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It's a perfect word.
It's evocative. It's
short. Its roots go back over 15,000 years. Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Casanova were among its most famous
literary champions.
And yet, cunt still gets
the short end of the stick. So to speak.
In erotic romance, “cunt” is generally considered the
division between sensual and erotic. Do you have forty sex
scenes in your 25,000 word story? Do your characters say
“fuck” and watch each other masturbate, do they use
vibrators and have so much oral sex their jaws lock up?
Great. That sounds sensual to me.
But do you have only three sex scenes and use the word
“cunt” to describe your heroine's love canal? Yes? Then
you're writing erotica, my friend.
Why is that? Why is it
that one small word has the power to change sexy to erotic,
to change arousing to offensive? And is it that offensive,
really?
Most women seem to think so. Studies have shown that women
find “cunt” to be the single most offensive word in the
English language. (Seriously.) It's forbidden. It's
absolutely taboo.
But what is forbidden is
often what is most erotic, as well. |
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I never used to
write it. I didn't like to read it. Until I found a few
erotic romances that used it, to great effect. My dislike of
the word changed to--not indifference, because I don't feel
a word like cunt can ever inspire indifference--but more
like approval. The word was forbidden. The word was direct.
The word was a little shocking.
In short, the word was pretty hot.
Remember that episode of Sex and the City where
Charlotte is trying to woo that painter to her gallery? It's
an old man, and he proudly informs her that he's been doing
a series of paintings of cunts. Charlotte is, of course,
stunned by this. He asks her to sit for him, and you can see
she's about to refuse when the old man's
cute-little-old-lady wife enters the studio. She's holding a
tray of lemonade and says sweetly, “I bet you have a
beautiful cunt, dear.”
Think about that for a
minute. “A beautiful cunt.” Think how you might feel if
someone said that to you, in an obviously complimentary and
admiring tone. Or a deep, dangerous, sexy one. Maybe if we
think of cunt as a strong word, an arousing word, a
descriptive word, instead of a nasty one, we can replace it
in our vocabulary and our books and hold our heads high.
Just hearing the phrase “beautiful cunt” made a difference
to me, since we so often associate the word with less
pleasant adjectives. But if we think of the word—and the
objects—as beautiful...as something that deserves its own
special, grown-up word…
That’s what cunt used to be. Chaucer used it in The
Canterbury Tales, spelling it “queynte”. According to
Charles Panati's Sexy Origins and Intimate Things,
“Chaucer believed the word was derived from 'quaint', which
meant 'a many-layered, in-folded mystery'.” Now really, what
better way is there to describe a woman's sexual organs than
“a many-layered, in-folded mystery”? Can you think of
another description as poetic, as accurate and lovely?
Of course, pre-Chaucer, cunt was a name. There are many
families on the rolls in thirteenth-century England named
“Cuntles” or “Clawcunte”, or many variations thereof. There
were “Gropecunte Street”s or “Cunte Lane”s in medieval
England as well. Clearly, the word's meaning was fixed even
over 700 years ago—it first appears in written record in
1066, but seems to have had a different meaning then,
although “cunt” is derived from early language, when “kuni”
or words like it were used simply to mean “wife” or “woman”.
Which is all very interesting, except it doesn't mean much
to us or help us. Women don't want to see cunt. There's an
implication that if they do, they're the type of woman who
likes really graphic, nasty sex—the hardcore erotic
stuff—instead of the lighter, sweeter, gentle-spanking kind
of sex. (Which I think are the best kind of women, but hey.)
What's a writer to do?
See, the problem is, “cunt” works so well. As I said above,
it is evocative. It does give the reader a distinct message:
this is going to be pretty graphic. This will be pretty
hot. Isn't choosing words to set a mood part of what we
do as writers?
I decided to try using cunt. I wanted to see what t felt
like to actually write it, to actually put that forbidden
word on paper. Could I still turn people on when I threw a
cunt bomb into my work? Could I still write scenes people
would enjoy, even if a cunt bobbed up at them from the page?
To my surprise, it worked. And it wasn't too bad. It was
actually pretty sexy. And so exact! We're always looking for
words to describe or identify female body parts. Aren't you
tired of writing about slick folds or swollen entrances? Or
channels, or tunnels, or whatever? Isn't it hard to use
“pussy” to describe both the vagina and the vulva (a word I
don't like, btw)?
This is where cunt fits in. I can talk about pussies and
cunts as two separate (but obviously closely related)
entities, and I can describe a vagina without adjectives but
with a word that everyone can visualize. The many-layered,
in-folded mystery of a woman.
I don't use the word much; overuse deadens the impact and
feels overdone, just as with any other word. But of late
I've been abstaining, and I have missed it. All those folds
and entrances just can't compensate for the brevity and
clarity of cunt.
I think it’s time we
take “cunt” back. It’s time we allow ourselves to think of
our sexual selves, our sexual parts, as deserving of an
adult word (rather than the kittenish—and kind of
childish—”pussy”). As able to see that some words have more
than one meaning, and there’s nothing shameful in reclaiming
such a rich history? There’s nothing shameful in possessing
something as strong and powerful as a cunt, in saying that
yes, we have this incredible body part, and it’s capable of
amazing things, and we’re going to use a real, strong,
mature, and age-old word to refer to it?
Say it loud! I have a
cunt and I’m proud. |
