Word of the Week: Cisgender September 18, 2008

The Latin root cis means ‘on the same side’ (in contrast to the Latin root trans, which means across or beyond). Gender comes from the Latin genus – kind, sort or class. So, cisgender refers to a gender identity/presentation that matches (is on the same side as) one’s assigned sex, or someone who’s not transgendered. The word was created to be a complement to the term transgender, and as a better alternative to saying ‘biological’ or ‘genetic’ man/woman when distinguishing a non-transgendered individual.

Gender was historically used to simply indicate different types of things, and this has persisted in modern usage, to a degree. For example, connectors and fasteners used in electrical/mechanical trades are gendered male or female. The difference between older usage and these modern ones is that now, those assignments are made in direct analogy to genitalia — the piece with something that protrudes is male, while the piece with a corresponding hole/indentation is female. Gender is also used linguistically: some languages have grammatical gender that assigns a gender to every noun, not always in correlation with the meaning of the word.

Word of the Week: Lifestyle September 10, 2008

Sorry I’ve been a bit absent with these posts lately. I ran out of inspiration, temporarily.

However, some recent blog posts (have you checked out the newly updated blogroll?) have nudged me out of my dry spell. I was reading one of Betty Rocket’s posts about people in the lifestyle, and had to remind myself which lifestyle she was talking about. It’s one of those words we take for granted these days, but ‘lifestyle’ is a fairly new term, dating back to only 1929 according to the OED.

Coined by psychologist Alfred Adler, lifestyle originally referred simply to someone’s basic psychological makeup that informs their behavior throughout life. Adler referred to this as life style or style of life. Over time, mainly through the forces of marketing and, more recently, sexual subcultures, lifestyle has come to signify a specific type of life style. In this way, there’s been a narrowing of definition here. In initial use, I understand life style as something universal – every person alive would have a certain individual life style. In modern usage, however, lifestyle always refers to some specific way of life, though it needs a modifier to determine exactly which way of life that might be (swinger lifestyle, gay lifestyle, party lifestyle, and so on).

Word of the Week: Klismaphilia August 21, 2008

This is not an interest I have, but it’s a fun word to say (try it!). Klismaphilia is essentially an enema fetish- it denotes the experience of sexual pleasure from thinking about or actually receiving an enema. It’s classified as a paraphilia; depending on who you ask, that means either sexual dependency, unhealthy obsession, or simply nontraditional sexual fantasies/behavior.

Word of the Week: Fanny August 6, 2008

Most of you will recognize this week’s word as a common term for butt; it may also recall memories of the fanny pack, one of the more memorable fashion offerings of the 80′s. ‘Fanny’ meaning butt is specific to this particular country- the U.S.- and is a fairly new slang term (within the past 50 years or so). In other English-speaking parts of the world, namely British locales, ‘fanny’ is slang for vulva. I’ve always been curious about this variance, so this week I did a little research on the subject.

Word of the Week: Vanilla July 31, 2008

A couple things come to my mind when I hear this word- flavor (as in vanilla extract) and race. Vanilla sex is a widely misunderstood phrase, and its meaning changes depending on which sexual subculture employs it. Just like ‘kinky’, vanilla has a slightly different meaning for everyone. For example, I might call pegging vanilla, whereas I’m sure some of you would not agree.