’s Body Parts she asks:
What is Gabriel Fallopian doing hanging around the ovaries? Why is Caspar Bartholin the Younger attached to the labia? And can we trust Ernst Grafenberg’s claim that he actually found the G-spot?
Nobody remembers how these parts got their names and, more to the point, nobody cares. Apparently, however, Swedish activists are asking us to create new language such as renaming the hymen (named after Hymen, the god of marriage) the “vaginal corona.”
Lera Boroditsky, associate professor of cognitive science at UCSD says that we need to take patriarchal anatomical language and “(let) it fall away is the death it needs to have.” I say these are some first-world problems and feminists should be focusing on other things.
If your sense of womanhood is shaken by the fact that certain parts were named by male scientists, you’ve got bigger problems.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member