It’s normal
A guy in India has set out to persuade men to stop treating women’s bodies as swear-words.
The speaker, Sunil Jaglan, begins with a question, “Raise your hand if you have used cuss words that name mother’s, sister’s or women’s intimate body parts?”
People smile sheepishly, looking around for moral support before awkwardly raising their hands, “Everyone here has used gaali, sir, this is normal,” says one man.
…
“But, is it right?” asks Jaglan.
To this, the women shout: “Of course not! Why target us or our body in your slurs? Why don’t people understand when they use misogynist profanities they actually target their own mothers and sisters? Is this what we are teaching our kids?”
Yes, it is, and it’s what most people are teaching their kids.
Jaglan has since gone from village to village to spread the word, rapidly gaining support from women fed up with a culture of sexist slurs.
…
“It is difficult for males who don’t like to listen to womenfolk. India is a patriarchal society and such things are expected, but we are also determined to fight back,” says 19-year-old volunteer Anjali from Sarmathla village, who is at studying Haryana University.
But everywhere is a patriarchal society. India does seem particularly bad in some ways, but misogyny is global.
The UK is another country where it’s quite normal to insult people by calling them slang words for the female genitalia. Even feminists call people cunts and twats.
And of course then will come the response of the woke: “It’s not anti-women! Men can have cunts, too!”
Just like the woke response to the line “If men could get pregnant, abortions would be a sacrament.”
If I am to be honest–
I get a charge out of using those words–not indiscriminately but on the right targets–(I love it when Scots refer to Trump as a c–t)–
just as I enjoy using dickhead, cocksucker and asshole.
C–t and t–t have a coarse sound, and aural punch–
And yet–
even if I don’t intend it,
women tell me it offends them, that we shouldn’t “target their bodies with slurs”–
then I must be an adult and dissuade myself from using them, just as I avoid the “R” word now.
It’s tough. Profanity works BECAUSE it’s awful. But in the end, a concern for other people’s dignity must outweigh the need to make the pungent statement.
There’s a difference between words used to insult an individual because they reference something that is in actuality dirty, contagious, or otherwise offensive to the senses (insults) and words that depend on specific subsets of humans being dirty or disgusting (slurs). Both are “awful”, but one is targeted specifically at an individual while the other dehumanizes and insults an entire class or group of people outside of the intended insultee. Asshole is used as an insult, but is not a slur. Cunt and twat as insults can only function as insults in the context of normal female anatomy being deemed offensive.
(And yes, dick and its associated insults are also sex-specific, but differ in that their target is the dominant group of the two; men aren’t continually receiving the message that they’re inferior to women so in our current society I have a hard time swallowing the line that it’s “just as bad”.)
Words like “pussy” and “cunt” directed towards men (and I’ve heard the argument that it’s an old Scots word that predates an association with women’s sexual organs) are used to demean each other as having those features because they are not real men, it’s how men tell other men that they are womanly. Which is nakedly sexist. Having been called a pussy at various times growing up because I didn’t meet manly standards, for example, knowin how to set the timing on a 4-stroke engine, I recognize exactly what is being said when men use those words towards each other.
It’s not a secret.
I swiped left on a dating profile where she opened with the lead “I won’t date liberals. I already have a pussy.” No loss for me, but it really shows the regressive nature of sexism.
I should add that in concordance with ibbica’s comment, it is a way for men not only to demean other men but to demean women by inferring that women are inferior.
From what I can glean from a quick scan of Google results, the old Scots claim is bogus – it’s old Norse/Germanic perhaps via India.
Shakespeare includes a joke about it in Hamlet, via a pun which most contemporary audiences/readers probably miss.
GEDDIT??
He’s playing on the idea of the cunt as “nothing” as opposed to something. It’s all strikingly crude and hostile, which is part of his performance of being “mad” but also part of his genuine psychic derangement.
I need to read that again, there’s so much I’ve missed. And with this passage I think I understand why we covered Merchant of Venice and Romeo and Juliet instead of Hamlet in junior high school.
We did Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar.
Mike – Hamlet is so rich there is always more to find. It’s exciting that way.
‘Cunt’ was already very old in Shakespeare’s time. There was a street called Gropecuntelane in Oxford in c. 1230–1240.
Yeah, even R&J is ribald though. Maybe not outright crude, but you know ‘…teaching maidens to bare weight well…”