Clitoris and glitter and pleasure, oh my!
"Klittra" -- Sweden's unofficial new term for female masturbation -- combines the words "clitoris" (klitoris) and "glitter" (glittra) in an effort to encourage a positive outlook on women's sexual pleasure.
In 2014, the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) declared a need for more open dialogue about women and masturbation. "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?" asked RFSU spokeswoman Kristina Ljungros.
Ljungros was referring to the fact that there is no Swedish word for female masturbation (nor is there in English, for that matter). Progressive Nordic nation that it is, Sweden just happened to decide that it needed one.
RFSU held a competition calling upon women to submit ideas for a new way to describe flicking the bean. They received over 1,200 responses, but "klittra" won the gold, pulling ahead competitors such as "pulla," "runka" and "selfa."
As RFSU tries to induct the new word into Sweden's dictionary, we'll be here cheering them on -- and hopefully moving Merriam-Webster in the same direction.
"We are trying to put sexuality on the agenda -- the positive aspects," Ljungros said. "We want to focus on the good parts, the lust."
You do you, Sweden. We could certainly part with a few of awkward slang terms of our own.
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