Shut Your Mouth

Some words are so forbidden, so scary, so discomfiting that people will do everything in their power to avoid uttering them.

They might avoid the subject or use elaborate euphemisms. If absolutely pressed, they might say the letters the word starts and ends with. They might whisper, or even resort to faking laryngitis.

“Vagina” is one of those words.

Exploding the silence shrouding the word--and the fear, shame and embarrassment that can attend it--was a goal of Eve Ensler’s Obie-winning play, “The Vagina Monologues,” performed last week at the Wiltern Theater. (It will be performed again Thursday through Saturday at Glaxa Studios in Los Angeles.)

Ensler’s mission is to lift women out of the darkness and secrecy surrounding their bodies and sexuality by saying the word loud and saying it proud.

For many people, this is painfully difficult.

One local newspaper reporter who was assigned to write a piece about the play could not bring himself to say it during conversations with the show’s publicists. And Ensler tells of a television station that had tried to produce an entire show about the monologues without ever using the word “vagina.”

Even women talking to other women resort to euphemisms. One of Ensler’s most poignant monologues is based on an interview with a 74-year-old woman who referred to her vagina as “down there.”

“We have been conditioned since childhood that these are private parts . . . taboo for touching, looking at or talking about,” said Carol Shuherk, a communications expert at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Each time you say ‘penis’ or ‘vagina,’ you leap over a comfort barrier. . . . You know that you and the person you have said it to share the same mental image. Suddenly, you are very intimate. It can be unnerving and embarrassing.”

Forbidden words generally have to do with scatology, sex and religion, said Timothy Jay, a psychology professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams. Innocuous words that have double meanings can make people uncomfortable even when they are used innocently.

“A child has no innate view of what any of these words mean,” said Jay, author of “Why We Curse” (John Benjamins, 2000). “A child learns what is taboo by being punished for saying it. Genitals do double duty. They produce things that are ‘smelly, dirty or bad’ but they are also for sex. We tend to talk about our genitals like they are not a part of us. That is why people name their genitals pet names.”

A culture’s taboos are cloaked in its euphemisms. “You don’t call people ‘toucan’ or ‘marmot,’ ” Jay said. “It is always ‘pig’ or ‘jackass.’ This comes from cultural representations of what those animals are.”

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Taboo words allow us to express animal passions, emotions that we are always trying to control with the logical part of our brain, said Jay, such as anger, frustration, surprise, joy and seduction. “These words not only do something to people, but sometimes it feels good to say them.” Many taboos originate in the Bible and in Emily Post’s guides to etiquette.

“Emily Post always says that you never refer to body parts at all,” said Jean Berko Gleason, a professor of psychology at Boston University. “Even if you were in love, you would never say ‘You have such beautiful lips.’ The Victorians didn’t talk about legs. They would say ‘limbs.’ It is easier to say ‘I love you’ in a foreign language than in a mother tongue because your mother tongue carries a very heavy emotional load.”

Every semester Gleason has to stand before a class of 106 students to introduce Freud’s ideas, using words she was taught as a child not to say. “I have to say ‘Freud said that girls have penis envy,’ ” she said. “I am a scientist. I know I look very cool. But I know that my blood pressure is going up.”

Taboo words are also idiosyncratic. Gleason gets nauseated over “luscious” and “succulent.”

“Those words just turn my stomach,” she said. “If I go to a restaurant and see those two words on the menu, I know I can’t eat those things.”

There are culturally specific taboo words. In England, people will ask for “the toilet,” too specific for Americans’ “restroom” mentality. Saying the word “bloody” bothers Britons (one theory is that it refers to menstruation; another is that it is short for “by our lady,” as in the Virgin Mary).

Ensler would agree with Jay’s assertion that saying forbidden words can be liberating.

“As more women say the word, saying it becomes less of a big deal,” Ensler writes in “The Vagina Monologues” (Villard, 1998). “It becomes part of our language, part of our lives . . . part of our bodies, connected to our minds, fueling our spirits. . . . Here’s the place to practice saying the word, because, as we know, the word is what propels us and sets us free.”

For “The Vagina Monologues” information, call Glaxa Studios at (562) 972-3593. All performances are sold out, but spots are available on a waiting list for unclaimed seats.