I have a stick up my arse about the difference between “less” and “fewer”, and women in the generations below have the same about “vagina” and “vulva”, and even though the principle is the same – why not just use the right word, instead of the wrong one? – I have never been able to see their problem. Everyone’s got the gist. Why make a scene?
It happened that I recently spent some hallowed time with millennials and also saw Janelle Monáe, live, and this all coincided at a festival that it would be crass to mention for the 91st time – but suffice it to say, I have finally come round to their point of view.
Monáe is famous for her high-concept everything, from her loafers to her eyebrows, and has this pair of trousers with a tri-frill down the front in variegated pinks, to resemble (drumroll) a vulva. Not a vagina! I know that. It’s a vulva. For clarity, for anything you can count, it’s “fewer”, while the vulva is what everyone calls the vagina and the vagina is the muscular tube leading to the cervix.
Monáe is a class act, and nothing happens for no reason. The density of her choreographic message on sex and gender, in the vulva trousers – we’ll have to put a pin in it for later, because in the moment, everyone was just shouting “It’s the vagina trousers!”, “I love the vagina trousers!”. It was an endlessly reinforcing loop of wrongness, to which I would normally respond by thinking, well, what’s the harm, I’m sure they know what’s what when it counts. It’s not like they’re shouting “less vaginas” or “fewer suggestiveness”.
But it was driving the young ’uns crazy, as a matter of respect. One way or another, Monáe had put a lot of thought into this spectacle; the very least she deserved was that it be called the right word. You wouldn’t go to a Coldplay gig where Michael J Fox guested on guitar, as he did last weekend, and introduce him as “Marty McFly”. It wouldn’t be existentially wrong; everyone would know who you meant. It would just sound like you weren’t concentrating, and hadn’t been for a long time. Maybe your mind is somewhere else, but really, don’t Chris Martin, and Fox for that matter, deserve better?
I’m a fully converted vulva-splainer now.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
