How To Be A Woman

Chapter 3




I Don’t Know What To Call My Breasts!




Of course, I know that adolescence is supposed to be an incredible … unfolding. I’ve spent my time in the library. I’ve read Gray’s Anatomy, cruising for the juicy bits. I can quote chapter and verse on adolescent neural development – on how when the sex hormones kick in, the teenage brain, essentially, explodes. White matter – wire-like fibres – establishes motorways of reason. The brain lights up like the Eastern Seaboard at dusk – lights flashing on and off in ripples; starbursts; spirals; waves. At 14, I am an experiment. Inside, I am being resurrected. I am in the middle of the kind of explosion of perspective that, in later years, I will pay a great deal of money to emulate in nightclubs, and at parties, in toilets – counting out tenners for pills in order to feel a tenth this remorseless, expanded and inspired.

I read the biographies of age-contemporaries, and boggle. Bobby Fischer was Chess Grandmaster at 15. Picasso was exhibiting at 15. Kate Bush writes ‘The Man With The Child In His Eyes’ aged 14 – so young, the child in his eyes might actually have been her own reflection. I have – as with any other teenager – the potential to take my place in the world, the equal, or better, of any adult. I could be a f*cking genius.

That’s the theory, anyway. And, to be fair, I am aware of it: my diary records that I am using this unprecedented expansion of my mental capacity to chew over some fairly major questions and concepts: ‘Wish I could cry forever. It would be such a relief.’ ‘Am I one of the wrong people?’ ‘Some days, I feel like I can do ANYTHING! I know I am here to, in some small way, save the WORLD!’ ‘Would wearing a hat make me look thinner? Seriously?’ and, on 14 March 1990, ‘I have found the meaning of life: Squeeze. Cool For Cats! BRILLO!’

But, to be honest, I’m generally too busy fire-fighting all the physical stuff to pay much attention to my brain, or my potential for prodigious genius. Man, it’s going nuts. There’s crazy shit breaking out all over the place. Bleeding and masturbatory experimentation are the very least of it. The transformation of my body from something that does little more than poo and do jigsaws into a magical department store that will, one day, vend babies takes up nearly all my time and worry.

One morning, I wake up to find that my entire body is covered in livid red marks – like the raspberry-ripple streaks across my belly, thighs, breasts, underarms and calves. At first I presume it’s a rash, and walk around for two days smothered in Sudocrem – baby nappy-rash ointment – in the hope that it will soothe them. When my mother notices her supplies are running low, she accuses the two-year-old Cheryl of having eaten it again and I, nobly, don’t correct her.


But when I examine the marks more closely – door locked, using an anglepoise lamp, listening to ‘Cool For Cats’ very loudly, for moral support – I see that they aren’t welts at all, but indentations. My skin has torn as I’ve grown – these are stretch-marks, covering nearly every soft part of my body. Puberty is like a lion that has raked me with its claws as I try to outrun it. Or, as I put it to Caz that night, ‘I am going to have to wear tights and polo-necks for the REST of my LIFE. Even in summer. I’m going to have to pretend I’m just always very cold. That’s going to have to be the thing everyone knows about me. That I’m cold.’

Caz and I have hit a rare moment of peace in our relationship. Two days ago, we spontaneously hugged each other. My mother was so shocked and alarmed she took a photo of us, to mark the occasion. I still have it now – both of us in matching dressing gowns, barefoot, faces pressed together in expressions of 98 per cent goodwill, 2 per cent festering aggression. Our mother thinks that we have, finally, bonded – brought together by the combined responsibility of being the eldest two siblings of seven children – able to now settle our differences as the adults we are swiftly becoming.

Why we’re actually hugging is because we’ve just had a two-hour-long conversation about what to call our vaginas.

‘I can’t say it,’ I say, to Caz. We’re in the bedroom – me on my bed, her on the floor. We’re listening to ‘Cool For Cats’ for the ninth time that morning. The tape is already wearing thin – Chris Difford’s voice now wobbles a bit as the Indians send signals from the rocks, above the pass. Caz is knitting a jumper, in order to have something to wear.

‘I think I’d rather pretend I don’t have one at all than say “vagina”,’ I continue. ‘If I injure myself, and end up in a very formal hospital where they don’t allow slang words and they ask, “Where is the pain?” I think that, rather than say “In my vagina” I would just reply “Guess!”, and then faint. I hate the word vagina.’

‘It was so much easier last year,’ Caz agrees, sadly.

Until last year, all the Moran children were labouring under the illusion that the word ‘navel’ didn’t refer to the belly button, but, in fact, the female genitalia. Any injury to the area would result in the shriek, ‘I banged my NAVEL!’, and communal sympathy. One corollary of this was finding the phrase ‘naval officer’ almost unbearably amusing. When Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson, and was referred to as ‘a naval officer’ during the ceremony on BBC1 by Jonathan Dimbleby, we became so hysterical we had to lie, upside down, on the stairs, until the blood went back into our heads.

Additionally – for a short period, in 1987 – our little sister Weena mispronounced ‘vagina’ as ‘china’, and we used that word, for a spell. Then, in the autumn, T’Pau released the Number One single ‘China In Your Hand’, and, once again, we all had to lie upside down on the stairs until our circulations went back to normal. Entering a shop where it was playing was borderline dangerous. We would have to run out, with our hoods up, shaking.

So now, in 1989, we have no word for ‘vagina’ at all – and with all the stuff that’s going on down there, we feel we need one. We sit in silence, thoughtfully, for a moment.

‘We could call them Rolfs,’ Caz says, eventually. ‘Like Rolf Harris? They look like his beard.’

We stare at each other. We both know that Rolf Harris is not the answer we are looking for.

The problem with the word ‘vagina’ is that vaginas seem to be just straight-out bad luck. Only a masochist would want one, because only awful things happen to them. Vaginas get torn. Vaginas get ‘examined’. Evidence is found in them. Serial killers leave things in them, to taunt Morse – like they’re the shelf in the hallway, where you leave your keys and spare change. No one wants one of those.

No. Let’s clear this up right now – I don’t actually have a vagina. I never have. Indeed, I reckon very few women ever have. Queen Victoria, obviously. Barbara Castle. Margaret Thatcher. With the pubic hair styled, of course, in an exact replica of that on her head.

But everyone else – no. Because I’m scarcely the only one. No one I know would refer to their vagina as their ‘vagina’. They have slang names, pet names, made-up names – family names for the front parlour that have been passed down from generation to generation. When I asked on Twitter for people’s childhood appellations, I got over 500 replies in 20 minutes – a great percentage of them totally, dementedly barking. It was like I’d opened up a Pandora’s Box of Minge. The first one I got set the tone: ‘My childhood best friend’s mum referred to it as “ducky”, and periods as “duck’s disease”.’

This is, clearly, a train of thought uninterrupted – possibly for generations – by any outside influence. It’s lexical inbreeding.

The range was immense. Some were quite lovely and/or amusing: your flower, your tuppence, pickle, tissy, Mary, flump, putt, tuchas, minny, pum-pum, tinkle, fairy, foof, my lady, woowoo, bits and pieces, muffin, cupcake, and pocket.

Then there were ones that were clearly the result of some family in-joke: Valerie, Aunty Helen, pasta shell, bumgina, fandango, Yorkshire Pudding (‘She would cry, “I’ve got sand in my Yorkshire!”’), Under Henge, and Birmingham City Centre.

And then there were the downright bizarre and/or worrying: your difference, your secret, your problem, Sweet Fanny Adams (nickname of a murdered Victorian child; not a great day at the Vagina Imaginarium, all told), and vent. I can only presume ‘vent’ was the product of a family that kept snakes, and wanted to use the same word across species, to save time.

Across the range, it was interesting to note the appearance of ‘la-la’, ‘tinky’ and ‘po’ – meaning almost the entire cast of Teletubbies appear to be based on familial slang words for vagina. I suppose you have to get your inspiration from somewhere.

I, personally, have a cunt. Sometimes it’s ‘flaps’ or ‘twat’, but, most of the time, it’s my cunt. Cunt is a proper, old, historic, strong word. I like that my fire escape also doubles up as the most potent swearword in the English language. Yeah. That’s how powerful it is, guys. If I tell you what I’ve got down there, old ladies and clerics might faint. I like how shocked people are when you say ‘cunt’. It’s like I have a nuclear bomb in my pants, or a mad tiger, or a gun.

Compared to this, the most powerful swearword men have got out of their privates is ‘dick’, which is frankly vanilla, and I believe you’re allowed to use on, like, Blue Peter if something goes wrong. In a culture where nearly everything female is still seen as squeam-inducing, and/or weak – menstruation, menopause, just the sheer, simple act of calling someone ‘a girl’ – I love that ‘cunt’ stands, on its own, as the supreme, unvanquishable word. It has almost mystic resonance. It is a cunt – we all know it’s a cunt – but we can’t call it a cunt. We can’t say the actual word. It’s too powerful. Like Jews can never utter the Tetragrammaton – and must make do with ‘Jehovah’, instead.


Of course, I knew all the thinking behind calling my cunt a cunt was useless when I had my two daughters. There’s no point in telling them all that ‘mystic resonances of Jehovah’ stuff when they’re being chased around the nursery by a teacher with a broom, enraged by them casually saying the biggest swearword in the English language, just before mid-morning snack-time.

When Lizzie was just a few days old – around the time the first kilo of morphine wore off, and I could focus again, but, to be frank, still a good two weeks before I could sit down without screaming ‘HOLY MARY I THINK IT’S BROKEN!’ – my husband and I stared down at our beautiful little daughter. Blue-eyed, kissy-mouthed and soft as a velvet mouse, she had just done a dump so enormous, it had filled every crevice of her lower body.

My husband approached her nethers, tentatively, with a wet-wipe, and then slumped back, looking defeated.

‘Not only have I got to clean all … this out,’ he said, looking on the verge of mania, ‘but I don’t even know what I’m cleaning. What are we going to call it? We can’t call it “cunt”.’

‘Her NAME is Lizzie!’ I said, shocked.

‘You know what I mean,’ my husband sighed. ‘I’m not using that word. That’s what you’ve got. You’ve got a cunt. It’s not what she’s got. You’ve got … Scooby. She’s got Scrappy Doo. It’s totally different. Oh God – it’s all up her back as far as her hat. I’m wiping shit off a hat. I’m not sure I like parenthood. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO CALL HER VAGINA?’

Over the next few weeks, we brainstormed over the issue, like ad executives blue-skying the ad campaign for a new hamflavoured yoghurt.

‘It looks like a ladybird,’ my husband said, during one particularly fanciful moment. ‘We could call it her ladybird!’

‘Yeah but by that token, it looks equally like a Volkswagen Beetle,’ I pointed out. ‘We could call it Herbie. And when she reaches adolescence, and goes boy-crazy, we can say “Herbie Goes Bananas” to each other over and over again, as you build the doorless turret we can lock her in.’

Another week, my husband came up with ‘Baby Gap’ – ‘It’s her baby gap!’ – which was not only a great joke, but also meant that putting her in a T-shirt or jumper with the ‘Baby Gap’ logo on it prompted valuable minutes of roflment.

In the event, though, that name lived fast and died young – we used it so many times all the fun fell off it. The words began to feel old and stale, like over-chewed gum.

We knew we needed something less gimmicky, but it was only when Lizzie started talking – at around 12 months – that the word finally came to me.

She’d fallen over and hurt her ‘baby gap’. As I pulled her onto my knee, and described out loud to her what had happened – in the manner that you do when you are teaching a child to speak – I reached out into the dark of my subconscious, and came back with –

‘Bot-bot. You’ve hurt your bot-bot!’ I said, palming her tears off her face.

‘Bot-bot’ is what my mother had referred to all our genitals as, before we hit adolescence: ‘Bot’ for the back and ‘bot-bot’ for the front. One word fits all. We were too poor for anything more … specialist.

And now here it was, coming into service for another generation. A round, tidy, stout little name for a round, tidy, stout little bot-bot.

Of course, when she gets older, Lizzie will find herself in exactly the same place Caz and I were, in 1989. As a teenage girl, you have to find something a bit more … rock’n’roll. Once your adolescence kicks in, there’s no way you can refer to the place that will be the epicentre of most of your decisions and thought processes for the next 40 years as your ‘bot-bot’. Scarlett O’Hara was not running around Atlanta after Ashley and then Rhett because of her bot-bot. There is no bot-bot element to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. Madonna is not showing us her bot-bot in Sex.

Often – after walking into a woodland clearing, and partaking of a ceremonial pipe amongst tribefolk – I have reflected that working out what to call your genitals is a formal rite of passage for a girl. As significant as the menarche, or assessing if you can style out dungarees or not. When ‘fingering’ starts at school – I believe around 12 these days; it appears to be the slightly more grown-up version of a toddler’s implacable desire to jam their fingers into DVD machines – it’s important a girl starts thinking exactly where she’s being fingered. Although ‘inside me’ is a fair enough starting point, it is, essentially, a direction or a command – not a name.

These days, in a world where adolescents get all their sex education from pornography, Adam may have named the animals, but Ron Jeremy names the vaginas. As one might expect, when one leaves the choice of words to porn stars who are improvising the dialogue during a double-penetration scene, not much thought, delicacy or aesthetic goes into it.

As a result, there is a whole generation of girls growing up whose ‘go to’ phrase for their genitalia is ‘p-ssy’. Personally, I dislike ‘p-ssy’. I’ve heard ‘p-ssy’ referred to in the third person too many times in porn films for it to seem like a joyful or fun word.

‘Your p-ssy likes that, doesn’t it?’ ‘Shall I give this to your p-ssy?’

It’s got all that unpleasant physical-disconnect bullshit – women separated from their vaginas – that I find un-hot in bad pornography, PLUS gives the constant, unsettling impression that the gentleman might actually be referring to the woman’s cat, which is sitting just out of camera shot, glaring balefully.

One day, I think, idly, all the cats who are watching porn being made will rise up, revolted by all the uncouth dialogue ostensibly being aimed at them, wander onto the set, and ostentatiously vomit up a hairball in the middle of some bumming.

But, let’s be honest, ‘p-ssy’ is the least of it. There is a panoply of slang words that are, in their ways, just as truly awful as ‘vagina’. Let’s bullet point!





Your Sex: sounds like a pre-emptive attempt to shift blame.

Hole: a bad thing that can happen to stockings or tights. My Johnnylulu is a GOOD thing that happens to stockings and tights.

Honeypot: inference of imminent presence of bees.

Twat: an unpleasant mélange of cow-pat, stupidity and punching. No.

Bush: the band of the same name are tiresome. The vegetation has spiders in. No.

Vag: sounds like the name of a busybody battleaxe, à la ‘Barb’ and ‘Val’. Suggestion also of chain-smoking Rothmans, and borderline addiction to bingo. No.





On the other hand, ones I do like:





Minge: sounds a bit like a slightly put-upon cat. Sometimes mine feels like that.

Flaps: amusing.

Foof: pampered, slightly ridiculous French poodle.

The Saarlac Pit: endless resonance, not least because, however much it wants Han Solo inside it, it never quite gets him.





Of course, once you start with the silly names for your number one vestibule, there’s no real reason to stop.

‘It’s all going off at West Midlands Safari Park and Zoo,’ I will say, ruefully, sitting on the toilet during an attack of cystitis. ‘The tree has been struck by lightning in Tom’s Midnight Garden.’


On other, happier days, one can comment that, ‘The mist is really rolling in on the Mull of Kintyre tonight.’


But what of your wabs? After all, it’s not like it’s any easier to think of something to call your breasts. They sit on your ribcage, from the age of 13 onwards, and yet there’s scarcely a word you can refer to them with that isn’t going to make either you, or someone else, uncomfortable.

A couple of years ago, the voluminously lipped sex-minx du jour Scarlett Johansson revealed that she calls her breasts ‘my girls’.

‘I like my body and face,’ she said, echoing the thoughts of all but the blind, ‘and I love my breasts – I call them “my girls”.’

Not for the first time in her career,1 Johansson had raised a vexed issue. What, exactly, can a grown woman of sense and wit call her tits? She has come up with the perfect answer – ‘my girls’ is playful, possessive, feminine – but no one else can now refer to their hurdy-gurdies as ‘my girls’, as people will think you are referring to Scarlett Johansson’s tits, rather than your own.

‘I dunno, do my girls look odd in this top?’ you might say.

‘Well, my girls would look fantastic in that top, because Scarlett Johansson’s got the kind of rack that could bring about world peace,’ a friend would reply. ‘But yours look lopsided, and your nipples are all over the place. To be honest, they look like Marty Feldman’s eyes.’

In tabloid world, of course, things are easy. The word is Boobs. Or, rather, BOOBS! ‘Keeley the Page 3 girl has great BOOBS!’ says Shayne Ward. ‘Cheryl has the best BOOBS in Girls Aloud!’ Even if one uses a different word when in conversation with a Sun journalist, they put it through their soaraway spellcheck and it still comes out as ‘boobs’ anyway. I was once interviewed by them at the time I was referring to my tits as ‘jugs’ – it was the height of Britpop; I was just doing what I thought Blur would approve of – and, sure enough, the piece appeared the next day as ‘“I love my BOOBS,” says Caitlin Moran.’

Personally, I don’t have boobs. Not one. It felt as odd as reading, ‘“I love my STRIPY PREHENSILE LEMUR TAIL,” says Caitlin Moran.’

‘Boobs’ are too Benny Hill. Boobs are perfectly spherical, bouncing, jokey – you might as well refer to your ‘pink chest clowns’ whilst making a trombone-y ‘wah wah wah waaaaaaah’ sound and have done with it.

Boobs are also, by and large, white and working class – you don’t really get Bangladeshi boobs, or boobs from Bahrain. There are no ‘boobs of Lady Antonia Fraser’. Boobs are what Jordan and Pamela Anderson and Barbara Windsor have – except when Barbara had a breast cancer storyline in EastEnders, when they quickly became ‘breasts’. ‘Boobs’, of course, can’t get cancer, or lactate, or be subject to the subtle erotic arts of the Tao. Boobs exist only to jiggle up and down on the chests of women between the ages of 14 and 32, after which they get too droopy, and then presumably fall off the face of the earth, into space; maybe to eventually become part of the giant rings of Saturn.

For exactly the opposite reasons, ‘breasts’ will not do, either. You never hear the word ‘breasts’ in a positive scenario. Breasts are bad news. Much like vaginas, breasts exist to be examined by doctors and get cancer, but breasts also rack up impressive horrorpoints for being hacked off chickens and cooked in white wine, as being the word of choice for awkward men about to have very bad sex with you (‘May I touch your left breast with my finger?’) and ageing pervs (‘Her magnificent breasts were unleashed from the flimsy fabric, and seemed to dance towards Hengist’).

‘Bosom’ sounds a bit Les Dawson. ‘Cleavage’ doesn’t work, obviously – ‘I have a pain in my cleavage’ – and neither does ‘embonpoint’, because it sounds both embroidered and pointy, and so would cease to exist when you took your bra off. ‘Tits’ seems nicely down to earth for day-to-day use – ‘Give me a KitKat, I’ve just banged my tit on the door’ – but struggles to make a satisfactory transition to night-time use, where it seems a little too brusque. Personally, I quite like the idea of ‘The Guys’ – but then that’s also how I refer to my seven brothers and sisters, and as potential confusion there could lead to an even greater incidence of mental illness than we already have, I’ll probably have to leave it be.

I did go through a phase of referring to my upper palaver by the names of celebrated duos – ‘He made me get my Two Ronnies out!’ ‘And it was all going so well until The Scarecrow and Mrs King here refused to fit into the top.’ ‘Actually I call them Simon & Garfunkel because one’s bigger than the other.’ – but then I had a baby. The midwife looked very sternly on me trying to wedge the business end of ‘Christopher Dean’ into my newborn’s mouth, while ‘Jayne Torvill’ lay, traumatised and bleeding, nearby.

The English language has yet to get its head convincingly around the problem of the average woman’s bristols. Indeed, given what alarmed, ignorant, giggling fools we are, there’s every chance that this is a problem that could hang around for a while. Maybe we should give up on spoken language during the interregnum, and just refer to them as ‘(.)(.)’.

Certainly the solution to mine and Caz’s problem was realising that – when it came to both breasts and vaginas – language wasn’t really necessary. After a short period of referring to them, jointly, as ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ – which had the additional benefit of making them sound like a classy BBC production, which inspired fond memories in many – it dawned on us that we could simply point at the relevant areas, whilst mouthing ‘there’, extravagantly, in the manner of Les Dawson. ‘There’ and ‘there’ worked by way of a holding operation until we finally felt worldly and louche enough to use the words ‘tits’ and ‘cunt’ – for me, 15, and for Caz, around 27, as I recall. But, man, what a maid-of-honour’s speech that was.

1In Lost in Translation, she presented us with the question, ‘Is it ever right not to have sex with Bill Murray during a trip to Japan?’, to which anyone with any sense was able to answer, ‘No – you must always have sex with Bill Murray when you are on a trip to Japan.’