The Other Patrick sent us a link this week, and it’s right in line with some things we talked about a while back in comments: Laura Penny wants to bring the word “cunt” into the light of day. Her basic argument – that it represents female sexuality as a powerful and possibly even threatening element – is intriguing and worth considering. The problem is that the example she chooses of a usage about which people got overly uptight is an incident in which one man called another man a “cunt.”
That usage is never going to be okay. Why?
There are gulfs and chasms and abysses of difference between referring to a part of female anatomy as a cunt and calling an entire person a “cunt.” She thinks because “prick” is a put-down, too, it’s all the same – but she’s mistaken. Being male has never been considered a bad thing to be. Being female has been, and continues to be. Calling a man a prick says he’s a particular kind of man that the speaker doesn’t like. Calling someone a cunt says the person is a woman, period, and any kind of woman is an objectionable thing to be. Additionally, men often call each other “pricks” in a teasing or even affectionate way, whereas “cunt” is always and exclusively an insult of epic proportions [ETA: in the U.S., anyway].
Any term which relies on the agreed precept that a whole demographic of people are automatically worthless just can’t represent egalitarian values.
I do agree that the word works just fine in its anatomical usage. As Penny argues, it possibly the least offensive slang term available for that collection of body parts, and actually beats the proper words because we don’t have a single word for the entire part as a woman experiences it – we only have a term for how men experience it through sex:
the medical descriptor “vagina” refers only to a part of the organ, as if women’s sexuality were nothing more than a wet hole, or “sheath” in the Latin.
Additionally, Penny talks a lot about how powerful female sexuality is, and that argument has never made sense to me. Sexuality shouldn’t be powerful; the power we invest in male sexuality is the whole reason it’s gotten conflated with conquering and controlling. We need to be stripping the power from male sexuality, and then when nobody’s sexuality is a particularly powerful thing, we can put sex in its proper perspective as a non-threatening part of being human.
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Oh NVM, I took the plunge and dat Richard Seymour is a pretty dang good guy.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Eeeeexactly. (Especially in re: potential fetus. NO THANK YOU SIR. NO THANK YOU AT ALL.) Plus, I’ve had sex without love, and it was good times. *Plus* plus, I dunno, the whole phrase just seems all soft-focus, Kenny G. music and “baby” as an endearment and I don’t know what all, and ew.
Hate “moist”, okay with “nipple”. Hate “tummy” or “belly”, too: just too…juvenile-sounding? Maybe?
Also, yeah. I *have* used it as an insult a few times, probably will again–I am not good about vocabulary, especially when I’m pissy–but don’t feel good about it. Generic girl parts shouldn’t be *that* much of an insult. (I’m okay with “twat”, which seems more on the level of “dick” or “prick”.) Although I hate my personal uterus with the fire of a thousand suns, so maybe I should find some way to make that an insult: like, the only thing person X does is be a pain for ten days a month, so…?
Isabel C.(Quote) (Reply)
I went through a phase when I was really confused about my own sexuality where I thought perhaps I was just asexual. It’s cool to hear from someone who is actually asexual. Have you checked out the AVEN network at all? I found some interesting people there.
In any case, I would imagine when you are really angry what comes out is partly coming from what is deeply rooted emotionally in what you first learned as angry words – for the same reason an angry person will swear in their native language. I would say don’t beat yourself up too much about it, even as you are trying to find ways of expressing yourself that say it better, if that makes sense. Sometimes we just have to give ourselves room to be human.
firebird(Quote) (Reply)
“Moist” is a funny word to me, I’m surprised at how many people, including many a friend and acquaintance hate it since I think it conveys very well the feeling of swamp ass I get in the summer.[/TMI]
But, OMG I HATE TUMMY/BELLY TOO! Mostly due to it sounding so juvenile, yes. (and because my mom has indigestion/constipation problems which causes her to rub her stomach incessantly and revert to baby talk when she whines about it…we can’t afford to go to the doctor and I shouldn’t be so heartless but I think it’s annoying as fuck (‘cuz I’m usually the only person around for her to talk about it with).
Has anyone heard of the word “twazzer”? That’s fun-sounding to me.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
I like belly to describe the entire region (abdomen sound overly scientific) like I’ll say someone has a big belly, or that a kind of laugh is a belly laugh, and my dog is sitting on my belly, because actually, my stomach is a little higher up than where he is, and there’s a layer of muscle and skin between him and it anyway, and sometimes, no, it isn’t my stomach hurting, it’s probably my intestines but it might me my bladder, or any number of other tightly packed organs, and I’ll use a more general word until I’ve pinned it down better. I could use abdomen, but belly works just as well, unless I’m talking to my doctor, and people give me odd looks when I tell them I have a little abdominal pain, but I’m good to go.
And as far as juvenile, the shortening of words and use of certain consonant sounds (bunny for rabbit, for example, mommy for mother or in Arabic, ummi, [my] mommy, for wahiditi, [my] mother, which is much more striking) and the addition of a long e sound at the end of words is part of a legitimate proto-language that makes it much easier for children of a certain brain growth state to learn to talk. Saying that something is inferior because it’s juvenile is another way of saying kids aren’t as good or as fully human as adults.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t really even realize my ageism…I’ve also got a massive double-standard ‘cuz of course I don’t mind when kids talk like that but when adults do (and they’re not interacting with a child) it just irritates me.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
What is the love you’re making? Is it the various fluids? The potential fetus? The hormones and chemicals being released that can foster infatuation?
I’ve never thought about it this way until reading your comment, but it suddenly struck me as sounding like “make nice,” which is generally considered something false.
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
Which is fine for kids, but I don’t particularly like, or seek, the company of children.I’m not all “argh, no children in a fifty-foot radius”, but…I hang out with adults. So I expect them to talk like adults. I’d be a little weirded out, frankly, if any of my friends referred to their “mommy” or “binkie” or whatever in a non-ironic way.
It’s like toilet-training: sure, toddlers do disgusting things in their underwear, and that’s…disgusting, but you expect it from a two-year-old. (Annnnd reason #2 on the “Izzy’s Never Having Kids” list.) If my date pisses himself, on the other hand, we have a problem of one sort of another.
All that said, I actually don’t think “belly” is a problem in non-sexual contexts–though I prefer “stomach”, inaccurate or not, or even “gut”–and “belly laugh” works fine for me. I think it just pushes my “ugh, NO” button when it shows up in erotic writing or dialogue.
Isabel C.(Quote) (Reply)
Of course, then we’re looking at situations in which you are deciding what it means to be an adult, and what it means to be a child, which I don’t agree with in general but don’t disagree with when it comes to your personal choices in friends and reactions to behavior.
However, I do get kind of peeved when gamers who are girls/women or sympathetic men refer to gamer men as “immature,” or call them 12 year lds because they act reprehensibly. For one thing, it’s placing reprehensible behavior in an “all young people act this way category,” “maturity is reserved for adults” mentality that I find puzzling. It’s saying that REAL adults don’t act this way, but KIDS sure do. There’s no way children are mature enough to know right from wrong. Blah.
Granted, that’s kind of not the same thing as what you’re saying, but I find that kind of argument to be an ageist one. As a kid I found the words “mommy” and “daddy” uncomfortable, same as “mother” and “father.” I also had a very extensive vocabulary (more than I do now! You lose it if you don’t practice and college was a mind-killer) because I disliked recess and lunch breaks and tended, from elementary school through highschool, to not really go until I could go off campus. I helped clean the cafeteria with the janitors in elementary school (and that was actually very fun), graded papers for teachers in middle school, and read the dictionary in 9th and 10th grades. So having my youth being lumped into a group seen as the group that does bad things, can’t speak, or are immature doesn’t feel too great!
On the other hand…I was definitely younger the last time I said “tummy,” so I’m not sure how one would talk abut youthful language without involving wordage about the young…XD
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
Dunno, I still say that my dog hunts bunnies, and that’s aside from the fact that I babytalk to the animals. And when I’m sick, or in pain or recovering from a seizure or surgery, my parents suddenly become mommy and daddy.
With the exception of belly dancing and belly buttons, I agree.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
it’s one thing to say that the language is characteristic of younger people, and another to say it’s inferior because of the age association as opposed to for some other reason.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
I’m not thrilled about certain usages of “immature” myself, particularly the ones implying that the only “mature” thing to do is settle down and start caring about linoleum and the PTA. That said, if we’re discussing childhood in re: clinical development stages, I don’t have an issue saying that most adults should have moved past said stages.
On the, er, third hand, what I actually mind about the language use in these cases–and this isn’t a moral judgment or anything, but more along the lines of hating “moist” or “nugget”–is adults actively trying to sound like small children, as opposed to small children naturally doing so (q.v. brain development) or adults reverting in times of stress. Maybe “cutesy-poo” is the word I’m looking for, rather than juvenile? Twee? One of those things.
Isabel C.(Quote) (Reply)
Ack, yeah. I was going to add something about regression-under-stress, but it slipped my mind. My bad.
I think “belly” doesn’t bug me in any context as an adjective, oddly enough.
Isabel C.(Quote) (Reply)
“Cutesy-poo” wordage, definitely, and I know people like that myself!
I don’t disagree with you on cutesy-poo language–it irks me, definitely! In the last few days I’ve just been seeing SO MUCH commentary on the internet making microaggressions towards youth in the “there’s no way adults act like this” way and a response has just been building. In particular this: http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ blog’s comments are rife with ageist claims that the perpetrators of the heinous harassment are “12 year olds.” I can say for a fact that when I was 12 I was treated way better by my male peers than at present now that we are adults.
But, eh, yeah that’s getting more off topic. Oops.
I think my own word hypocrisy is that cutesy-speak at children bothers me to no end but I definitely use it on “my” cat sometimes. She’s just so fluffy and always has this great “I’m superior” face. And did I mention fluffy?
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
Baby talk to children past a certain age annoys the crap out of me, but children before and during the stage when they’re learning to talk actually really respond best to it. There has been some research done that suggests that the modulations in pitch match infant cries and that they affect brain chemistry in the children positively. The cutoff should be around three, though, at the most, and a lot of people address elementary age kids like that, and it’s grating, for me, and for most kids. And it’s frequently used by adults to condescend to kids and not answer questions, which really pisses me off.
As for the twelve year old thing, the Other Anne is right. I got better behavior out of my twelve year old peers when I was that age than I get from college boys, and I still get better behavior from twelve year olds now that I’m an adult. High School boys, not so much, but that’s so much more to do with the “boys will be boys” attitude.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Heh. I call all dogs puppies. I can’t help it. I know they’re NOT puppies, but they’re all puppies to me.
PS, my first word was puppy, much to my mom’s dismay. Maybe that’s why I’m fixated.
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
Directed at no one in particular: Ha! I knew 90% of Hathorians were actually huge language geeks (I am, too)! We could open a whole other blog about Words That Annoy Us!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Up until the middle of the 20th century, “make love” meant to flirt or woo. I hear it in classic films a lot, typically as a playful accusation– “Why, Mr. Jarvis, I believe you’re trying to make love to me!”
Patito Gigante(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, I’ve known about that for a while, and MUCH prefer the original definition of the term…”make love” in reference to sexual intercourse just seems so…eh…douche-chilly and saccharine? IDK, it’s hard to explain.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
I had a look at the AVEN site, thanks for the link. They have a pretty broad definition of “asexual” there, which I like.
Korva(Quote) (Reply)
Sure! It was one of my stepping stones, and I still have a friend from there on my Facebook. (Considering I’m only friends with about 40 people that’s actually saying something.) While I’m in a heterosexual relationship now, and would consider myself bisexual, I do not experience attraction as a visual phenomenon (rather, scent, touch, and emotional closeness are important), which is what was so confusing in a society that insists on visual sexuality. I still find mass market sexuality bewildering.
In any case, I just noticed you use the word since it is still fairly uncommon and wanted to recognize it.
Firebird(Quote) (Reply)
Attackfish,
based on the comic refd., shall we call the cunt in whole or part a stargate? as in, “i may not be a stargate, but i have one, and it is awesome.”
cub(Quote) (Reply)
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