Take fuck for example. The
common alternatives for the verb form are to sleep with, to make love, and a
gamut of boganisms like bang, bonk and shag. To sleep with is just misleading.
To make love is pleasantly romantic. But sometimes it’s about lust not love:
you just want to fuck.
The same pussy-footing happens with
cunt. Vagina is a perfectly good word, but it describes something a
gynaecologist looks into. When I look at the same thing I see a cunt, not a
quim or a slit or a gash, and pussy is best left curled up on the end of the
bed.
I never use cunt as a term
of abuse, the ultimate pejorative. Cunts are beautiful, glorious things that give
the greatest pleasure. I won’t use cunt to describe someone I wouldn’t piss on
if they were on fire. Should I be so moved, mean-spirited,
evil bastard or bitch-hag from Hell
will suffice.
American blacks have reclaimed
nigger, and good for them. Some feminists are trying to reclaim slut, and good
on them too. I doubt, though, that one feminist’s attempt to make cunty, as in
“Wow, this is so cunty!”—cunty being an expression of approval—is going to cut the
etymological mustard, although I once knew a cunty woman. We enjoyed rip-roaring
sex and she rejoiced to think of herself as my cunt. That’s how to reclaim a
word.
I warn my good woman that I
call a cunt a cunt. Coming from Serbia, she says, the word holds no emotional charge
for her, as it did for lexicographer Francis Grose in his Dictionary of the vulgar tongue in 1811. A cunt for him was “a
nasty name for a nasty thing”. My bet is he never saw one.
In flight on my first trip to
France I read Stephen Clarke’s Talk to
the snail, an ironical guide to understanding the French. He observes that
the French word con can be tricky: it
has several meanings, one being cunt. Using con
politely is all about context and inflection.
Outside a souvenir shop in Rue
de Mouffetard last year I find a rack of small replicas of the distinctive blue
Paris street signs with white borders. Place des Cons catches my eye. I like to
think of it as the Gallic equivalent of the famous east London alley circa 1230
known as Gropecunt Lane.
It’s now attached to the wall
next to my front doorbell and proudly affirms that my small
weatherboard cottage is a place for cunts.
Rock on.
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