Offensive.
Taboo.
Vulgar.
Obscene.

Those are the words most often used to describe the word cunt. To most people it really is vulgarly offensive, taboo, a gynaecological obscenity, the worst of the four letter words.

Hmmmm…

If anyone thinks the word for the thing is offensive, what could they think of the thing itself? Sure, all of the “educated”, “middle class” “Guardian” “readers” who pat themselves on the back because they ‘get’ Chris Morris, think that the word cunt is a non-issue and probably deal with the word in a ‘been there, done that’ detachedness. Still, I’m sure even they consider it a vulgar word. Certainly not one to utter in mixed company. The men more than likely don’t really take many trips downtown, if you know what I mean. And they would certainly never utter the word around their parents. (by the way, hi, Mom!) Subconsciously, there is no difference between the word and the thing. A cunt is a ‘cunt’ is a cunt. And if it’s vulgar, it’s vulgar… it’s vulgar.

The first step towards loving ‘cunts’ is loving the word cunt. Before I get all California-rebirthing-in-a-women’s-cummune and Eve Ensler on you let me just say that I have no desire to change its meaning, no desire to reclaim it, no desire to be a word Nazi, I just think the word ‘cunt’ and cunts themselves deserve a little more respect than simply being considered obscene, vulgar, taboo.

Sure, I’ve been to the Vagina Monologues and shouted ‘cunt’ with the rest of the women, but was dismayed to hear the nervous laughter from the audience afterwards. They all seemed to be reacting like they’d done something wrong or a bit naughty and were tittering in embarrassment. ‘Oooo gosh, aren’t I just outrageous and terrible I just shouted the c-word. Giggle, giggle.’ No embarrassed giggles from me. I love saying cunt, me. In fact shouting it at the top of your voice in public is pretty fricken satisfying I can tell you. Try it some time.

Gimme a C!

Cunt really, honestly, is my favourite word. I’ve been trying to use it at least once daily – more often in polite company – since I was introduced to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s album Come Again as a teenager in the late 80s. I had no feminist reasoning behind it then, I simply loved the word. I loved the reaction it got from people. I loved the fact that this word, those four letters strung together, those four letters that when spoken created that harsh and nasty sound, could make men and women, young and old absolutely disgusted. A word! Wow! It was the moment I realised the incredible power of words. It was also the moment I realised that I was on a mission to own that one word in particular.

I’ve used the word cunt so often with so many friends and colleagues over the years that no one I know or have worked with would be surprised to hear me speak it – they’re probably all terribly bored of hearing it by now ‘Oh, god, Gia’s saying cunt again. Boooring.’ Exactly the reaction I want. Over the years I’ve been forced to take a political stance on the word – the older I got it became less ‘cute’ to justify uttering it with an ‘I think the word rules’ explanation. I am proud to say that I’ve changed the minds of many people about using the word.

Most of my friends will say cunt, at least around me, without batting an eyelid. My husband, not one to shy away from testing social boundaries himself, used the word long before I met him, but has taken on my feminist reasoning and can now argue his view point persuasively when challenged about using it in a meeting with shocked American scientists. When my ex was looking for a reason to justify the use of the word cunt in one of his programmes, I gave him the whole spiel to tell the Channel 4 lawyers and trying to be all right-on and groovy they went for it (and it was so satisfying to see the phrase “Such-and-such is about as bad as Harry Secombe calling Thora Hird a cunt” in the ITC complaint a couple months later!).

One of my dearest friends became my dearest friend because of the word ‘cunt’. Christmas 1998, I was bought the book ‘Cunt’ by Inga Muscio as a present from two of my friends (see, I told you). It’s, well, it’s all about having a cunt. I started reading it, bought a copy for my sister while I was halfway through and got in touch with the publisher about option rights the second I put the book down two days later. Inga got in touch with me a day after that, we worked on a TV idea based on her book. Throughout it all Inga and I became very close and she is firmly rooted as one of the most important people in my life.

While I was working on the ‘Cunt’ idea I was presenting a TV programme with Charlie Brooker who had just started his website TVGoHome. I mentioned that I had sent in an idea to Channel 4 called ‘Cunt’ and asked him if he thought they’d like the name. The next ‘issue’ of TVGoHome had his now famous Nathan Barley-led documentary series ‘Cunt’. Word is that Channel 4 is making a series out of it… I wonder what it will be called?

Gimme a U!

The etymological history of ‘cunt’ is confused. Some say it’s derived from the Japanese goddess Cunda, the Korean goddess Quani, the Hindu goddess Kunti (Krishna’s auntie) or perhaps even the word Egyptian pharaoh Ptah-Hotep used for ‘goddess’: quefen-t. Some people think it has roots in the Hebrew word kus (woman) or perhaps the Greek word kusthos (the pudenda). Maybe its Latin root is cunnus or its Swedish and Norwegian root is kunta. More than likely it’s probably related to the Middle Low German, Middle Dutch and Danish word kunte.

What is certain is that it is an old, old word.

Cunt’s first appearance in print was in 1230 on a map of medieval London when Gropecuntelane was listed among the ‘stews’, the brothels, of Southwark. Both Oxford and York are known to have had Gropecuntelanes and Bristol had a Cunte Street. Now, which one of you is going to start a campaign to get it changed back? All in the name of national heritage, of course.

In 1315, surgical pioneer Lanfranc used the word in Science of Cirugie when writing about his anatomical discoveries, ‘In wymmen [the] neck of [the] bladdre is schort, & is maad fast to the cunte’. Can you imagine your doctor saying during your pap smear, ‘I’m just going to stick this up your cunt. It may be a little cold”? My guess is that in Lanfranc’s day ‘cunte’ was just the normal, average everyday word for vagina. I much prefer the word cunt. If ‘vagina’ was a person it would put on latex gloves to touch itself.

Eeww.

Cunt’s literary appearance is as the Middle English word queynte in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Queynte has other meanings – sly, extinguished or an elegant, pleasant place, which is just the prudish American English professor’s euphemism for the word ‘cunt’.

Fil with this yonge wyf to rage and pleye,
Whil that hir housbonde was at Oseneye –
As clerkes ben ful subtil and ful queynte –
And prively he caughte hire by the queynte

The tiptoe-around-the-whole-issue translation is:

Fell in with this young wife to toy and play,
The while her husband was down Osney way,
Clerks being as crafty as the best of us;
And unperceived he caught her by the puss,

A closer translation might be:

Fell in with this young wife to fool around and play
While her husband was in Oseneye
As clerks are clever and crafty
He secretly grabbed her by the cunt.

It makes you realise what a cheeky old cunt that Chaucer really was.

When and, more importantly, why did a word that was used in books, medical texts and on street signs for goodness sake become the most vulgar word that one can utter in the English language? Why did the word cock, meaning penis, enter the dictionary in the 1930s, but Americans had to wait until 1961 for cunt to appear in Webster’s Dictionary, while Brits had to wait until 1972 for it to get into the OED? It’s a damned old word. Why could it have taken so long to be recognised? Could have anything to do with Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue, written in 1796 he wrote that the word ‘cunt’ is “a nasty name for a nasty thing”.

Hmmmm.

Gimme an N!

In Leonard Shlain’s book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess he posits that the more literate a society becomes, the more misogynist they become. Stick with me here.

His theory is based on the idea that men’s and women’s brains work differently. Despite all that 70s feminism that was forced on me as a kid, I, purely from circumstantial evidence, have to concede that indeed men and women do think differently.

Men are more left-brained; women are more right-brained. The left-brain is used for more logical, linear, analytical thought – science, mathematics, and reading. The right brain is used for more random, abstract, holistic thought- music, painting, and creative pursuits. The right side of your body is controlled by the left side of your brain and vice versa. If you are right handed – the simple act of writing with a pen is stimulating your left-brain.

I’m not saying that women can’t do science and men can’t paint, I’m saying that men’s brains work best when zeroing in on one thing and following it in a linear fashion. Men’s brains evolved to find the prey, follow it and kill it. As far as women’s brains go… well, if you’re not one, ask a mother who works outside the home what she’s good at. After doing a load of laundry, washing the dishes, writing a new CV, helping her kids with their homework, cleaning the bathroom, finishing some work up that she didn’t have time to finish that day, ironing everyone’s clothes, doing her taxes she’ll say, “Juggling.” Women are damn fine jugglers. Primitive women were in charge of family, fire and food. They had to keep their eye on the whole picture, gathering information from all around them and piecing it together.10,000 years isn’t even a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms, we have exactly the same brains as the cave people and use them in the exactly same way.

Shlain’s theory is that when a society is illiterate and passes on information verbally or through images, paintings or sculpture they lean towards women-centric thinking as the right, or more feminine, hemisphere of the brain is stimulated when deciphering meaning. One has to be more creative with their communication.

After you get through the chivalrous “Dark Ages” you get to 1436 and the first Gutenberg printing press. A mere fourteen years later women started to be rounded up and burned as witches. Shlain asserts that the simple act of leaning to read and write – a focused linear process- stimulated the left, or more masculine, hemisphere in the brain thereby prompting hundreds of subsequent years of serious maltreatment of women. Sure it could be a coincidence, but Shlain has researched Western, Oriental, Indo-European and Middle Eastern cultures and finds the laws governing those societies that use an alphabet change and take away rights of the women after the society becomes literate. Obviously, no one yet knows for sure if there’s any truth in it, but there’s no arguing that in ancient, illiterate civilisations where goddesses held equal footing with the gods, women were an equal and valuable part of society.

One could say then, perhaps, it was the introduction of the Bible to the general public rather than the printing press itself that sparked this change of thought. Perhaps. The Bible isn’t one of the most female friendly tomes around, I’ll grant you that, but interestingly Hebrew was the first written alphabet (rather than image-based hieroglyphic text) and, as far as I can remember, they had something to do with writing the Old Testament, didn’t they? Now just think back to RE or your favourite Charlton Heston film… do you remember what the second Commandment is? The first one is ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Fair enough. I mean, for a religion with only one god it’s a pretty fair request. But what is the second Commandment? I’ll remind you, it is: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath blah, blah, blah”. No images. No pictures. No sculptures. Nothing right brained. Nothing female.

In the beginning was The Word. Not The Image. The Word. Then men started using those words to put women in ‘their place’. Writing stories about how the first ever woman invented the whole idea of sinning, writing laws preventing women from owning property, writing wedding services demanding that they obey their husband, creating religions that tell women they have to cover themselves up (and all Bible-based religions say that)… Calling things chairman, and manhole cover and history and ‘One Small Step for a Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind’… Step aside little ladies, let us get on with things, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about it. You couldn’t understand what we’re up to anyway.

Gimme a T!

The word ‘cunt’ is not offensive in itself. What is offensive is that a word and, yes, it is a ‘swear word’ for a woman’s body part is the worst word in the language. If John Lydon has said ‘cocksuckers’ or even ‘arseholes’ or ‘fuckers’ on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here would there have been any hoo-haw whatsoever? I think not.

When a man calls another man a cunt it is perceived to be emasculating. I think it’s a wholly misplaced compliment myself. Cunts are astonishing and endless, vastly pleasurable and beautiful… not exactly how I’d describe lots of men, but something I’d use to describe lots of women.

How different would the world be if we all just decided tomorrow that cunt, though still not a pre-watershed word, was not the vilest thing you could say? Can we reclassify it? Decriminalise it? Demote it? Who do I have to call about this? Would it have a subconscious effect on how men see women, how women see themselves? Would teenage girls find the whole getting their period and becoming a sexually active woman thing a bit easier to handle? Would women finally be proud of their cunts?

Maybe like the man who tells his wife she’s useless, fat and ugly for 20 years, destroying her self-confidence and obliterating her self-esteem, then twists the knife in her gut as an added flourish by telling her he wants to leave her because she isn’t the beautiful, vibrant, happy woman he loved when he first met her, maybe men have to realise that if they start to love the word cunt, and start to love cunts themselves, that women will indeed be happier about the fact that they have one and become better people, more alive. They might be so happy that they want to use it more. Guys, look, I’m saying, love the cunt and you’ll get more sex. Better sex. Long, deep, endless, exquisite, vast and mind blowing sex. The kind of sex that is impossible if you and your partner harbour deep-seated resent and distaste for cunts. The love you take is equal to the love you make ‘n’ all that.

A woman’s cunt is part of her, it is her, it’s what makes her biologically and even psychologically a woman. Love her, love her cunt, love the word.

What’s it spell?