When Words Are Not Just Words: Language, Taboo, and the Illusion of Liberation

The recent discourse surrounding Toni Fowler’s defense of her use of a crude Tagalog term for the female reproductive organ has been framed as a debate about hypocrisy (“Why is vagina acceptable but the Tagalog word is not?”) or prudishness (“Why are Filipinos so uncomfortable with their own bodies?”). But this framing misses the deeper issue.

What is really at stake is not anatomy, nor even sexuality—but how language works, what it does, and whether liberation can be achieved simply by speaking louder and more bluntly.

Same Referent, Different Act

At a superficial level, Fowler’s argument appears straightforward: if two words refer to the same body part, why should one be condemned and the other permitted?

The problem is that language does not operate at the level of reference alone.

Linguists distinguish between denotation (what a word refers to) and connotation (the social, emotional, and cultural meanings it carries). Philosophers of language have long insisted on the same point. As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously observed, the meaning of a word is found in its use, not in a private mental definition.

The English word vagina belongs to a clinical and technical register. It appears in medical textbooks, legal documents, and biology classes without altering the moral temperature of the room. The Tagalog term Fowler defends, by contrast, is a marked term—historically sexualized, vulgarized, and used precisely to provoke or shock.

To insist that the two are equivalent is not progressive. It is linguistically careless.

Can Taboo Be Broken by Force?

Supporters of Fowler often argue that connotations are social constructs—and social constructs can change. This is true. Language evolves.

But linguistic change is not accomplished by insistence or repetition alone.

Words lose taboo status only when 1) a speech community, not just an individual, adopts them neutrally, 2) they migrate across registers (from vulgar to educational or professional use), and 3) they lose their shock value.

Here, none of these conditions are met.

In fact, Fowler’s reliance on the word’s capacity to offend demonstrates the opposite. The word still shocks. It still disrupts. It still commands attention because it remains taboo. As long as provocation is the mechanism, the taboo is intact.

A word cannot be normalized while it is still being used as a transgressive act.

Language Does Things

This is where philosophy clarifies what intuition already suspects.

J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words, showed that speech is not merely descriptive. Utterances are actions. They can assert, wound, normalize, degrade, or reconfigure social space.

To say “I’m just naming anatomy” ignores the illocutionary force of the utterance—what the speech does in context.

Public, indiscriminate use of a vulgar sexual term does not merely inform. It sexualizes public discourse, collapses distinctions between private and public speech, and trades on transgression as social capital.

Intentions, however sincerely stated, do not cancel effects.

Modesty Is Not Repression

Another claim often raised is that Filipino preference for terms like "ari" or "puwerta" reflects sexual immaturity or fear of the body.

This is a philosophical misreading.

Across cultures and centuries, societies have employed linguistic reserve around sexuality—not because sex is evil, but because it is powerful, intimate, and morally significant. Classical theology is full of such restraint. Latin moral theology spoke of pudenda (“things to be veiled”), not out of disgust, but out of proportion.

Saint Thomas Aquinas described this instinct as verecundia: a natural sense of modesty allied to temperance. It is not repression, but moral perception—the recognition that some realities lose meaning when stripped of boundaries.

To assume that health requires maximal explicitness is not neutral. It is a modern cultural preference masquerading as universality.

The Irony of Shock-Based Liberation

There is a final irony in Fowler’s position.

Her attempt to dismantle taboo depends on the very fact that taboo still exists. Shock only works where limits remain. In attempting to abolish linguistic restraint, she confirms that sexuality continues to carry symbolic weight—and that language is one of the ways societies register that weight.

In this sense, her rebellion affirms the structure it seeks to overthrow.

What This Debate Is Really About

This is not a debate about whether bodies are good (they are), nor about whether sexuality should be acknowledged (it should). It is a debate about whether all forms of naming are equal, and whether restraint is always a vice.

Wittgenstein warned against imagining language as a purely private labeling system. Aquinas insisted that speech is a moral act ordered to reason and fittingness. Austin demonstrated that words do things whether we intend them to or not.

Together, they point to the same conclusion: not everything true must be said in every way, in every context, to every audience.

When speech loses that sense of proportion, what is gained is not freedom—but coarseness dressed up as courage.

If words are not just words, then how we use them matters. And liberation that depends on shock may reveal less about progress than about the poverty of our discourse.

A Filipino Catholic Note

For Filipinos formed by a Catholic imagination, this debate touches something deeper than taste or trend. Our instinct for linguistic reserve around sexuality reflects an anthropology that understands the body not as spectacle, but as gift—created, fallen, redeemed, and destined for glory. Modesty in speech is not fear of the flesh, but reverence for it; not denial of sexuality, but a refusal to trivialize what participates in love, generation, and self-gift. In this light, restraint is not backwardness but wisdom: an acknowledgment that some realities are better honored through proportion than exposure. When language protects mystery rather than flattening it, it serves not repression, but dignity.

Nick Santamaria is a scholar of theology currently pursuing doctoral studies at De La Salle University and the Maryhill School of Theology. His research interests include the socio-anthropology of religion, theological anthropology, and the intersections of faith, culture, and modernity. He writes on the lived experience of belief, exploring how theology takes root in the everyday life of Filipino communities.