‘Naming is Not a Neutral Act’: Why it’s Time to Reclaim the Word Cunt

By Anna Fraser

The first time I heard the c-word, I audibly gasped. It had only been referred to in euphemistic terms, with friends saying ‘See You Next Tuesday’ rather than the word itself. To hear ‘cunt’ said out loud felt shockingly wrong, although I had no idea why.

It probably comes as no shock to the wise, enlightened feminist that the word (that, as we know, refers to a female genital organ) is so shrouded in stigma and mystery, while in comparison less shocking expletives like ‘dicks’ or ‘pricks’ litter the landscape of swearwords. Why are these words (which refer to male genital organs) fine, while cunt is not? The short answer: women are simply not supposed to refer to their sexuality. Men are supposed to define our sexual purposes for us.

It is interesting to note that the most common label for female genitalia is ‘vagina’. The Oxford English Dictionary Online defines the vagina as ‘the part of the female reproductive tract that leads from the vulva to the uterus,’ meaning that to refer to the whole area as ‘vagina’ is simply inaccurate. People are not being taught the correct words to refer to our bodies, which has obvious medical implications. The etymology of ‘vagina’ derives from a combination of Latin and old French to mean sheath or cover, meaning that the vagina is reduced to being a receptacle for a penis. Not very feminist.

In contrast, while the first definition the OED brings up for ‘cunt’ describes it as the female genital organ, its second definition is decidedly less neutral. A ‘cunt’ can mean ‘a woman as a source of sexual gratification; a promiscuous woman; a slut. Also as a general term of abuse for a woman.’

Despite being the older of the two words (and the oldest recorded word for vulva or vagina in the English language), ‘cunt’ was banished from major English Dictionaries from the eighteenth century to the 1960s, as it shifted from a neutral, medical descriptor to an abusive term for a sexually liberated woman. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other literary greats loved to allude to the cunt, playing on its aural similarities with ‘quaint’. But ‘quaint’ instead contains connotations of smallness or cuteness, which sanitises the c-bomb and, by extension, belittles women. So how did ‘cunt’ go from being a playfully poetic word to an offensive one?

In her hilariously informative book, The Curious History of Sex, Kate Lister informs us that the stigma cloaking this word and the body part it signifies leads back to the introduction of laws banning ‘sexually obscene’ material in the sixteenth century. Incidentally, this coincides with shifts in the way society thought of gender, moving away from similarities between men and women along a humoral model to a more rigid, binary position. Just as women are being confined to their sexualised bodies, they are being taught the shame that comes with even referring to genitals by name.

Writer Naomi Wolf discusses the impact that the words used to describe the vagina – or cunt – have on the mental and sexual health of those who have one. She writes that: ‘words about the vagina create environments that directly affect [people’s] bodies. The words [people] hear being used about their vaginas change, for better or for worse, what they purport to describe. Because of their effect on the autonomic nervous system (ANS), words about the vagina can either help or hurt actual vaginal response.’

Naming is not a neutral act then, and the history we see traced in the OED is one of repression and control, as people with vaginas are taught to be ashamed of their bodies and, by extension, their sexuality. As such, it is important that we reclaim control over the labelling and the knowledge of our own bodies.

There has been a shift in the past fifty or so years to reclaim the c-word, embracing its potent effect to empower those with them, with one notable campaigner being Germaine Greer. Yet there still remains the implicit link in this word between sexuality and women, which, though it can be empowering, can also reinforce the idea that women’s bodies are tempting, or reduce them to reproductive functions.

When we look back at the etymology of the word itself, the ‘cu’ is tied to words like cunning, suggesting that the word cunt comes from the same root as words for knowledge and wisdom. Discussions about reclaiming ‘cunt’ should thus centre on the knowledge the word holds, which is the history of shame and repression as well as the way women have been denied knowledge of their own bodies. Through this lens, the reclamation of ‘cunt’ will have the biggest impact on people today.