by Kate Lister
Cunt maintains an uneasy relationship with feminists, who are undecided if the word is empowering or demeaning. Various feminist movements have tried to reclaim cunt. Judy Chicago led the ‘Cunt art’ movement of the 1970s and created works of art that aggressively used ‘cunt’ to cut through prudish attitudes around female sexuality. Inga Muscio’s 1998 Cunt: A Declaration of Independence inspired a movement called ‘Cuntfest’ – ‘a celebration of women’. In 1996, Eva Ensler premiered a new play called The Vagina Monologues at the HERE Arts Centre. The play features different characters talking about their sense of self, their sexuality and how they feel about their vaginas. One monologue is entitled ‘Reclaiming Cunt’ and is a tour de force of cunt:
I love that word
I can’t say it enough
I can’t stop saying it
Feeling a little irritated at the airport?
Just say CUNT and everything changes
‘What did you say?’
‘I said CUNT, that’s right, SAID CUNT, CUNT, CUNT, CUNT.’
It feels so good.
Try it. Go ahead. Go ahead.
CUNT.
CUNT.
CUNT.
CUNT.47
The audience are encouraged to shout CUNT in unison and to feel the explosive power of the word as one. The Vagina Monologues was a landmark production in feminist theatre. But although I am very much in agreement with Ensler and also consider shouting cunt at Ryanair baggage reclaim services to be highly therapeutic, Ensler’s work hasn’t forced the mass renegotiation with cunt we may have hoped for. Perhaps cunt is beyond reclaiming now. But it remains a deeply powerful and special word.
Words for women’s genitals tend to be clinical (vagina, vulva, pudendum, etc.), childlike (tuppence, foof, fairy, minky, Mary, twinkle, etc.), detached (down there, bits, special area, etc.), highly sexual (pussy, fuck hole, etc.), violent (axe wound, penis flytrap, gash, growler, etc.), or refer to unpleasant smells, tastes and appearance (fish taco, bacon sandwich, badly stuffed kebab, bearded clam). Cunt doesn’t convey any of these. Cunt is cunt. Words for the vulva seem to be in a constant state of trying to deny the very thing being described – your genitals aren’t a ‘twinkle’ or ‘fur pie’. Sadly, just as cunt the word has been censored, cunts themselves have been culturally censored to the point where the only cunts that we feel are acceptable are plucked, waxed, surgically trimmed, buffed, douched with perfumed cleaning products and served up covered in glitter. The vaginaplasty business is booming and you can now have your labia cut off, your hymen rebuilt and a car air freshener installed (I joke). Is it any wonder we can’t cope with the directness of cunt and resort to ‘down there’? Cunt may never be allowed off the naughty step, but it is surely far less offensive than many synonyms on offer. And while people insist on calling cunt a vagina or a vulva so as not to cause offence, it’s worth remembering that we are actually calling cunt a scabbard – a cock holder, a sausage pocket.
Cunt may be classed as an offensive word, but it’s an ancient and honest one. It’s also the original word; everything else came after.
Welcome to #TeamCunt.
* * *
* ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Oed.Com, 2018
1 Walter Kirn, ‘The Forbidden Word’, GQ, 4 May 2005, p. 136.
2 Christina Caldwell, ‘The C-Word: How One Four-Letter Word Holds So Much Power’, College Times, 15 March 2011.
3 Pete Silverton, Filthy English (London: Portobello Books, 2009), p. 52; Matthew Hunt, ‘Cunt’, Matthewhunt.Com, 2017
4 Mark Daniel, See You Next Tuesday (London: Timewell, 2008), Kindle edition, location 135.
5 Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh*T: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 20.
6 Silverton, Filthy English, p. 52.
7 Quoted in Mohr, Holy Sh*T, p. 149.
8 Ibid.
9 Lanfranco and John Hall, Most Excellent and Learned Worke of Chirurgerie, Called Chirurgia Parua Lanfranci, 1st edn (London: Marshe, 1565).
10 ‘Cunt’, Oed.com, 2018 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/45874?redirectedFrom=cunt#eid> [Accessed 7 September 2018].
11 ‘OE and ME Cunte in Place-Names’, Keith Briggs, 2017
12 ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Oed.Com, 2018.
13 Russell Ash, Busty, Slag and Nob End (London: Headline, 2009), Kindle edition, location 665.
14 ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Oed.Com, 2018.
15 Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt, The History of British Women’s Writing, 700–1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 68.
16 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. Jill Mann (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 226.
17 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, p. 120.
18 John Florio and Hermann W. Haller, A Worlde of Wordes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 504.
19 Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, Poetry Foundation, 2018
20 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Shakespeare.Mit.Edu, 2018
21 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Shakespeare.Mit.Edu, 2018
22 Thomas Bowdler, The Family Shakespeare (London: Hatchard, 1807).
23 Reprinted in Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 127.
24 John Whiteford Mackenzie, Philotus, A Comedy, Reprinted from the Edition of Robert Charteris (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1835), p. 3.
25 Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, vol. 1 (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), p. 350.
26 Geoffrey R. Stone, ‘Origins of Obscenity’, New York University Review of Law, 31 (2007), 711–31, p. 718.
27 James Thomas Law, The Ecclesiastical Statutes at Large, Extracted from the Great Body of the Statute Law, and Arranged Under Separate Heads, vol. 4 (London: William Benning and Co., 1857), p. 273.
28 The History of the C-Word (BBC3: BBC, 2007).
29 Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 140.
30 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. by Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 269.
31 Ibid., p. 79.
32 Ibid., p. 78.
33 Samuel Pepys and Robert Latham, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 4 (Berkeley: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 209; E. J. Burford, Bawdy Verse: A Pleasant Collection (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 170.
34 Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 3rd edn (London: Hooper & Co., 1796), p. 81.
35 Hallie Rubenhold, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies (London: Doubleday, 2012), p. 11.
36 Marquis de Sade, Marquis de Sade Collection, ed. by Anna Ruggieri, Kindle edition, location 8323.
37 Anonymous, The Pearl (London, Privately printed, 1879).
38 ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Oed.Com, 2018
39 Gerald Gould, ‘New Novels’
, Observer, 28 February 1932, p. 6.
40 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. by David Ellis (Ware: Wordsworth, 2007), p. 156.
41 James Joyce, Ulysses (Ware: Wordsworth, 2010), p. 54.
42 Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, Poetry Foundation, 2018
43 Mike Nichols, Carnal Knowledge (Los Angeles: AVCO Embassy Pictures, 1971).
44 William Friedkin, The Exorcist: Extended Director’s Cut (Warner Brothers, 2010).
45 ‘Oxford English Dictionary’, Oed.Com, 2018
46 ‘Ofcom Explores Latest Attitudes to Offensive Language’, Ofcom, 2016
47 Eve Ensler, Jacqueline Woodson and Monique Wilson, The Vagina Monologues (London: Virago, 2001), pp. 100–10.
SEX
AND
VULVAS
Looking for the Boy in the Boat
A History of the Clitoris
Unless you’re a late social bloomer who still believes women are domesticated wombs with tits, who should restrict their activities to baking cakes and darning socks, I think we can all agree that feminism has done some pretty marvellous things. Women can now vote, open bank accounts and make cheese from our own breastmilk without being molested by the patriarchal dairy overlords. There’s no doubt, women have come a long way. But there’s still one area that feminism is failing in. One area where the almighty penis continues to reign over the vulva unchallenged – and that area is sexual slang. However many slang words you can think of for the clitoris, there will be a thousand more for the penis, testes or semen. Of course, there are many colloquialisms for the vulva, but they rarely delineate the various important pleasure points contained within that glorious goodie bag: the clitoris, the cervix, or the much mythologised Gräfenberg spot, for example. It’s just ‘gash’, ‘pussy’, ‘clunge’, etc. And I’m not even sure if there are any slang words for the womb or the ovaries (would ‘baby-cave’ or ‘lady baubles’ work?). The whole ‘locker-room banter’ register of bawdy sexual slang celebrates the vulva for the pleasure it brings to the mighty ‘rod’ (1591). The omission of the clit – whose only function is to pleasure its owner – is telling. In Western culture, the clitoris has been overlooked because female sexual pleasure has historically played second fiddle to male pleasure. Literally and metaphorically, the clitoris has never received enough attention.
Take, for example, that much beloved encyclopaedia of vulgarity, Roger’s Profanisaurus, first published in 1998. The work contains over 2,500 slang entries, cataloguing all manner of obscenities from ‘purple headed yoghurt warrior’ (penis) to ‘growling at the badger’ (cunnilingus). But there are only five clitoral colloquialisms to be found within the whole damn thing: ‘boy in the boat’, ‘bell’, ‘button’, ‘fanny flange’ and ‘sugared almond’.1 Even the latest reworking of the Profanisaurus series, Hail Sweary (2013), which advertises itself as containing ‘4,000 new rude words and blasphemies’, only manages a dismal five entries on the clitoris; ‘beanis’ (a large ‘bean’ that resembles a penis), ‘clock’ (again, a large clitoris and cock hybrid), and ‘panic button’ – under which is sub-referenced ‘wail switch’ and ‘clematis’. Which means that the clitoris accounts for less than 0.15 per cent of all the entries. But it’s not like the book is pussy light. In fact, while Hail Sweary only contains thirty-seven colloquialisms for the penis and/or testes, there are a whopping 104 entries for the vulva. While this might sound like a win for #TeamCunt, most of these terms are pejorative comments on what’s referred to throughout as ‘untidy’, ‘unkempt’ or ‘messy’ vulvas. References to the labia are multiple: ‘doner meat’, ‘pig’s ears’, ‘Biggles’ scarf’. Pubic hair also features heavily: ‘ZZ Mott’, ‘gruffalo’, ‘Terry Waite’s allotment’. Allusions to fish are tediously predictable: ‘fishmonger’s dustbin’, ‘trout pocket’, ‘haddock pasty’.2 And so on, and so on. Despite the book’s obvious obsession with the holiest of holies, the emphasis is clearly phallocentric and prioritises the pleasure the vulva gives, rather than that which it can receive. It might seem like I am picking on the Profanisaurus, but the colloquial drought around the clitoris is universal. Ignoring clitoral pleasure is woven into the very language of sex.
This chapter focuses on the Western fascination with the clitoris and the endless efforts by doctors to understand and ‘fix’ it. As female genital mutilation (FGM) continues to be a major concern across Africa, Asia and the Middle East today, it is important to remember the West’s own hand in this barbaric practice. Some of the earliest Western records describing the clitoris are Ancient Greek descriptions of FGM, allegedly carried out in Egypt.* The earliest extant evidence of FGM comes from the Greek historian and geographer Strabo (64 BC–AD 24), who claimed the Egyptians ‘raise every child that is born to circumcise the males and excise the females’.3 Though several Greek writers claimed the Egyptians circumcised women, there is very little surviving evidence from the Egyptians themselves to corroborate how they felt about the clit – they may have circumcised the clitoris, they may have left it well alone, or they may have dressed it up like a Mr Potato Head, we will just never know.†
Galen (AD 129–216), probably the most influential of the Greek physicians, called the clitoris the ‘nymph’ and thought its function was to help keep the womb warm, like a kind of clitoral bobble hat for your ‘chuff’ (1998).4 This made perfect sense to the Greeks as everyone knew that women were hot and wet and men were cold and dry. This was a belief shared by Galen’s contemporary, Soranus of Ephesus (yes, really – a gynaecologist called ‘Soranus’), who practised medicine in Alexandria in the first century. In his four-volume treatise on gynaecology, Soranus describes the anatomy of the vulva fairly accurately, and also calls the clitoris a ‘nymph … because it is hidden underneath the labia such as young brides hide under their veil’.5 Soranus’s work gives us one of the earliest descriptions of ‘oversized’ clitorises, and the ‘treatment’ this required. Brace yourselves.
On the excessively large clitoris, which the Greeks call the ‘masculinized’ nymph [clitoris]. The presenting feature of the deformity is a large masculinized clitoris. Indeed, some assert that its flesh becomes erect just as in men and as if in search of frequent sexual intercourse. You will remedy it in the following way: With the woman in a supine position, spreading the closed legs, it is necessary to hold [the clitoris] with forceps turned to the outside so that the excess can be seen, and to cut off the tip with a scalpel, and finally, with appropriate diligence, to care for the resulting wound.6
Evidently, Soranus’s work was highly influential as variations on this procedure start cropping up in various medical texts throughout the Classical world.** Sixth-century Byzantine Greek physician Aëtius of Amida builds on Soranus’s work, describing an ‘excessive’ clitoris as being both ‘a deformity and a source of shame’. His sixteen-volume medical encyclopaedia gives the most detailed and vivid account of this awful procedure (wince warning):
Have the girl sit on a chair while a muscled young man standing behind her places his arms below the girl’s thighs. Have him separate and steady her legs and whole body. Standing in front and taking hold of the clitoris with broad-mouthed forceps in his left hand, the surgeon stretches it outward, while with the right hand, he cuts it off at the point next to the pincers of the forceps. It is proper to let a length remain from that cut off, about the size of the membrane that’s between the nostrils, so as to take away the excess material only; as I have said, the part to be removed is at that point just of the forceps. Because the clitoris is a skinlike structure and stretches out excessively, do not cut off too much, as a urinary fistula may result from cutting such large growths too deeply. After the surgery, it is recommended to treat the wound with wine or cold water, and wip
ing it clean with a sponge to sprinkle frankincense powder on it. Absorbent linen bandages dipped in vinegar should be secured in place, and a sponge in turn dipped in vinegar placed above. After the seventh day, spread the finest calamine on it. With it, either rose petals or a genital powder made from baked clay can be applied. This is especially good: Roast and grind date pits and spread the powder on [the wound]; [this compound] also works against sores on the genitals.7
‘Excessively large’ clitorises were thought to be analogous to a mini penis, and therefore responsible for lesbianism and abnormal sexual appetites in women. This belief dominated cultural attitudes to the sweet spot right up until the twentieth century. In modern medical terms, this is known as ‘clitoral hypertrophy’, a ‘macroclitoris’ or ‘clitoromegaly’, and it is an extremely rare condition. But given the frequency with which hypertrophied clitorises turn up in historical medical texts, you’d be forgiven for thinking our matriarchal ancestors were packing endowments that would make a donkey blush. Obviously, this was not the case, so we have to conclude that this obsession with the clitoris and uncontrolled sexuality was cultural, rather than biological. Given the fascination with cutting out offending clitorises, perhaps it’s no wonder the poor thing has tried to keep its head down throughout history. There is not much mention of the ‘jellyroll gumdrop’ (1919) outside medical literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, but we can find it if we put the effort in.***
Christopher D’Alton, ‘Female Genitalia Showing Severely Diseased Tissue and Hypertrophy of the Clitoris’, 1857.