The Observer | Magazine | Q&A: The Agony Aunt
Q Boys have willies. What do girls have? This is a serious question and I’d like an answer – soon (well, at least before they reach puberty). I have two-year-old twin girls. We’re potty training at the moment and they know the name for all their body parts, bar one. Vagina is too technical, and fanny – though I don’t mind the word – some people think is rude. As a child I used willy, but others tell me this is only for boys and will cause confusion.
This letter was sent in to Mariella Frostrup’s agony page by a friend of ours, after we’d been discussing the important topic of what our girls should call their ‘willies’. Now that they’re going through potty training this is a more important topic than one would initially have thought – especially given the propensity to shout whichever term you decide upon across restaurants, parks or friends’ houses…
‘Willy’ is a pretty coy term, but there doesn’t seem to be an equivalently asexual equivalent for ‘girl willy’. Whatever our views, Mariella’s answer is pretty superficial: if we’d needed a thesaurus there’d have been no need to ask her.
Then again, I’m not even sure why Leslie did ask her…? A bigger mystery, imho, than our current problem with ‘naming conventions’.