Swedish Campaign Searches for a New Term for Female Masturbation

When it comes to self pleasure, dudes have a lot more ways to describe their one-on-one time than women. Sure, we’re not exactly short for euphemisms: flicking the bean, polishing the pearl, beating around the bush, and the fan favorite: Jilling off, etc. For some reason plenty of people find female masturbation to be taboo, but now a Swedish organization is holding a competition to normalize the act.

The Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) launched a competition earlier this month looking for a specific word for female masturbation to promote “open, positive view of sex and relationship issues.” Kristina Ljungros, a spokeswoman for RFSU said:

“Rather than sit around amongst ourselves talking about it, we thought we would launch a nationwide competition…”

“We are trying to put sexuality on the agenda – the positive aspects, not just the negative ones like sexual abuse. We want to focus on the good parts, the lust”.

“When it comes to masturbation, people mostly think about just men doing it and we don’t think of it as common for women. If we don’t have a word in the language, how can we even talk about it?” she argued.

Unfortunately it’s too late to submit your own ideas to RFSU—though you are more than welcome to submit them below. RSFU has sifted through more than a thousand entries and has narrowed them down to a shortlist of 34 words, which the Swedish public has voted on. Some of the shortlisted words: “klittra,” “pulla,” “selfa.” Very Swedish. The most popular words will be voted on by the RFSU’s committee in June of 2015.

Sigh, klittra probably has my vote, though wouldn’t “Klitto-patra” be awesome?