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Name: Molly Keating听听
Advisor: Prof. Kira Hall, TA Velda Khoo听
Class: LING听2400: Language, Gender, and Sexuality听
Semester: Fall 2023
LURA 2024

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In her 1992 article 鈥淣aming of Parts: Gender, Culture, and Terms for the Penis among American College Students,鈥� Deborah Cameron argued that the terms used by college students to reference male genitalia indexed greater cultural ideologies about sexuality. Based on slang-term data she collected from male vs. female groups of college students, she argued that the men鈥檚 lists of terms for the penis indicated a conceptual schema depicting masculinity as an act of dominance and sex as an act of conquest. Thirty-one years later, my paper for the course 鈥淟anguage, Gender, and Sexuality鈥� sought to investigate whether Cameron鈥檚 observations on cultural ideologies of sex and gender still hold in the contemporary United States. I conducted a new study that replicated Cameron鈥檚 to see if there may be changes in the data. If so, what might those changes indicate about shifts in these ideologies? Like Cameron鈥檚, my study was not meant to be an exhaustive survey of American English terms for male genitalia. Nevertheless, I found that the conceptual schema has in fact shifted. Although the overall metaphorical categories identified by Cameron have not been subject to profound change, with only a few additions, the shifts I found do index a change in cultural perspectives towards sex and gender. Sex and masculinity remain as experiences of conquest and dominance, but they are expressed and reinforced differently.

Language does not exist in a vacuum and can impact our lives in a myriad of ways. The theory of linguistic relativity, also known as the 鈥淪apir-Whorf hypothesis,鈥� states that the unique grammars of the languages we speak influence a speaker鈥檚 perspective of the world, directing their attention to what is indexed as paramount by the grammar. The theory suggests that the ways in which we use language indexes our perspectives on everything we choose to communicate. Likewise, the aspects we centralize in our choice of linguistic terms contain more than their base semantic meaning.

Adapting Cameron鈥檚 study design, I gave two groups of 4 men and 4 women 15 minutes to come up with and write down as many descriptive terms for 鈥減enis鈥� as they could; together, the two groups of 4 men and 4 women came up with 209 terms. Despite the sharp increase in this 鈥渘aming of parts,鈥� as compared to Cameron鈥檚 original study, the categories within which each slang term fit did not change substantially. However, I found it noteworthy that the women鈥檚 group not only added a few categories beyond Cameron鈥檚 original findings, they also adopted a few categories from their masculine counterparts. The adopted female categories include weaponry, famous monuments, and personifiers. The differing results from Cameron鈥檚 1992 study and my own 2023 study are shown in the two figures below.

The main changes can be seen in how Cameron鈥檚 supposed sexual ideologies are recirculated in this contemporary population. The consistent presence of personifiers within the men鈥檚 categories (such as the king, two-inch terror, and tricky dicky) demonstrates the male habit to characterize the actions of the sexual organ as agentive in its own right. Giving the penis a separate identity, and therefore autonomy, has incredibly dark implications in cases of sexual violence. However, the young men鈥檚 eagerness to poke fun by means of the personifiers illustrates a change from the 鈥渕ythologizing the penis鈥� seen in Cameron鈥檚 group. While laughing at terms like Milli-meter Peter, the men actively participate in and recirculate the values of masculinity they are attempting to distance themselves from. This recirculation of Cameron鈥檚 claimed ideologies is accomplished by the use of punchlines focusing on the same cliches of size and dominance. That is, terms like Milli-meter Peter and Two-inch Tony are funny because they minimize what should be prodigious.

Some of the most notable changes seen are in the weaponry category. For example, when discussing the addition of the penetrator, the men鈥檚 group wrote down an apology next to it on the list. Cameron did not record her participants, so it is unknown if her participants might also have distanced themselves from certain terms. Regardless, the agreement among the contemporary group, as seen in the exchange below, was that the implications of the term were offensive enough to apologize for its use. In their apology, the male participants are acknowledging the inherent violence of the term, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Given this acknowledgement paired with the decreasing use of this type of term in my study, it can be concluded that there is a growing awareness among men of the role played by language in sexual violence.

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This growing awareness is further demonstrated in the women鈥檚 group with the large increase in weaponry terms used to describe male genitalia. It seems that the women in my study are much more aware than their 1992 counterparts that men refer to their genitalia as weapons鈥攁s tools for violence鈥攁nd they are able to cite these terms readily. Furthermore, the high number of monument terms listed by the women (e.g., Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building) demonstrate that despite male attempts to distance themselves from such representations, the mythologizing of the penis still lives on in contemporary US culture.

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Title Image Credit听

"An Overabundance of Phallic Architecture". From High quality Phallic Architecture Blank Meme template.听

References听

1. Cameron, Deborah. 鈥淣aming of Parts: Gender, Culture, and Terms for the Penis among American College Students.鈥� American Speech, vol. 67, no. 4, 1992, pp. 367鈥�82. JSTOR, .