Some years ago I helped my Polish flatmate a little to prepare for one of her English exams. In doing this I came across a marvellous worksheet detailing the usage of the word “fuck”. Until one sees this presented to someone trying to learn the language, one never quite realises the variety and complexity of this superficially simple word’s usage. Those four letters can have good meanings, bad meanings, erotic meanings, violent meanings, no meaning beyond quasi-punctuation (if you are from Glasgow anyway), mean excitement, mean fear...the list goes on. Then, at the end of the worksheet was the sage advice – “If you are not entirely certain that you usage of the word is correct, do not use it.”
This worksheet was brought to mind today as I read an article that has within it the use of the word “cunt”. In the article the author highlights her being called this as an obvious example of misogyny. Now, in the particular case that she describes it may well be, but this assertion that any calling of a woman a cunt is proof positive of the insulter’s hatred of women interested me as this word has been something of an issue for me following my moving to the other side of the Atlantic.
In Glasgow (at least amongst my contemporaries – my Gran wouldn’t have fitted into the following generalisation, for instance) the word “cunt” has similarly varied usage as the word “fuck”. It is not uncommon to hear it used in a friendly greeting (“alright, what yoose cunts up’tae?”), is quite often used in the course of the telling of a humorous story (“so there I was wi all these cunts looking at me wi just ma pants on”), and has made the transition to verb (to cunt something up). Importantly, the word, as I have experienced it, is essentially gender neutral. If anything I would say that it is used far more in reference to males (or mixed groups) than to females – I can’t really think of many times where I have heard it used in an angry context towards a woman. If someone is described as a cunt then one knows that they are an unpleasant individual, but my assumption would be likely to be that they were male.
Shifting to North America I discovered that, just as my flatmate had a learning curve to mount with “fuck”, so too did I with the now seemingly foreign “cunt”. Carrying on speaking as I would with friends at home, my use of “fuck” as a punctuation mark raised a few metaphorical murmurs, but my laissez faire use of “cunt” produced actual overt reactions from people. I quickly learned that there are none of the sophistications in usage over here, none of the contextual subtleties – it’s a bad word that is used to be bad, and, importantly, is used with far more specificity towards females.
All well and good – I’ve tried to not use it and get far fewer dirty looks as a result (for that sin anyway). What really interested me though was my reaction when I first heard someone use it in anger towards a woman with the specific meaning that they were female and bad. Never in my life can I remember being shocked by language, but when I heard this there was indeed an element of the shocking to it – what was a perfectly normal word to me in the contexts that I experienced its usage had become extremely ugly in the context that it is used over here.
Going back to the article, the author refers to an occasion where she is referred to as a cunt. She interprets this as an obvious example of misogyny – the person has called her a cunt therefore they hate women. In my Glasgow context I could never have understood how she could even begin to reach that conclusion (remembering that cunt is a widely used and essentially gender neutral term there). Having now understood the North American context a little better, the leap that she makes is somewhat less baffling – the word really is used to insult women specifically here. What could be described as my contextual empathy helped me see where she was coming from a little more (if not agree with her).
Reading the comments on the article, though, I saw a need for some contextual empathy in the opposite direction. The necessary connection with using the word cunt and the user’s hatred of women was argued for strongly and seemed to be the default position of many of those commenting. From my Glasgow perspective, however, that assertion is simply nonsensical. The word has many meanings and many uses. One of these will no doubt be by a woman-hater to abuse a woman, but more far more likely is that it will be someone greeting their friends or telling a story in a pub.
The groundbreaking conclusion, then, is that context is everything. Language is not rigid and words cannot be used as some sort of essentialist discriminator for people. Similarly, words in and of themselves are not ontologically simple – they cannot just be categorised as good or bad, hating or loving. The person calling someone a cunt may in fact be being affectionate towards them – their usage of the word does not define them as one thing or another (other than as either somewhat foul-mouthed or Glaswegian, perhaps). Similarly, they may indeed be insulting someone, but there is no necessary link between them using the term and their insults being motivated by that person’s ovaries. And then there are, sadly, those pathetic individuals who are using the word against women because they are women. Sorting these out from each other requires this contextual empathy, just as understanding a North American feminist’s reaction to the word does for me.
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