Shame

Here is the transcript of the episode Shame. You can read more about this episode on the episode web page.

The transcript has been edited for readability.

Speakers

LG = Luke Green
GW = Gunda Windmüller
MS = Mithu Sanyal

Transcript

LG: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Yellow of the Egg. It’s been a while since the last episode, life has been super busy, but this is an episode I absolutely still wanted to release. The episode you’re about to hear is from an interview from all the way back in 2022, and I’m really happy that you can now listen to it. A little content note in advance: The episode contains discussions of genitalia and the words people use to describe them in German and in English. Here’s the episode!

[Sting]

The words we use to describe parts of our bodies are often reflective of how we feel about these body parts. At the same time, these words we use can also affect how we feel and our relationship to these body parts, a case in point being perhaps the most intimate body parts, the genitals. We have many euphemisms for genitals and the pubic area in English and in German, one German example being Intimbereich, ‘intimate area’. But there is one German word that comes up again and again in this context: Scham, which means ‘shame’. Schambereich, ‘shame area’, Schamhaare, ‘shame hair’, Schamlippen, ‘shame lips’ – these words are commonplace in German, but some would say they aren’t conducive to a healthy relationship to one’s own body.

In this episode we’ll be looking at the word Scham in German in relation to genitals, specifically to labia, and we’ll be talking about an ongoing campaign to find alternative words for Schamlippen which do not contain the word ‘shame’.

With that being said, let’s crack on with the show.

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I’m Luke Green and this is Yellow of the Egg, the podcast where we stroll through the beautiful gardens of the German language. Today I’m joined by Gunda Windmüller and Mithu Sanyal for this episode: Shame.

[Theme music]

GW: Many gynaecologists have told me that for especially young women it’s difficult to name the different parts of their vulva because they’re ashamed of the words. They don’t want to say Schamlippen or Schamhügel and all this. I mean, if you have to say the word embarrassed, then you are more likely to be embarrassed, to using it. And also, I think, in a more general way, when you think about your body, you don’t want to have to think the word embarrassed for something which is just a body part, really.

My name is Gunda. I work as a journalist and author, and I also do a podcast together with Katja Berlin, which is called Fix und Vierzig. So, for women over 40 and those who wish to be.

LG: As part of her work as a journalist and author, Gunda Windmüller wrote an article back in 2018. The article was about young women who don’t know much about their vagina and their vulva.

GW: And I talked to a gynaecologist about it, who told me that she finds it astonishing that she meets so many of her patients that really don’t know how to name their vagina or the parts of their vulva. And while I was writing the article, I came across the word Schamlippen, which, I don’t know if this is really the exact literal translation, but it’s like ‘shame lips’ in English, I guess. And I thought, “Oh, that’s a terrible word, especially for a part of my vulva”. So I went to Duden.de and checked whether there was another word I could use. And, there was none. And so, next thing I thought was, “I am gonna have to change that. We need a different name which doesn’t include the word shame for a body part, let alone such a special body part”.

LG: The word Scham can be translated into English as ‘shame’, and has etymological links to the ideas of embarrassment, disgrace and humiliation. The corresponding verb sich schämen means to feel ashamed or to feel embarrassed. It’s certainly not a word that’s positively connotated. At the same time, Scham- also has the meaning of ‘pubic’, as in Schambereich, the ‘pubic region’, Schamhaare, ‘pubic hair’, or Schamlippen, which are the labia. One German term for the vulva is even die weibliche Scham, which can be translated as ‘the female shame’. It’s easy to understand why Gunda felt that a word for the labia which includes the word ‘shame’ ought to be changed.

GW: I told a friend of mine, Zara Diel, who’s also an author, about this idea, and she immediately said, “Well, you need to get in touch with Mithu”.

LG: Gunda is talking about Mithu Sanyal, a novelist, broadcaster, cultural critic, and author of the book Vulva: Die Enthüllung des unsichtbaren Geschlechts, which is about the cultural history of the vulva.

MS: Because we use the wrong word. We say “vagina” when we mean the vulva, so the visible sexual organ becomes invisible in language.

LG: Mithu’s book was originally published in 2009 and has since gained a lot of recognition.

MS: And Gunda read the book and she wrote to me and said she really liked that I pointed out that, for example, in German if you refer to the pubic hair, you say this is the hair you’ve got to be ashamed of. So it’s, in German, it’s Schamhaar. And it’s also- the labia is called Schamlippen, so the labia you’ve got to be ashamed of. And so on. And she said, “How is that possible? We should do something about that. Let’s start a petition.” And I thought, “That’s brilliant, let’s do that.”

LG: And that’s just what they did.

GW: And we talked and decided on a campaign which tries to introduce the word Vulvalippen to a broader audience. Because we thought it’s no use just us changing the word, but we really wanna get this going and start a PR campaign against Schamlippen and pro Vulvalippen.

LG: Gunda and Mithu could have started a campaign about any of these words with Scham to do with the genitals and the pubic area. They could have chosen Schamhaare or Schambereich. But they chose to focus on the word Schamlippen specifically.

MS: Because you have to pick one, and to ask the German- so it’s called Duden in German, so that’s the book that gets printed, and they decide what are the right words to use and what are the wrong words to use and how to spell them, and all this. So, they’re quite an authority. And to change words in that book, like a kind of dictionary that everybody’s got to refer to, you have to kind of prove that in normal usage people use a different word. And we thought, let’s pick the labia, let’s not pick the pubic hair, let’s pick the labia, because we also wanted to show that telling people these are labia you’ve got to be ashamed of, makes it a lot more probable that you will feel ashamed of them, and that you will have plastic surgery, for example. Because that’s also going up drastically in Germany, obviously worldwide but especially in Germany, and we wanted to kind of create awareness for that.

GW: And Mithu and me both wrote articles in different newspapers in Germany about it, and eventually Change.org, the campaign platform, approached us and asked us whether we wanted to do an actual petition to get the word into the Duden, the new word, Vulvalippen. And, of course, we said yes. And then we started this campaign, this petition. And it really generated quite, quite a big media interest. I mean, many many outlets in Germany reported on this. We went on lots of radio interviews, etc, etc.

LG: This was about six or seven years ago at the time of this episode going out.

GW: And ever since then, the word isn’t yet in the Duden, but this will take some time, some more time. But many many media outlets now use the word Vulvalippen, like Cosmopolitan, the German Vogue does, Brigitte – I mean, many German magazines for a female audience. But I’ve really read it – I’ve got a Google alert for Vulvalippen – and every other week I get a new site who uses it. So, I would say we’ve been quite successful.

LG: In English, we have the terms ‘vulva lips’ or ‘vulval lips’ too, but a much more common term for these body parts is labia. While this is a term that comes from Latin, literally meaning ‘lips’, it’s in regular use as an English word, not just in the medical field but often in everyday language. The word labia does also exist in German as Labia or Labien, but doesn’t seem to have caught on in the way that Schamlippen has throughout history.

MS: We do have the Latin word labia in German as well, but German works different to the English, so there are loads of Latin words in English and people use them all the time; in German, you really don’t. So, in German, usually the word tells you what it is. So, the thing that flies is a ‘fly thing’, Flugzeug. The thing you play with is a ‘play thing’, Spielzeug. The thing you work with is a ‘work thing’, Werkzeug. And so, you get a lot of information via the words. And so, we wanted, especially in places like Kita, so Kindergartens and stuff, there people do refer to: ‘Oh, be careful with your labia’. Kids don’t understand the word labia, and they wouldn’t use them. And so, we wanted people to have an alternative German word that they could use, that everybody would understand immediately because it describes what it is and that is also not shameful.

LG: Gunda points out another possible problem with the word Labia in German.

GW: I think it’s a bit too general because Labia really is just Latin for ‘lips’. So, we’ve got other lips in our bodies as well. So, it’s not very specific.

LG: Which I suppose could be said for English too, yet labia is still one of the prevailing terms in English. There is another Latin word that could be used in both English and German to refer to the vulva, that being pudendum.

MS: This also goes back to the Catholic church. So, the church named all genitalia pudendum, so ‘the shameful parts’.

LG: While pudendum refers to all genitals that are visible from the outside, male and female, it usually refers to the vulva. As Mithu says, though, it comes from the Latin meaning ‘thing to be ashamed of’. So also not a great alternative if we want to move away from the idea of shame. Gunda and Mithu settled on the term Vulvalippen, but there have been lots of other ideas and suggestions as to what word to use.

GW: Other people have suggested different names for Schamlippen. They’ve said you can call it Lustlippen, like ‘lust lips’, or ‘Venus lips’. And I’m not a fan of these suggestions because, you know, you don’t want to introduce the idea that it has to do something with lust or with sexuality.

LG: While this might not have as clearly negative connotations as ‘shame’, it’s still adding associations that might not apply to everyone. The same applies to other terms that have been suggested, such as Stolzlippen, so ‘pride lips’ instead of ‘shame lips’.

GW: Yeah, I think, yeah, I’ve come across quite a few. I think Stolzlippen might have been one of them. But yeah, still, it’s too loaded for me. I mean, of course, fine, call them Stolzlippen if you like, you know. Call them gold lips, or whatever. [laughs] But, as long as it’s not Schamlippen, really, I’m quite happy with other suggestions as well.

MS: There’s also one that’s called in German Charmlippen, which is wordplay. So ‘shame’ and ‘charm’. So, what’s charm in English? To be charming. So- And because that sounds so similar. On the other hand, I don’t like charming, so you could be ‘charming’, that makes it small. But I love the wordplay. I love that people say, ‘This is my body, and I will name it myself’. Great, go for it.

LG: In the end, Gunda and Mithu chose Vulvalippen as their preferred alternative. On the one hand, it has the advantage of being descriptive and unambiguous. It doesn’t include ‘shame’ in the name, and unlike the other suggestions, it’s fairly neutral.

GW: In the end of the day, it’s just a body part. So, call it very straightforward Vulvalippen, and whatever other things come to mind, that’s fine. But I’m really for more neutral words to describe our bodies.

LG: But there is also another reason why Vulvalippen was chosen.

GW: What I also like about the term Vulvalippen is that it sort of forces people to think about the name Vulva. Because I’ve spoken to so many women who say, “Yeah, but Vulva is not a nice name.” And I don’t think it’s the actual sound of the word which people don’t find nice, but it’s the associations they have. They still think somehow that the female sexual organ is something that shouldn’t be talked about. You know, there are other very nasty words in German, and in English as well, which are associated with that body part, and they sort of refrain from it and want to use words which have nothing to do with the sexual context or the bodily context. I think that’s wrong. I think we should be able to clearly say that we are talking about the Vulva when we are. So that’s what I like about the Vulvalippen, that it gives, you know- It pushes the word Vulva.

LG: You might wonder why the word Vulva really needs to be pushed. Here’s an example.

MS: When I was writing the book, back in the 2000s, and people asked me, ‘What are you writing?’ And I said, ‘I’m writing about the cultural history of the vulva’, they – I’m not kidding you – they said, ‘Oh, is that a river in Russia? Or is it a Swedish car?’ And they genuinely didn’t know what it meant.

LG: This is because most of the time, people tend to use words like Vagina, Scheide, and so on, which refer to the vagina, when they actually want to talk about the vulva. That makes it so words like Vagina are overused and used for the wrong body parts, and words like Vulva are underused, and as a result, many people might not know what they mean.

GW: I mean, I often read about the vagina, but the appropriate word would be vulva. Because the vagina is the hidden part, the actual channel towards the inner parts of the sexual organs. The vulva is everything you can see from the outside.

LG: In everyday life, you might not think it’s that much of a problem to refer to a vulva by using the term Vagina, ‘vagina’. But it’s strange that we often use the word for one body part to refer to a different body part.

MS: And I always said, oh, imagine if you called a penis the scrotum, and everybody would notice, that is kind of weird! And you don’t notice it if you call a vulva a vagina.

GW: So I was hoping if we call it Vulvalippen, then people would actually finally get it into their minds that this is the vulva, it’s not the vagina. And I also find it highly significant that people use the word vagina when they are actually talking about something that is hidden. You know, that’s another thing to think about. Why can’t we name the things you can see?

LG: Speaking of the body parts you can’t see, let’s talk about the term Vagina for a moment. While the term Vagina is in use in German, in everyday language people often use the word Scheide instead. Some would argue that this word perhaps also isn’t the best option. This is because Scheide is the German word for ‘sheath’, as in ‘sword and sheath’.

GW: A Scheide is something that you put a sword in. It’s something that is very passive that is solely made for something else to penetrate it, to be stuck into it. And it again helps to give us an idea of the female body as something passive that is just lying there, ready to be used at any time. You know, a Scheide, you don’t have to do anything. You can just put something in. Whereas, you know, the vagina is also a very active body part, and you cannot just put something in it. So yeah. I don’t like the word Scheide. Personally I only use the word vagina.

LG: Although, etymologically speaking, this problem still exists with the word Vagina.

MS: So, vagina is just the Latin for Scheide, so ‘sheath’. And that was because in the – oh, don’t let me lie – I think it’s the 17^th century, when they- ‘What shall we call this thing?’ They said, ‘Oh, this is the thing where the man puts his sword in, so we call it a sheath’. So, suddenly a whole sexual organ didn’t have any- I mean, (a) it didn’t have a name that was not just in relation to another organ, and it didn’t have a use in its own. So, a sword is quite useful on its own, a sheath without a sword is just, yeah, you can put, I don’t know, mushrooms in it and then they’ll get squashed. I don’t know. So, it is just pretty useless. So- I don’t know whether you know Ella Berlin, and she had this brilliant video online. She’s a sexologist and she works a lot with pubescent girls, and she- it’s a video for teenagers. And she said, ‘Oh, imagine if a girl’s ear was called ear, and if a boy’s ear was called This is the place where your wife can tell you everything that she needs and wants.’ So, what does happen to the boy’s feeling for his ear? What happens if he doesn’t want a wife? What happens if he doesn’t want to think about that? What does happen if he just wants to listen to music? So, suddenly this part of his body doesn’t belong to him. So how can he have a good relationship to his ear? And all this. And I really loved that kind of comparison because it made it so clear.

LG: In practice, a lot of people might not think about this level of meaning when using the word Scheide, and certainly not with Vagina, which has become very much separated from its original Latin meaning of ‘sheath’. Nowadays, as a German or English word, Vagina or vagina only really has this meaning of the body part and not of ‘sheath’. This is why people who want to avoid the word Scheide might be more ok with the word Vagina because this link is not as explicit or present in people’s minds. In fact, all of the issues with the words we’ve heard about today such as Scheide and Schamlippen might not actually be conscious issues for a lot of people. Is all of this really in the public consciousness at all?

GW: Well, I like to think it is, but unfortunately, I think most people really don’t think that much about it. You know, I live in Berlin in this sort of media bubble, and everyone is like very woke and aware of certain issues, so everyone will be like, “Yeah, you’re right.” But when I talked about this issue with some relatives in Bavaria, they were like, “What? What are you doing?” You know? They didn’t really see the need for the campaign or- I mean, even though they agreed it’s a nice thing, they didn’t really- It’s nothing that’s really on their minds. Which is fine, of course. But, I mean, not everyone has to actively participate in change as long as they profit from it in the end.

LG: This might be something that is changing, though. As people reflect more on their language, they become more aware of the meaning of the words that they say. Gunda’s and Mithu’s campaign is one example of a light being shone on an issue in order that more people reflect on it. Gunda talks to us about how such awareness has changed over time. Because when she was at school, the term Schamlippen was used in her sex education classes in biology.

GW: And Schamlippen was always there. And I never- Back then, I never really questioned it. That’s how natural, sort of, the shaming of the female body was to us, and I mean, that was in the 90s, so it’s not that long ago. And I find it very significant and great that now these days, I believe that many teenagers will react differently when they see the word Schamlippen now because, you know, they have a different awareness, and they have maybe a different stance, that language is not so much a given as something they can shape as well. So yeah. I think it’s very sad that I never questioned the word when I was a teenager and it had to take another 20 years for me to realise how awful it was, and it has changed me, definitely. I am much more proud of my body ever since I really started this process of language observation.

LG: Of course, language is not the be all and end all.

MS: Obviously we’ve made the vulva invisible in language, but people are not completely stupid, so they do know that it is there. So, I don’t think language changes everything, but language makes it a lot easier. It makes it a lot easier to refer to, to have common knowledge, and it’s like a shortcut. And so, I wouldn’t say we just change the word and then the world will be different, but yeah. Language is the way we describe the world to ourselves. It prefigures what we can see and what we can’t see. Not to 100%, but it is a good thing to use specific language, correct language, and also to have fun with language and be creative, so I love people creating their own words.

LG: This being said, it would be quite the achievement to have had such an impact with this campaign that it not only raises awareness, but actually leads people to avoid using Schamlippen and start using alternatives like Vulvalippen, which has already started happening, as Gunda told us before. And even if it’s not very likely to happen, what if one day the word Schamlippen was actually removed from the Duden in favour of Vulvalippen?

GW: That’d be gorgeous. I mean, that would be ideal. Just imagine to talk to our imaginary great-grandchildren in 100 years’ time and they’d be like, “What? You called it what?” [laughs] And they couldn’t even find the word, they would have to believe us.

MS: [Laughs] We would go in- That would be going down to history, to have been able to change the Duden.

LG: Perhaps it will happen one day. It seems more and more people are using the term Vulvalippen, and maybe one day it will become normal to refer to labia by this term. Who knows, maybe it might even overtake the word Schamlippen. One can only hope. One last take-away message from today?

GW: Whatever you can see from the outside is called Vulva, and please don’t think of the word shame when you think about your own body, or other people’s bodies for that matter.

[Theme music]

LG: Thank you so much to Gunda Windmüller and Mithu Sanyal for joining me for this episode. You can find out more about that campaign by checking out the shownotes.

Gunda Windmüller is a journalist and author, and her podcast with Katja Berlin is called Fix und Vierzig. Unfortunately, they aren’t making new episodes anymore, but the episodes are available to listen to wherever you get your podcasts. You can find Gunda on Instagram @gundawindmueller.

Mithu Sanyal is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic. Her book that we mentioned in the episode is called Vulva: Die Enthüllung des unsichtbaren Geschlechts. You can find her on Instagram @mithumelanie.

Links to Gunda’s and Mithu’s work as well as their Instagrams can be found in the shownotes and on the podcast website, yellowoftheegg.com.

While episodes of Yellow of the Egg are no longer regular, you can still follow me on Instagram @yotepodcast, that’s Y-O-T-E-Podcast, just in case a new episode drops and you don’t want to miss it. If anyone is still on Facebook, I’m @yellowoftheegg, and my email is yellowoftheegg.podcast@gmail.com. If you like what you’ve been hearing, maybe you could give me a cheeky little 5-star rating, and tell everyone about the podcast if you think they’d enjoy hearing more about the German language. There’s a nice little backlog of episodes to dive into.

With all that being said, thank you so much for listening. Machts es gut, servus aus Wien.

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