I have watched a woman's whole face open at our name, the laugh, the lean-in, the oh thank god someone said it. And I have watched a different woman's mouth go flat, the polite nod that means she's already decided something about me. Same name. Same three syllables. Opposite verdicts. And the second woman is almost never the troll you'd expect. She's not the man who comments "FILTHY" under our ads. She's frequently thinks of herself a feminist, someone who has read everything, who is on the good side about things that matters, and who finds the kitty unforgivable.
That gap has taught me more than any focus group could. Because the heat around a cute name for a vagina isn't really about the name. It's about a wound so old it predates the language we're fighting in.
Why There's No Neutral Word for the Vagina
You cannot understand why "kitty" detonates without understanding that there is no neutral word for this part of a woman, and there never has been. We have the clinical word, which the platforms ban. We have the crude words, which were built as insults. And we have the cute words, which were built to make grown women sound like they were discussing something embarrassing they'd rather not. Every register is a costume, and every costume was sewn by someone who thought the body underneath was a problem.
And that thinking is ancient. Eve takes the apple, and sex enters the world as sin with a woman's name on the invoice. Pandora opens the box that looses suffering on humanity, and the box is, not subtly, a body. The Greeks gave us the vagina dentata, the toothed and hungry thing that might bite, fear dressed up as folklore. Medicine spent centuries on the "wandering womb," the belief that the uterus was a restless animal roaming the body causing madness, which is where the word hysteria comes from, literally, the womb disease. We burned women as witches and a striking amount of the testimony was about their bodies, their marks, their appetites, their refusal to stay quiet and closed. Barbara Walker spent an entire encyclopedia documenting how thoroughly the feminine was recoded from sacred to shameful, from worshipped to feared. You don't have to buy every etymology in that book to feel the weight of the pattern, which is corroborated everywhere you look: for most of recorded history, the woman's body, and this part of it especially, has been treated as the location of sin, danger, dirt, and disease.
So when a woman bristles at a playful name for her own anatomy, she is not being humorless. She is standing at the end of a three-thousand-year corridor of being told that the thing between her legs is the problem with the world. She has earned her suspicion. She has earned the right to side-eye anyone who seems to be making light of the very thing that was used to make light of her.
I want to say that plainly before I say anything in my own defense, because if you don't grant the critics the full dignity of their history, nothing else I say is worth reading.
The Feminist Case Against Cute Euphemisms
Here is the strongest version of the case against my own company's name, made as well as I can make it, because it deserves that.
You do not dismantle a euphemism by inventing a softer one. "Kitty" lives in the same family as "down there" and "lady parts" and "your flower," the long lineage of words designed to let everyone avoid the real one. Every time we reach for the cute word, we ratify the idea that the real word is too much, too dirty, too adult for daylight. The genuinely radical act, the argument goes, is to refuse the wink entirely. Say vagina. Say it flat, say it in the grocery store, say it in the ad and let them ban it and make the ban the story. By naming my company after a cat, I am not subverting the shame. I am bowing to it in a prettier dress. I'm teaching a generation of women that you can talk about your body, sure, as long as you make it adorable first.
I have turned that argument over many times, usually at night, usually after a woman I respect has gone quiet at our name. I don't think it's wrong. I think it's one of two reasonable bets, and we made the other one.
Why We Named a UTI Brand After a Cat
Here's my bet. The plain word is the one I'm not allowed to use. Type "vagina" into an ad manager and your reach falls off a cliff. The censor doesn't care how brave I'm being. It just doesn't deliver the post. So the woman at 2 a.m. googling why sex keeps giving her UTIs, the one who actually needs the clinical information, never sees the brave version, because the brave version got flagged before it reached her. Purity that nobody receives isn't purity. It's a tree falling in an empty forest, very principled, completely unheard.
The cat gets through the door. That's the entire reason for the cat. It is a Trojan horse with whiskers: playful enough to slip past the filter and the flinch, and once it's inside, I don't whisper. Inside, we say vagina, urethra, vaginal estrogen, E. coli adhesion, all the words the front door couldn't carry. The wink isn't the message. The wink is the smuggling. I'm not making the body adorable so it's allowed to exist. I'm making the packaging disarming so the literacy gets delivered to the people the plain word would never reach.
I would rather get prevention science to a million women through a cat than to ten thousand through a principle. That's the trade, stated honestly. Reach over purity, in this specific censored moment, for this specific audience. Maybe in twenty years the brands that just said the word will look braver than mine, and the critic will turn out to have been right. I genuinely don't know. I made a bet under the conditions I was actually given, not the conditions I wish I had.
What the Reaction to "Good Kitty" Reveals
But here's what I keep coming back to. The fact that a cat can make one woman weep with relief and another woman furious, that's not a branding problem. That's the entire thesis of why this work exists.
If the name were neutral, if it landed softly on everyone, it would mean the culture had finally made its peace with the female body. It would mean three thousand years of sin and dirt and wandering wombs had been quietly resolved while we weren't looking. They haven't. The heat is the evidence. Every furious reaction and every relieved one is a reading on the same instrument, measuring how raw the wound still is, and the wound is the reason there's a company here at all.
So to the woman who loves it: I see you, and the lean-in is what I built it for. And to the woman who can't forgive the cat: I see you too, and I think we want the exact same thing. We're both standing in that old corridor trying to find the door out. You think the way out is to say the word and dare them to stop you. I think the way out is to smuggle the word past them in a costume they'll allow. We disagree about the tactic. We do not disagree about the war.
I'll keep wearing the cat. You keep saying the word. Between us, maybe we get a few more women out of the corridor.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is the name "Good Kitty" controversial?
Because "kitty" is a cute stand-in for the vagina, and any name that gestures at that part of the body lands on centuries of cultural baggage. Some women hear reclamation and relief; others hear one more diminutive in a long line of words designed to keep the real word unspeakable. The split isn't trolls versus fans. Some of the sharpest criticism comes from thoughtful feminists who'd rather see the plain word used than a softer euphemism.
Isn't a cute euphemism just reinforcing the shame?
That's the strongest argument against the name, and it's a fair one. The case goes: you don't dismantle a euphemism by adopting a gentler one, you only ratify the idea that the real word is too much. The counter-case is that the plain word gets banned by ad platforms and never reaches the people who need the information, so the euphemism functions as a delivery vehicle, disarming at the front door, clinical once you're inside. Reasonable people land on different sides.
Why not just say "vagina" plainly?
We do, inside our content. The problem is reach: type "vagina" into most ad managers and the post gets suppressed before anyone sees it. The plain word is the brave choice that the censor quietly disappears. The name is the workaround that gets the clinical information past the filter to the woman who's actually searching for it at 2am.
Where does the discomfort around naming the female body come from?
It's ancient. From Eve and sex-as-sin, to Pandora's box, to the "wandering womb" that gave us the word hysteria, to witch persecution, Western culture spent millennia coding the female body, and this part of it especially, as the location of sin, dirt, and danger. A modern flinch at a cute anatomical name is the tail end of a very long story, which is part of why the reaction runs so hot in both directions.
