on women’s parts
The Bottome, which is properly the Womb and the Matrix, is the chief of all parts … for in it is the Infant conceived of the Seed, formed and distinguished, nourished and increased, made a Living Soul, and preserved even to the Infusion of that divine and immortal substance, and then thrust forth into the world.
Dr Chamberlain’s Midwifes Practice, 1665
In Newsweek last week, Kathleen Deveny examines the increasingly widespread use of the word ‘cunt’. Even in such a story, she can’t spell the word out - dashes and asterisks stand in for the letters we know are there, lurking, and even her use of the term ‘C-word’ doesn’t baffle the vast majority of us.
For most of us, ‘cunt’ is not a word that can be used when our mothers are in the room. It’s offensive - I find it offensive! - but when asked why it is offensive (and I am, by my combatively intellectual male friends, frequently asked), I can’t really say. I suppose that, for me, it comes down largely to the onomatopoetic thrust of the word: one syllable that can be spat out, usually with venom, to describe the apparatus that (as Dr Chamberlain tells us) is responsible for the nourishment of the ‘Living Soul’.
I mean, talk about a degeneration of terminology! From the highly feminine and aesthetically beautiful word ‘matrix’ (’a place or point of origin or growth’ - thanks, Daddy, for the beautiful OED, complete with magnifying glass, and sorry I’m putting it to such a rude purpose) to a word that rhymes with both ‘blunt’ and ‘grunt’, and is about as pleasing as either of those.
But the opening anecdote of Deveny’s story is, I think, a little misplaced. That ‘cunt’ should be used in The Guardian, an English newspaper, devoid of dash or asterisk, isn’t going to surprise or bother many Guardian readers. So much I have learned since moving to England. You can drink in Parson’s Green without fear of arrest, you can show breasts without a black bar across the nipples, and the word ‘cunt’ is hurled across pub patios with great frequency and without inciting alarm. There is, figuratively as well as literally, an ocean between Britain and North America.
The Newsweek story, in fact, made my examination of reference to female bits a sort of perfect storm of comparison and controversy. In the 1981 Granada production of Brideshead Revisited, a lovemaking scene between two of the main characters, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte, became problematic when the miniseries was preparing for broadcast in the US, because actress Diana Quick’s left nipple was visible during the post-coital snuggle. This was not an issue for Granada, nor for the British public, but it was for PBS, and after a long struggle, the handy old black bar was used to cover the nipple (and part of Jeremy Irons’s face, which is just criminal). The bums of Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews got through the censors without argument, but a lone nipple is nothing but trouble.
So too with, believe it or not, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Because the series was buried in a late Saturday night slot, Pythons explain that the BBC more or less let them get on with it, and interfered almost not at all. The exception was an episode in the second series, ‘The All-England Summarise Proust Competition’ (aired 1972), in which the following exchange takes place:
Jones: So, what are your hobbies, apart from summarising Proust?
Chapman: Strangling animals, golf, and masturbation.
Terry Jones expressed some alarm and dismay that the censors didn’t have trouble with ’strangling animals’, but with ‘masturbation’. After a long fight, the word ‘masturbation’ (which had caused uproarious laughter from the live audience) was blanked from the scene, and viewers at home thought the audience was laughing at the word ‘golf’. The Pythons were also forbidden from using the word ‘cancer’ throughout the series, being forced to (with poignant crudeness) replace it with ‘gangrene’.
These examples, however, are the exception that makes the rule for Monty Python, as anyone passingly acquainted with Terry Gilliam’s animation will know. Cut-out early 20th-century nudes feature enormously throughout this animation, interacting with one another by, for example, tearing away flowers covering breasts with their teeth. Small troupes of men climb up the legs of these women, seeking the treasures above, to be batted away with giggles. One episode in the first series, ‘Full Frontal Nudity’, features an old perv taking in a girlie show promising to show it all, only to be stymied by seeing breasts and crossed legs, but not the real prize. This was BBC television, and thank God for it.
(Monty Python’s Flying Circus could, of course, be described as a four-series drag act, complete with reliably consistent references to poofs and fairies, but that is parenthetical to this argument, ha-ha.)
I forget who said that showing a breast gave a movie an automatic R-rating, but cutting off that same breast would bring it down to PG. This seems true of North America alone. In British newsagents, pornographic magazines are at the top back of the rack - out of reach of small children - just as they are in North America, but there are no punches pulled on the covers. Breasts are there, not covered by black bars or tassles or a modest forearm. They don’t suggest: they come out and say it. This is not a defense of pornography, just an example of a lessened shame in the form, parts, and function of the human body.
My little Canadian self was shocked when, as a new immigrant, I first saw nudity on television and on the covers of magazines. Now I understand that there is something terrifically dirty about taking that nudity into basements and back rooms, as is done with marvelous hypocrisy all over North America.
Something tells me that, in Britain, anyway, the word ‘cunt’ will eventually fall into the same category as ‘calling a spade a spade’ and ‘Welsher’: few enough people, in time, will know what it actually refers to. That it takes something beautiful - something, in a way, quite mysterious and magical, the very seat of God’s creation, if you believe in that kind of thing - and makes it dirty (as referenced by Deveny, when Lecter uses the word to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster does a remarkable job of looking like she’s just been slapped, and that’s how most women would react to it) will be forgotten, and it’ll be just another rude word.
(Although everyone here knows what ‘Welsher’ refers to, so I don’t personally use the term. I like Wales.)
Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.
Related posts:
September 7th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The cultural difference is interesting. I’ve always been amazed when in the US at the high degree of sexually suggestive dress in TV shows and music videos, yet it’s all tease. Any suggestion of anything more than tease and there’s instant horror. Yet the violence levels in American movies is way over the top. It’s a complete inversion to European views.
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September 7th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Gary - That’s just it. I think the word ‘tease’ says it all. And in many ways, I think the ‘tease’ of North American sexuality is far cruder than Europe’s unselfconsciousness.
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September 7th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
This is fascinating, Sarah. And your Canadian experience sounds much like my American one.
What I’ve noticed in American culture, particularly in the media, is a craven preference for hovering at the edge of a thing: teen girls, i.e., Miley Cyrus and early Spears, can dress and act as provocatively as any woman looking (aggressively looking) for a bed partner, provided they don’t cross the line and actually become sexually active; female clothing displayed on national TV can be reduced to nothing but a few strategic strips, provided genitals and nipples are covered. Songs, speech and actions can imply sex heavily, but never be direct. We love the taboo, we are obsessed with the taboo, so long as it stays (just barely) on the right side of the line.
Once the nipple is out, though, we’re obliged to be shocked and appalled. I think all that manufactured outrage is little more than a means of maintaining the status quo: if we weren’t shocked, it wouldn’t be taboo, and several industries would have to find another way of holding our attention, and therefore our wallets.
It IS dirty when it’s treated this way; it makes something shameful and hidden of what is natural, and allows us to objectify without any inconvenient things like personalities, preferences, respect or genuine desire in the way.
Hoo. And that’s as much thinking as I can to this side of 10 am.
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September 7th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Amy - There’s definitely something to be said for preserving some of the mystery of sexuality, of course, but you’re right: that’s not really what the American media does. Everybody knows what’s under the strategic strips. And the magnates need not be worried - sex will always do a roaring trade, whether it’s covered up or not!
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September 7th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Sarah, I shared a very similar experience to you. I moved from the US to the UK in 1980 (yea, I’m that old) and I couldn’t believe how “open” British TV was and that was in the days of three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. It took a little getting used to after the self-righteous prudery of the US media. When it was decided that nipples were allowed to be shown on British TV there was nary a whisper (I think Mary Whitehouse had popped her clogs by then) yet here, Janet jackson lets on pop out during the SuperBowl and there was national outrage out of all proportion. Yet, I bet, on the same night on any of the 150 channels over there, there were probably programmes or films being shown that were violent and bloody beyond belief. The double standards in the US media boil my piss.
As for the C word. I don’t like it, it’s too demeaning and brutal and I swear like a sailor.
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September 7th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Sue, the Janet Jackson thing, even witnessing it from home, absolutely blew my mind. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why violence is as universally accepted as it is in North America. I was certainly offended by it when I lived there.
And, just as an aside, I’ve absolutely got to hear your accent one of these days. It sounds like you’ve been all round the shop and back!
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September 7th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Sarah, it’s an interesting cross-cultural perspective. But I will say this, I think US prudishness is directly related to the much stronger influence of Christianity in US power structures.
A lot of the censorship on TV and in media and public spaces is directly related to the fear of condemnation. And much of that condemnation comes from a section of the populace fearful of anything sexual, and, interestingly enough, anything that implies female bodies and sexuality are intended for more than the command and interest of their husbands.
What struck me so vividly about the Superbowl debacle was that it has been so conveniently rewritten so that few even remember the reality of it. Janet Jackson did not “let” her boob fly out, and it wasn’t a simple oops…Justin Timberlake ripped the top open - and I believe it was a planned stunt, but it was presented as one that was, for me, a pantomime of degradation and assault. And yet, no one ever blames him, even as part of the stunt…it’s always poor Janet, exposing her breast and forever corrupting millions of viewers, scarred forever for a few seconds view…
As for cunt, for me, it is one of those words with two lives - I’ve used it and had it used in very wonderful ways…ways that have nothing to do with blunt, angry, hatred. It’s a powerful word, made all the more powerful when reclaimed. I don’t use it in public, and I don’t use it in anger - it isn’t a word I reach for when I need to insult. But…I am aware that it is, still, a word hurled by many in insult. So, I understand many women still react to it from that perspective.
I guess it really is a matter of perspective, because that word, in my head, is intense in all the ways that are good and strong and embracing of women and their bodies. :}
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September 7th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Emily, you’re probably quite right about the Superbowl incident, and if one is offended by it, it should certainly be more by the violence of it than the sexuality of it.
And of course the Christian nation plays a great part in how (North) Americans publicly treat sexuality - my problem with it is certainly not prudery. But it puts me in mind of a person who refuses to eat meat, but still kills animals: the exploitation remains, and the damage to women, to sexuality in general, and even to men is certain - far more so than if sexuality and the body were treated in a forthright and honest way.
As to ‘cunt’, the word has lost its edge here, if it ever had one. I still can’t get next to it, and as I said, I can’t think of any reason beyond its sounding aesthetically ugly in my ears, in representation of something that manifestly the opposite. I certainly respect and admire people who don’t have that reaction.
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September 7th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Sarah, PM me your phone number and I’ll talk your ears off until you figure out which side of the Atlantic I belong to.
xxxx
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September 8th, 2009 at 11:32 am
English swear words often have meanings that have nothing (really) to do with their (supposed) actual meanings. David Cameron’s blushes over the word ‘twat’ are a case in point (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jul/29/david-cameron-apology-radio-twitter).
For myself, I was aware of both Cameron’s usage of the word, and the more vicious senses (to ‘twat’ someone, as in to hit with extreme violence; ‘twat’ as a course word for female pudenda). The courser uses are (I believe) more recent - or may be less middle-class. But I still believe that ‘twat’ can be used fairly innocently.
As for the ‘f’ word, and even the ‘c’ word, they are rarely meant literally in UK expletive. They are used primarily for shock value, because they are language you wouldn’t wish your mother to overhear. My favourite example of this is the grammatically interesting : ‘the eff’ing eff’er is eff’ing effed!’ This is an exclamation of dismay at an inanimate object which irritatingly fails to work. It has absolutely nothing to do with the literal words used.
On a slightly different note, English prudery/openness is variable. An alleyway that runs next to the Oxford College I once attended is called Grove Street. This was a Victorianisation of an earlier recorded name, Grope-cunt Street. It was our College Dean who made this known to we undergraduates, in a history piece on the college. The earlier name had apparently existed from the time the college was a monastic foundation, right through its rakish 18th century days. But the College building called ‘Grove’ hasn’t been renamed in the light of this Bowdlerisation!
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September 8th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Richard - yes, it seems like a lot of different words have been divorced from their actual meanings here, and every expletive I can think of in my pre-third-cup-of-coffee fog is in fact a sexual word. Language, I’ve learned since I’ve been in England, is just a very different ball game.
(And I’ve used the ‘eff’ example you cite several times - usually when assembling Ikea furniture.)
I’m surprised the street was renamed - a hundred years later it would have been listed! I wonder what the original founders’ intentions were. I always thought Oxford was so nice…
Coming from Canada, though, it all feels very open and honest. Not that I don’t love Canada, but in many ways it’s quite a prescriptive country…
Sue - telephones are my mortal enemy, much to my mother’s dismay. But I’ve got to hear that voice! We AWers should all post vlogs on our sites one of these days.
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September 8th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
I think words only have as much power as we give them. And right now cunt is a word with a lot of power and a lot of hate behind it. It will be interesting to see how/if the changes and softens with time.
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