The Project

Certainly great efforts are being made across the world to help humanity fight scourges of HIV and other STDs. This activism is extremely important. People around the world are fighting to increase availability of protection methods, contraceptives, and women’s rights. However, this type of activism is not the focus of this project. This project seeks to understand and assist with the issue of sexual language. Activists who are trying to make communication about sexual topics easier face the same difficulties as the women they are trying to help. They do not have words that can be used to make things easier for women. Perhaps something can be done about this.
Though changing the language as a whole is next to impossible, many activists have sought to change individual words, to reclaim words from their derogatory or other connotations. The word queer is an example of a somewhat successful reclamation. Some words are much more resistant to change, or have other meanings that underlie the slang. Other slang changes quickly. New words are invented to express new or different ideas. Why not then take advantage of the ability of our language to incorporate new words, new concepts? The broader concepts of sex and sexuality that have been developed by feminists, lesbians, and other women can be given a concrete referent. Why not diversify the vocabulary of sex? If we can introduce new words, words generated by women, then perhaps we can give women the vocabulary to speak with. Perhaps they won’t feel degraded or embarrassed if they like the words they use. If they like and own these words, the perhaps women can fight to defend the place of privilege these words have been given in the female vocabulary.
In order to facilitate this goal, we seek the production of a new female sexuality-based dictionary/encyclopedia. This book will compile a series of words, images and descriptions for a variety of under-represented sexual acts and body-parts, especially for that which is not centered around the penis. This document will focus on the female anatomy or sexual acts that do not require or focus on the penis, without excluding men as participants. It will attempt to re-define sex and sexual behavior as a mutual act rather than merely a consensual act in which one party is the active participant and the other a mere consenting receptacle. Sex will be discussed as the whole range of sexual encounters, not the penile-vaginal intercourse that is currently evoked by that word. We will seek words that are positive or attractive, words that evoke agency and sensuality. We hope that words can be adopted or generated so as to be independent of traditional western culture ideas about sex, but rather be based on the sexual acts and feelings of people.
To generate these entries, the author will search out topics that exist in sexuality but are nameless or pigeonholed. These topics will be found through discussion with women friends, searches through academic, medical, slang, and internet databases, and personal experience. Once a list of topics has been generated, words, definitions, and images will be generated, adjusted, or appropriated for use in a new way. Once gathered, these words, definitions, and images will be compiled into an attractive booklet. This booklet will be distributed to friends and associates of the author with the request that these people extend it further to their friends and so forth. This book will also be placed in a digital format and be displayed on a website. The address to this website will be distributed to as many peers as possible in the hope that it will extend the vocabulary of many. Though the effectiveness of such a project is difficult to measure, success within the scope of the author’s current capabilities could be defined as the completion and simple distribution of such a work.