What's The Massive Problem With The C-word?
Why is the C- Word Worse than the F -Word?
Few words in the glorious English language are as divisive as the c swear word. Even people who have no issue with saying fuck have strong opinions about saying cunt. Most people grimace and say they hate it. Hate. It. Reasons vary from the harsh sound of the word [/kʌnt/] with its sharp 'nt' through to inferring that female genitals are a bit icky. Really? Icky?
I kid you not.
None of that same revulsion is attached to the swear words associated with male genitalia: prick, cock, dick, wanger. Descriptive words for the male appendage are not quite so… offensive.
People, this is no accident.
Gropecunt Lane
Cunt is not a modern word. It was already common parlance in the 14th century when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote it several times in The Canterbury Tales. In ye olde medieval days, cunt was just a word for female genitalia.
Most English towns had street names reflective of the street's purpose: bread was produced in Baker Street, the church stood on Church Street, London Road led to London, and one could pay to cop a feel in Gropecunt Lane. Simple.
Witch Hunt the Cunt
Enter stage left, King James VI of Scotland and later also King James I of England and Ireland (b.1566, d.1625). King James was a copious drinker with debatable personal hygiene, and a prolific burner of witches – or should we say, "witches"? To fuel the witch hunts, his toxic brand of Christian Puritanism turned women into objects of suspicion, shored up by shaming their sexual organs to the point where they could not even be mentioned.
A Nasty Name for a Nasty Thing
Disgust for the vagina became entrenched. In 1785, the antiquarian Francis Grose compiled The Classical Dictionary of The Vulgar Tongue.
Cunt was listed as "a nasty name for a nasty thing".
Before Puritanism, there was neither shame nor disgust about female genitalia. The vagina was a magnificent entity that could embrace a penis and birth children.
The legacy of King James's condemnation of the vagina persists today. In the USA and England, cunt is a particularly dirty, dirty word. The worst.
In Ireland, cunt is used with much less venom – "It’s an awful cunt of a day" would be just another way to say that it is raining. I worked with a brilliant Irish businessman. He was a strategy genius but would crack me up when he couldn't "get the lid off the cunting biscuit tin".
Shun the Cunt
The Emerald Isle was not always so linguistically accommodating. In the roaring 1920s, James Joyce wrote cunt in Ulysses. His uncompromising publisher, Sylvia Beach, fought tooth and nail to publish the uncensored version. Across the Irish Sea in England, D. H. Lawrence had the gamekeeper utter it to Lady Chatterley. The censors lost their shit, and it was banned for over 40 years.
By the 1990s, in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, colourful Glaswegian junkie dialogue is peppered with cunt this and cunt that. The controversy that blighted previous authors who dared to utter the c word had finally run out of juice.
Shame and Condemnation
So why on earth is cunt still offensive to a large proportion of the adult population?
Even in the 21st century, 500-year-old negative Jacobean ideas persist. The most spiteful swear word we have describes female genitals as shameful and nasty. None of the same disgust applies to the swear words associated with male genitalia. "Dick" is almost friendly in comparison, almost… swaggering.
This is deliberate. Reviling the vagina is fervently anti-women.
Such is the relentless shame regarding female sexual organs that many modern women (and men, come to think of it) cannot accurately name the component parts of female genitalia. For some, locating a clitoris is as sophisticated as a round of 'pin the tail on the donkey'.
Meanwhile, in bathrooms and salons, women's pubic hair is whisked away, sanitising adult vulvas into pre-pubescent baldness, and surgery to improve appearances is an option for anyone dissatisfied with the natural look of their female genitalia.
Say it Loud. Say it Proud
If we want to take disgust away from female sexual organs, we should start by stripping the repulsion from the word cunt. Cunt should be as innocuous as dick, and this will only happen if we say cunt liberally – and often, without apology.
If it's okay with Olivia Colman…
The British female actor, Olivia Colman, claimed cunt is her favourite swearword. Frankly, if it's okay with Olivia, it should be okay with us.
Finally, girls are taking the word back, and we can all join in.
It is so easy. Just say cunt from time to time.
Own it.
Reclaim it.
Destigmatize it.
Sing it from the frigging rooftops.
No biggie, and the next time someone shudders at the c-word, they have a long-dead woman-hating Jacobean King to thank.
Unashamedly written by Mel Barren
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