[NSFW] The surprising profundity of how toki pona handles sex
[Obvious CW, this entire post is about human sexuality. Academic-ish terminology but yeah.]
As I was writing “There is no gender in toki pona.“, I kept thinking about how what I was saying applied to discussions of sexuality. But I didn’t want to meander too far from my main point, and didn’t want to turn an SFW post into an NSFW one.
In the previous post I talked about how gender-related words in toki pona are not exempt from subjectivity. That’s the idea that the words we choose depend on our own perspective. Some Penicillium roqueforti, for instance, might variously be jaki ‘grossness’ if found somewhere undesirable, namako ‘flavor’ if found as part of Roquefort cheese, soko ‘fungus’ to a mycologist, misikeke ‘medicine’ to a manufacturer of penicillin, and laso ‘blueness’ to an artist painting a slice of Roquefort and interested only in the color. None of these words is more or less correct than the other, even if some will statistically occur more often than others.
But I can’t think of a better way to explain the full depths of subjectivity in toki pona than by talking about how it applies to human sexuality. That’s because sex, as one of the most intimate and primal acts humans engage in, is one of the things most defined by the perception of the person doing it. And in toki pona, if we want to talk about sex in detail, we have to subjectively describe the things and acts involved.
Tokiponist readers can skip past this list, but for others: toki pona has several words for body parts. Of these:
- uta means ‘mouth’ and lawa means ‘head’, both with little room for ambiguity.
- luka means ‘hand’ or ‘arm’, but in a sexual context will almost always mean the former.
- lukin1 ‘eye’, kute ‘ear’, and pilin ‘heart’ also have dedicated names. They are of little direct relevance to sex acts,2 but may come up incidentally.
- Other words can refer to body parts used in sex, but are ambiguous without greater context. noka could mean thighs or feet. nena could mean breasts or buttocks. insa could mean vagina or rectum. monsi could mean back or buttocks. sinpin could mean chest or face. (None of these is an exhaustive list.)
However, for the body parts most associated with sex, toki pona has no words. And that is where a miracle of subjectivity arises.
Consider the vagina. When someone says ‘vagina’ in English, they do this accepting all the societal baggage associated with that word (including that it comes from the Latin word for ‘sheath’ and that many or even most English speakers think the word refers to the vulva). Someone describing their vagina in toki pona, however, can choose a phrase based on both how they perceive it and why it is being discussed:
- lupa unpa ‘sex hole’ conceptualizes the vagina through the lens of sex, in a way that is interchangeable with other holes involved in sex.
- lupa mama ‘parent hole’ conceptualizes the vagina through the lens of reproduction.
- lupa anpa sinpin ‘front bottom hole’ (or just lupa anpa or lupa sinpin if one or the other is already clear from context) is entirely neutral as to any activity the vagina might be used for.
- lupa meli uses a word that, as discussed in my previous essay, doesn’t have a direct translation in English, but can broadly be glossed as ‘feminine’. As also discussed there, using toki pona’s three gender words to refer to sexually dimorphic anatomy is somewhat controversial, but not incorrect. Or someone could be using meli not to convey that vaginas are a female body part, but that they associate theirs with femininity as a concept.
- By the same token, the other two gender words—mije (broadly meaning ‘masculine’) and tonsi (broadly meaning ‘gender-variant’)—might be used after lupa by someone wishing specifically to convey that their vagina does not conform to a normative female or feminine standard, either in terms of physical appearance (e.g. from masculinizing medications or procedures), how they perceive it, or how they use it.3
- lupa is not the only viable noun, either:
- Someone emphasizing that their vagina is how sperm cells reach the uterus and how a newborn exits the uterus might say nasin mama ‘parent path’.
- Someone emphasizing that objects go into their vagina might use poki ‘container’ or, perhaps in a kink context, ilo ‘tool’.
- When speaking in a context where the vagina’s applicability to sex and childbearing is not particularly relevant—perhaps a doctor discussing it as an organ needing medical attention—someone might use insa ‘internal organ’.
- Or someone might use a figurative term like uta anpa ‘lower mouth’.4
The range of meanings is even starker with penises. The differing states of vaginas primarily effects adjective choice. With penises, on the other hand, there is not even a universally accurate noun. Yes, in practice, many people use palisa ‘long hard thing; branch, rod, stick’ to refer to their penises. But if you, dear readers, will indulge some prescriptivism on my part: If you are routinely calling your penis a palisa, you are either using that word wrong or need to talk to a doctor immediately.
As the irreplaceable Mira Bellwether wrote in the legendary zine Fucking Trans Women,5 “almost all sexual discourse on penises” is “on erect penises, hard penises, penetrating penises”, with soft penises treated as defective.6 Yet penises spend the vast majority of their existences flaccid. A penis, usually, is a linja ‘long and flexible thing’ or nena ‘bump/protuberance’.7 If the most generic term for a vagina is probably lupa anpa sinpin, for penis it’s probably nena anpa sinpin.8 Notably, and very much not coincidentally, this is also a phrase that could describe a clitoris.
The full range of modifiers available for vaginas also apply to penises. The gender-related terms are of particular interest, as many transfeminine people may find their penis more masculine or feminine in different contexts, perhaps based on different erotic stimuli. So a nena tonsi could become a linja meli (longer but not fully hard, and thus smoother to the touch) or a palisa mije (fully erect, more similar to the normative erect male penis)—if those are the words that make sense to the person, of course. Penises, unlike vaginas, also have the second (arguably primary) role of excreting waste. In this context one might be a nasin jaki ‘path of grossness’, linja telo ‘rope-like thing of fluid’, or ilo weka ‘tool of removal’.9
Substances, too, benefit from subjectivity. Both ejaculate and vaginal discharge can be either telo ‘liquid’ or ko ‘goo/sticky stuff’ based both on the viscosity of the fluid (often correlating with testosterone levels) and/or the role the person sees it as fulfilling.
A common struggle for queer, kinky, and otherwise different people when speaking in English is that the words generally used for some sex-related thing don’t always match the way we see those things. Someone who uses a strap-on dildo may prefer to call it their penis. Someone who bottoms anally may not want to use a term for their anus that is more associated with decidedly unsexy10 functions. Someone who has a penis but prefers to finger their partners may feel like they are doing something wrong because that’s not “sex” according to mass media.
It would be easy enough to construct a language in which all of those things are called the things people want to call them. Have a word for any phallic object used for sex, have separate words for anus-as-GI-component and anus-as-erogenous-zone, etc. But toki pona does something much more audacious than that: It makes all these things the same. “mi palisa unpa e lupa” is the same sentence regardless of what palisa and lupa refer to.11 It could mean that you put your penis in someone’s vagina, your strap-on in someone’s anus, your finger in two people’s mouths, or even your tongue in someone’s nostril if that’s what you’re into. And it is up to you, the speaker, to decide what needs to be disambiguated. If you are a trans woman who wants to talk about sex without commenting on whether you’ve had bottom surgery, well, lupa unpa and lupa anpa can both mean either ‘vagina’ or ‘anus’. Meanwhile, your anus can be the lupa unpa in that context but the lupa jaki ‘gross hole’ in others, and your lupa monsi ‘back hole’ more generically. If you are a trans man who uses a packer, that is your nena anpa, and if it is of the pack-and-play variety, that nena anpa can become a palisa unpa. And if your preferred form of sex is with yourself, your “mi palisa unpa e lupa” to mean that you finger your own anus is just as valid as someone else’ “mi palisa unpa e lupa” to mean that they have procreative penis-in-vagina sex with their wife. None of these words mean only one thing.
This is the greatest beauty of toki pona. This is the reason I speak toki pona. Not just how this applies to sex, I mean. The fact that I can use words that convey my experience of reality, and they are not just “valid” in the sappy group-therapy sense; they are correct. I do not need to repurpose words. The words I use in toki pona are always correct as long as they are honest. Someone can describe being on the receiving end of toki utala ‘combative speech’, and all that matters is that that is a valid description of the speech to them; contrast the problem in English of “Stop yelling at me.” / “I’m not yelling.” Someone can talk about the misikeke ‘medicine’ they take daily, and that is an accurate term if they use that thing to treat maladies, whether the thing is a pharmaceutical, cannabis, or a spiritual exercise. The degree of information conveyed is based on what the speaker finds important to clarify, not what a societal expectation says you need to convey.
And so if someone says “supa lape la mi unpa palisa e lupa pi olin mi“, they have told you almost nothing that can be directly translated into English,12 and yet they have also told you everything that they think you need to know. That is beautiful.
- Also oko in some nasin (ways of speaking). ↩︎
- With apologies to Captain Disillusion, love with your heart, but don’t like… literally love with your heart. ↩︎
- I and fellow tokiponist lili Lawa wrote the Wikipedia article “Terminology of transgender identity“, which I recommend for further context on the way tonsi people talk about our bodies. ↩︎
- uta is, lowkey, probably the least useful word in pu other than pu itself. Like, I use it, because if it’s widely understood one might as well, but if someone were proposing it now as a nimi sin (new word) I think it’d get laughed out of the room as obviously redundant with lupa. Technically its definition includes a few related things like lips and jaw, but these can be said with other words and toki pona rarely takes you to that level of anatomical specificity. ↩︎
- Two more Wikipedia articles I wrote! ↩︎
- You can, and should, buy Fucking Trans Women for $10 through Payhip. The money goes to Mira’s widower, who I’ve been lucky enough to chat with briefly, and is a great person. ↩︎
- This lends itself to obvious jokes about penis size, but, at least in my opinion, “long” in the context of linja is more about length relative to width, and even most small penises are “long” in that way. The nena/linja distinction here depends more on how the penis is being conceptualized than its size. ↩︎
- sinpin ‘front’ to disambiguate from buttocks. As with lupa anpa sinpin, either anpa or sinpin might be dropped if the other is clear from context. ↩︎
- The former, and arguably the latter too, could also apply to a vagina in the context of menstruation. ↩︎
- To most! ↩︎
- Literally ‘I sexually apply a stick-like thing to a hole’, or variants thereof for different tenses and different quantities of the three nouns. ↩︎
- Sussing out the full range of potential meanings of this statement is left as an exercise to the reader. ↩︎