Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Slang terms for sex and the genitals often come from the names of animals in English, and in other languages as well. Cock and pussy are the two that come most quickly to mind. But Blanche was looking through other lists and noticed the curious fact that monkey shows up as a synonym for both "penis" and "vagina," and in that respect appears to be a rare hermaphroditic slang term.

There is some history of using monkey to women and their private parts. The Oxford English Dictionary has an 1863 citation, "And reaching down his gun to take, His fingers touched her monkey." Monkey also shows up in an 1899 slang dictionary as a synonym of pussy and snatch-box. Monkey used in this way sounds somewhat unusual to Blanche, but there are many current citations like this on Internet sites such as Urbandictionary.com, so she supposes it is still current slang.

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There is also an older tradition in English of calling foolish children or lecherous women monkeys, as in Othello, when Cassio says "This is the monkey's own giving out; she is persuaded I will marry her." It is not certain that the foolish/lecherous sense of monkey is directly related to the reference to the vagina, since there's some gap in the history of the word and the first sexual sense of "her monkey" doesn't show up until 19th-century America.

Use of monkey for "vagina" is also found in some other European languages, such as Italian mona, which has the same two meanings. Blanche is told that Greek mouni works in the same way. Monkey fits the pattern that any animal which is warm and hairy is a potential word for "vagina," hence pussy and beaver in English. (And the same pattern is found in other languages as well -- conejo "rabbit" and zorra "vixen" in Spanish.)

On the other hand, monkey as penis is a much more recent innovation in American English. The first use recorded in the OED is only from 1978 in the phrase "choking the monkey," a synonym for masturbation, apparently only used for male masturbation. (In more recent American English, "spanking" and "slapping the monkey" are more common phrases.)

Probably all mammals masturbate by rubbing themselves -- dogs are famous for humping legs and dolphins love the water intake valves in their tanks. But because primates have hands, their masturbation is the kind that is most recognizably the same as ours. (Perhaps in recognition of this, there is a minor genre of YouTube videos that show monkeys masturbating.)

But does the slang phrase spank/slap/choke the monkey have something to do with primate self-pleasuring habits? That is unlikely, since we spank the monkey, rather than monkeying ourselves or doing the monkey. Instead, spank the monkey is part of a set of masturbation synonyms that involve a verb of abuse (spank/slap/choke/attact/bang/bash/beat) plus a vivid, rhyming, or alliterative word that might refer to the penis (the bishop / the pope / the chicken / the pirate / the hog/ the meat / the midget / the baby). So randomly combining a verb and noun you can coin new masturbation phrases like slap the midget, choke the baby, spank the pope, etc. Significant is that many of the nouns in these idioms do not otherwise mean "penis." Out of the context of the abuse verb, bishop, pope, or pirate would not be understood to mean "penis," and neither would monkey.

So monkey is not really slang for "penis"; it is only part of an idiom about masturbation. You can say He spanked his monkey, but you can't say Suck my monkey. And for that reason, we don't have to conclude that monkey is a slang word in English that can mean either "penis" or "vagina." To the extent that monkey is still slang for a body part, it means "vagina" when used outside the masturbation idioms.

But to get back to the monkeys, Blanche cannot resist mentioning a recent conversation with a visiting anthropologist. He was kind enough to explain the red, white, and blue display of vervet monkeys. Vervets have a red anus and blue fur on the scrotum, as well as white fur that runs between the two. When a vervet male wants to demonstrate his dominance over another, he walks back and forth in front of him with his tail lifted. The subordinate male sits crouched while watching this display, emitting grunts and screams as the simian Old Glory passes by.

Oh, those crazy subhumans. Come to think of it, you can see something similar watching the commentators on Fox News, until they pause to take a commercial break from their adoring coverage of the Republican Primate in Chief.