I recently started reading a new book, Red City by Marie Lu. In the first part, one of the main characters has sex with another character. Things seemed pretty normal (for a fantasy novel); the author used the word “cock”.

All well and good. But then we got to “slippery core”.

And then, a few pages later, she has folds.

Overall the sex scene is pretty good, but why is it that authors (especially female authors) tend to refer to a woman’s genitals as a “core”, or that she has “folds”? Look, I get it; there aren’t a lot of pretty-sounding words for female genitalia. I mean, except in some older stories/books of mine I generally talk around female genitalia. “Vulva” and “vagina” sound clinical, “pussy” is silly-looking, “cunt” is considered one of the rudest words in American English, and if you follow Katelyn Brawn on Instagram you’ve heard plenty of truly ridiculous ones beyond that. There just isn’t a good word that authors can use, so they resort to “core”. I mean, even Jacqueline Carey uses the term “nether lips” multiple times in the Kushiel series, as well as “phallus” to refer to the penis, but she makes it work.

We need a good, sexy word for female genitalia that can be used by writers (of all sexes). Otherwise we’ll just get more women with cores and folds.

I would also like to point out that the characters in the snippets above don’t use protection. The woman knows that the man is a virgin so the odds of him having a STI are small, but she is clearly experienced which suggests that she has had sex at least once before (probably plenty of times, though). The man doesn’t even think about these things, or about possibly getting her pregnant. I realize that bringing it up would just break the flow, but I can think of at least three good ways to mention it. The man is very anxiety-ridden and shy; he probably is worried about STIs or pregnancy. He could bring it up and wilt, and she could bring him back to full hardness while telling him she can’t get pregnant because of some magical reason or another.

I don’t know. This is just the stuff I think about. You have to get the little stuff right so we can believe the lies of the big stuff.