AAR

[Cora]

Actually, many of today's "crude" words words for bodyparts, e.g. the male and female C-word, have been around a long, long time. I doubt that a proper Regency miss would know or use them (but then, proper Regency misses have done a lot of unlikely things in today's historical romances), but a Duke of Slut type hero probably would at least know such words. And for historicals, the medical terms would probably be unsuitable, simply because they were not in common use.

Otherwise, I wonder whether this objection to clinical terms is a cultural thing, because to me the word "penis" is not clinical at all, because that's how I have always called the respective bodypart from a single digit age on. We do have euphemisms and more or less colourful slang terms, but I think "penis" is the one most people would use.

I can see the problem with "vagina" because that one really does have that clinical ring to it, probably because "vagina" is a term I only learned in school, before that I used the neutral German word. If I were writing in German or translating a respective scene, I'd probably use that neutral term (and since the same word can also mean sword sheath, you could have some nice imagery as a bonus), since I hate all of the German slang terms. But English does not seem to have an equivalent neutral word, so we're stuck with vagina on the one hand and euphemisms or slang terms on the other.

[Elizabeth Rolls]

[Maysa]

[Schola]

[veasleyd1]

For actually-used pre-modern terminology, a useful reference is:

Pauline Kiernan, Filthy shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Sexual Puns (Gotham Books, 2007).

Kiernan has a doctorate from Oxford and is also the author of Shakespeare's Theory of Drama.

The problem for an author in using many of these is that many readers, probably, would not catch the references because the vocabulary is obsolete.

[Linda in sw va]