Wow. If I was ever gonna rename the blog, I have to say, My Sensitive Girl Hole would be pretty high on the list. Mmmmm, that has all kinds of flavours in it.
Today I got in trouble for saying FUCK! Which is, like, so 1997. Wowsers. I'm not complaining, though, because really, my use of it was totally inappropriate under the circumstances and yes I can still tell the difference. I try not to be sloppy with my word. (That's a modification of a precept my father passed on to me.) But here'n I was gonna write a big whole thing for Vagina Fridays today about cunt and pussy as power words, and now I just feel wayyyyyyy out there, naked and dangling from branches. Hrm.
Well let's try this:
Thing 1: A few weeks back, someone (female) saw that the hard drive on the Macbook was named "pussy" and said something along the lines of "so clearly you're not going for feminist support."
Thing 2: A few weeks further back than that, Chad forewarned me before I dug into the first issue of The Boys that they used the word "cunt" on the second page.
Now, to be fair, Chad was witness to the Great Cunt Freak-Out of two double aught five, so his caution can be understood. And, too, the big issue with any ism and feminism particularly will always be that even among the chosen, there will always be vast, vast difference of opinion in what the ism actually means. So neither of these examples are without context.
Things 1 and 2, however, illustrate opposite sides of the same "main dealie."
The main dealie involves learning where the power resides in the use of slang words for the female genitalia. Based on what I understand to be true about that power, I stopped using "cunt" and "pussy" as derrogatory terms for people about a year or two back. (I am also trying to pull "bitch" from the lineup, but it is really hanging in there. My very favourite curse is "son of a bitch," so this is going to take a long time.) This process of usage alteration was well underway by the time I read Cunt last year, but what Cunt ended up doing was fill in the other side of the equation: instead of banishing those words from the lexicon altogether like holocaust victims, I started re-investing them for positive use in my language. Because, as I'm sure I've made clear by this point, I rather like vaginas. I try to be vag-pos. And it bugs me that, specifically around language, vaginas are a hidden organ. So many people can't bring themselves to refer to the vagina any more specifically than "down there." They come up with euphemisms and workarounds. That shit freaks me out.
Now, slang is slang and maybe slang is part of the problem. But, for me, the nice thing about slang is that it is expressive. I dig on expression. I dig on stuff that carries a specific freight, that says something in a way that it can't quite be said in any other way. And on that score, the vagina is rich in options (tell me twat doesn't kick the pants off cock for baroque specificity), yet poor in social acceptability. For example, I think it's a fairly shoddy deal that dick is considered to be on the light end of the cursing spectrum while pussy sits more gutter-wise. I am, shall we say, exceptionally wary of any and all systems that attempt to position the vagina as worse/dirtier/more dangerous/more unspeakable than the penis.
Top of the order here, I don't like people who call other people cunts (or pussies). I don't really care if they're ignorant or not, it just bothers me. It bothers me that "pussies" are weak and "dicks" are strong (if annoying). A guy's an asshole if he is fundamentally self-absorbed (which goes right to the root of our primal identity-centering relationship with our anuses), but if you call a guy a cunt, what are you saying that he is? That he's a woman, and being a woman's bad?
It bothers me less in movies or TV shows (or comic books) because that usage tells me something about the character. Usually it's that I wouldn't want to hang around with them in real life. (I mean honestly: would you actually want to go drinking with Al Swearengen? He's fun and all, but he's not a nice man.) Also, maybe because when words are on a page I expect them to be respectful of wordly power, whereas a real live person is usually doing it out of a) blind ignorance or b) deep-seated, often unconscious, hatred and fear of every woman he's ever known in his life.
I am very much invested in wordly power. I don't fear words. To be any kind of a writer and fear words is like being a carpenter afraid of his own chisel. I'm sure you could still be a carpenter if you were afraid of your chisel, but I suspect your job would be significantly harder on a regular basis. Writing's hard enough. Words are the tools; respect the words.
I know everyone has their own limits and levels. I know everyone has their own opinions, and bless that! It's one of the things that makes us people, and the idea that we're even slightly supposed to come to some sort of common agreement is freaking ridiculous. I do my best to be respectful of the comfort levels of the people around me... but I also see the vagina get monsterized over and over and over again, and sooner or later, I snap. There are some battlegrounds I can pass by, but when words get involved, it hits me deep. This is me working through the negativity.
