By Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093, founder of My Mental Climb. Christina leads the practice's sex-therapy and Gottman couples work.
TL;DR. Love Island contestants keep inventing code words for sex, "french fries" this season and "journeys" last season, partly to clear broadcast rules and partly because naming sex out loud is uncomfortable for almost everyone. The discomfort does not stay on the show. Sex is one of the least-discussed and hardest topics for couples to talk about directly, even though research consistently links direct sexual communication to higher sexual and relationship satisfaction. Most people reach for euphemism over precision, rarely saying "intercourse" even when that is exactly what they mean. In sex therapy, helping a couple build plain, shared language for sex and bodies is one of the first moves, because it is hard to ask for what you cannot say.
On Love Island this season, "french fries" is the cast's code word for sex. It caught on after Trinity asked the villa who had been "doing french fries" the night before (the answer, more or less, was Kenzie and Corbin), with the running joke that fries are a finger food. Last season the word was "journey." One contestant said her journey "went all the way," the rest of the cast picked it up, and "How was your journey?" became villa shorthand for "did you sleep together." (E! Online breaks down both.)
The franchise has been doing this for years. Islanders invent code words for sex to stay inside broadcast limits, and the words change every season: doing bits, journeys, french fries. It is genuinely funny, and it is also a clean example of something that shows up in therapy rooms all the time. Naming sex out loud, in plain words, is hard for most people, and the workaround is almost always a euphemism.
Why naming sex is so hard
The avoidance has little to do with vocabulary. Most adults know the words. What they run into is everything attached to the words.
Euphemism researchers describe sexual slang as a kind of container for a culture's discomforts: the embarrassment, the shame, the religious and family messaging, the sense that sex is private and a little improper even when it is wanted. When the direct word carries all of that, the indirect word feels safer. It creates distance from the thing being discussed, and distance feels like protection.
Where the shame usually starts
For most people, this traces back to childhood and the words they were, and were not, given. A lot of people never had plain language for sex or bodies modeled at home, where every body part got a real name except the genitals, which got a nickname or got skipped. A child absorbs that gap as an early lesson: this part is different, and we do not say it out loud. That lesson is hard to unlearn at thirty. One study in the journal Sex Roles found that about a third of women used euphemisms or childlike terms for their own genitals, which the researchers read as a sign of how durable genital shame still is.
Child-health guidance points the other way, and this is the part worth knowing if you are raising kids. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends teaching children the correct anatomical terms, penis, vulva, vagina, testicles, breasts, the same way you teach elbow or knee. The reasons are concrete. Children who have accurate words for their bodies are more likely to disclose abuse and to be understood when they do, because they can say what happened and to whom. Knowing the real names supports body autonomy, the felt sense of being in charge of your own body, which child-safety researchers treat as a protective factor against abuse. Teaching the words plainly, without dropping your voice, also tells a child there is nothing shameful about these parts in the first place.
A kid who can say vulva or penis without flinching has a head start on every adult conversation this post is about. The breasts and the genitals never got filed under "different," so they do not have to be un-filed later.
We dodge the "proper" word too
Here is the part that surprises people. The avoidance is not only about slang versus crude words. Even the formal, textbook-correct term goes mostly unused. Almost no one says "intercourse" in ordinary life, even when intercourse is precisely what they mean. They say sleeping together, hooking up, did it, messed around, were intimate, made love, or, this season, french fries. "Intercourse" is accurate and unembarrassing, and it still lands as too direct, too much like a doctor's office.
When a couple cannot land on words for sex that feel both accurate and comfortable, they tend to talk around it, and talking around it is where misunderstandings live.
The vagueness is not only about the formal word. The casual ones are slippery too, and "hooking up" is the clearest case. Researchers who study it call it a purposefully ambiguous term: when they ask emerging adults what it means, the answers split at least six ways, from kissing to making out to everything-but-intercourse to intercourse to an undefined "sex" to, sometimes, just going on a date. Two people can both say "we hooked up" and mean genuinely different nights. On a dating app that gap gets filled in by hope or by anxiety, and two people walk away from the same evening with two different stories of what happened and what it meant.
For people dating, and for couples, the fix is unglamorous and it works: say the specific thing. "I want to have sex tonight" carries information that "let's see where things go" does not. Being specific out loud puts two people on the same page instead of leaving them to guess, and it rarely kills the mood people assume it will.
Why it matters past the villa
On a dating show, the euphemism is harmless and a little charming. In a relationship that has to last, the same avoidance starts to cost something.
Talking about sex is consistently one of the hardest things for couples to do. In observational studies, sex is among the least-discussed topics between partners, even partners who handle money, in-laws, and parenting without much trouble. The gap shows up in the bedroom: research on long-term couples finds that partners are often only partly accurate about what the other one enjoys and dislikes, sometimes knowing well under half of a partner's turn-offs. You cannot offer someone more of what works and less of what does not if neither of you has said it out loud.
The encouraging side is just as well-documented. A meta-analysis of couples' sexual communication found that partners who talk about sex more directly report higher sexual satisfaction and higher relationship satisfaction, and for women, more frequent orgasm. The mechanism is not mysterious: saying what you want makes it more likely you get it. Being specific is how two people find each other in bed, and there is nothing unromantic about it.
What the kink community figured out
If you want to see direct sexual communication done well, look at a community mainstream culture tends to dismiss: people who practice kink and BDSM. Out of necessity, they built explicit templates for talking about sex, and the rest of us can borrow them.
Before a scene, partners negotiate. They talk through what they do and do not want, hard limits and soft limits, often using a yes/no/maybe list where each person marks what they are into, curious about, or unwilling to try. They agree on a safeword, a pre-set signal that stops everything, and many use a traffic-light system: green for keep going, yellow for slow down or check in, red for stop now. Consent gets treated as ongoing and revocable, something you keep giving rather than a one-time gate at the start. The community's working shorthand, "safe, sane, and consensual" and "risk-aware consensual kink," assumes that the more intense the encounter, the more explicit the conversation has to be beforehand.
Research on these communities finds their consent norms are unusually strong and detailed, and consent educators increasingly hold up kink negotiation as a model the wider culture could learn from. Take away the specific gear and what is left is a set of plain habits any couple can use: say what you want and do not want before you start, agree on a way to pause that is not a crisis, and check in along the way. None of it requires being into kink, just a willingness to have the conversation most people are taught to avoid.
What this looks like in therapy
None of this means the topic of sex is the problem. Sex is not inherently awkward; the discomfort lives in the person, in what they were taught and what they carry, not in the subject itself. That distinction is the hopeful part, because conditioning can be revisited and softened. A history that made directness feel unsafe is not a fixed trait, and getting more comfortable talking about sex is the kind of thing therapy is built to work with.
In sex therapy and couples work, one of the early moves is helping a couple build plain, shared language for sex, desire, and bodies, words both people can say without flinching. Sometimes that means getting more comfortable with the direct terms; sometimes it means choosing your own shorthand on purpose, which is a different thing from avoiding the topic when both people could name it directly. The Love Island cast, for what it is worth, did land on shared words. They just did it for the cameras instead of for each other.
We hold a lot of context for how people come to talk, or not talk, about sex: family and cultural messages, faith backgrounds, and past experiences that made directness feel unsafe. We also stay curious about the specific story you bring rather than assuming we already know it. If sex has become something you and your partner talk around instead of about, that is workable, and it is common. You can book a free 15-minute consult with our intake coordinator, who will match you with the therapist who fits. Telehealth across California.
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Last clinically reviewed: by Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093.
