The C word that ladys dont like.

Posted by Cartron on February 22, 2005 at 07:23 [80.6.228.212]

Very little has been written about the word 'cunt'. The longest account currently available is an entry in Hugh Rawson's Dictionary Of Invective, in which he calls 'cunt' "The most heavily tabooed of all English words" (1989). Rawson's 'cunt' article is five pages long, though other tabooed words such as 'fuck' and 'nigger' have whole books devoted to them. I feel that 'cunt' deserves a similarly extensive analysis, and I hope that Cunt: A Cultural History will serve as a comprehensive study of this ancient and powerful word.

Introduction

'Cunt' is perhaps the single most offensive and censored swearword in the English language. Our taboo surrounding the word ensures that it is rarely discussed, though, when it is, the superlatives come thick and fast. Accordingly, Andrew Goldman calls it "the mother of all nasty words" and "the most controversial word of all" (1999). For Tom Aldridge, it is "unarguably the most obscene [and] most forbidden word in English", "the ultimate obscenity", and "the nastiest four-letter word" (2001). John Doran describes it as "The most offensive word in the world", "the worst word that anyone has ever been able to think of", and "[the] most terrible of terrible words" (2002).

The most succinct description is provided by Pentti Olli, who defines 'cunt' as "the bottom half of a woman or a very despicable person" (1999). According to Francis Grose's scurrilous definition in his Classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue, it is "a nasty name for a nasty thing" (1796). In fact, the word has nine recognised definitions: it can mean 'vagina', 'a contemptuous person', 'a sexually available woman', 'a foolish person', 'sexual intercourse', 'an infuriating object', 'a difficult task', 'an acquaintance', and 'a vein for drug-injecting'.

'Cunt' is a short, monosyllabic word, though its brevity is deceptive. Like many swearwords, it has been dismissed as merely Anglo-Saxon slang, as the anonymous Ode To Those Four-Letter Words cautions:

"friend, heed this warning, beware the affront
Of aping a Saxon: don't call it a cunt!" (----).

The etymology of 'cunt' is actually considerably more complex and contentious than is generally supposed. Greek Macedonian terms for 'woman' - 'guda', 'gune', and 'gyne' - have been suggested as the word's sources, as have the Anglo-Saxon 'cynd' and the Latin 'cutis' ('skin'), though these theories are not widely supported. Furthermore, 'cunt' is not strictly a slang term; like other 'four-letter words', it was originally standard English and was deliberately marginalised in favour of polysyllabic (thus 'respectable') alternatives. Thus, 'cunt' was replaced with 'vagina' and 'vulva', 'crap' gave way to 'excrement', and 'piss' was surpassed by 'urine'.

The prefix 'cu' is one of the oldest word-sounds in recorded language. It is an expression quintessentially associated with femininity, and is the basis of 'cow' ('female animal'), 'queen' ('female monarch'), and, of course, 'cunt' ('female genital'). The word's second most significant influence is the Latin term 'cuneus', meaning 'wedge', from which comes 'cunnus' ('vagina'). The final 't' of 'cunt' can be traced back to Scandinavia, as in the Old Dutch 'kunte'.

In its second edition, the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), the foremost authority on English etymology, clarifies the word's commonest contexts as the two-fold "female external genital organs" and "term of vulgar abuse". At the heart of this incongruity is our culture's negative attitude towards femininity. 'Cunt' is a primary example of the multitude of tabooed words and phrases relating to female sexuality, and of the misogyny inherent in sexual discourse.

Kate Millett sums up the word's uniquely despised status: "Somehow every indignity the female suffers ultimately comes to be symbolized in a sexuality that is held to be her responsibility, her shame[.] It can be summarized in one four-letter word. And the word is not fuck, it's cunt. Our self-contempt originates in this: in knowing we are cunt" (1973). She specifically identified this attitude in the novels of Henry Miller: "His interpretation [...] is that woman is no more than "cunt," though she is occasionally said to redeem herself by having babies" (1970).

When used in this reductive, abusive context, female genital terms such as 'cunt' and 'twat' are notably more offensive than male equivalents such as 'prick' and 'cock'. Joan Smith calls 'cunt' "the worst possible thing - much worse than ['prick'] - one human being can say to another" (1998) and Simon Carr calls it "the worst thing you can say about anyone" (2001). As Deborah Cameron notes, "taboo words tend to refer to women's bodies rather than men's. Thus for example cunt is a more strongly tabooed word than prick, and has more tabooed synonyms" (1985). Jonathon Green concurs that "the slang terms for the vagina outstrip any rivals, and certainly those for the penis[.] They encompass what is generally acknowledged as the most injurious of monosyllabic epithets [and] that ultimate in four-letter words" (1993), by which, of course, he means 'cunt'.

This linguistic inequality is mirrored by a cultural imbalance that sees images of the vagina obliterated from contemporary visual culture. Such censorship of both the word 'cunt' and the organ to which it refers is symptomatic of a general fear of - and disgust for - the vagina itself. The most literal manifestation of this fear is the myth of the 'vagina dentata', symbolising the male fear that the vagina is a tool of castration.

There have been attempts, however, to reappropriate 'cunt', investing it with a positive meaning and removing it from the lexicon of offence (similar in effect to the transvaluation of 'bad' and 'wicked', whose meanings have also been changed from negative to positive). The 'cunt-art' movement, for example, used traditional 'feminine' arenas such as sewing and cheerleading as artistic contexts in which to relocate the word. A parallel 'cunt-power' ideology, seeking to reclaim the word more forcefully, was instigated by Germaine Greer.

What 'cunt' has in common with most other contemporary swearwords is its connection to bodily functions. Genital, scatological, and sexual terms (such as, respectively, 'cunt', 'shit', and 'fuck') are our most powerful taboos, though this was not always the case. Social taboos originally related to religion and ritual, and Philip Thody contrasts our contemporary bodily taboos with the ritual taboos of tribal cultures: "In our society, that of the industrialised West, the word 'taboo' has lost almost all its magical and religious associations" (1997). In Totem & Tabu, Sigmund Freud's classic two-fold definition of 'taboo' encompasses both the sacred and the profane, both religion and defilement: "The meaning of 'taboo', as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand, 'sacred', 'consecrated', and on the other 'uncanny', 'dangerous', 'forbidden', 'unclean'" (1912).

Taboos relating to language are most readily associated with the transgressive lexicon of swearing. William Shakespeare, writing at the cusp of the Reformation, demonstrated the reduced potency of blasphemy and, with his thinly veiled 'cunt' puns, slyly circumvented the newfound intolerance towards sexual language. Later, John Wilmot would remove the veil altogether, writing "some of the filthiest verses composed in English" (David Ward, 2003) with an astonishingly uninhibited sexual frankness and a blatant disregard for the prevailing Puritanism. Establishment "prudery [...] in the sphere of sex", as documented by Peter Fryer (1963), continued until after the Victorian period, when sexually explicit language was prosecuted as obscene.

It was not until the latter half of the twentieth century, after the sensational acquittal of Lady Chatterley's Lover, that the tide finally turned, and sexual taboos - including that of 'cunt' - were challenged by the 'permissive society'. During the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, the word 'cunt' became part of the national news agenda, and indeed the eventual publication of Lady Chatterley can be seen as something of a watershed for the word, marking its first widespread cultural dissemination.

The word has since become increasingly prolific in the media, and its appearances can broadly be divided into two types: euphemism and repetition. Humorous, euphemistic references to 'cunt', punning on the word without actually using it in full, represent an attempt to undermine our taboo against it: by laughing at our inability to utter the word, we recognise the arcane nature of the taboo and begin to challenge it. By contrast, the parallel trend towards repetitive usage of 'cunt' seeks to undermine the taboo through desensitisation: if 'cunt' is repeated ad infinitum, our sense of shock at initially encountering the word is rapidly dispelled.

With other swearwords (notably 'fuck') gradually losing their potency, 'cunt' is left as the last linguistic taboo, though even the c-word can now be found adorning badges, tee-shirts, and book covers. Its normalisation is now only a matter of time.

Cunt Etymology & Miscellany

Indo-European: Cu & Femininity

The clearest method of structuring the complex etymology of 'cunt' is to approach it letter by letter. Its prefix, 'cu', is an expression of "quintessential femineity" (Eric Partridge, 1961), confirming the status of 'cunt' as a truly feminine term. The synonymy between 'cu' and femininity was in place even before the development of written language: "in the unwritten prehistoric Indo-European [...] languages 'cu' or 'koo' was a word base expressing 'feminine', 'fecund' and associated notions" (Tony Thorne, 1990). The proto-Indo-European 'cu' is also cognate with other feminine/vaginal terms, such as the Hebrew 'cus', the Arabic 'cush' and 'kush', and the Nostratic 'kuni' ('woman').

Thus, 'cu' and 'koo', both pronounced 'coo', were ancient monosyllabic sounds implying femininity. 'Coo' and 'cou' are modern slang terms for vagina, based on these ancient sounds. Other vaginal slang words, such as 'cooch', 'coot', 'cooter', 'cooz', 'cooze', 'coozie', 'coozy', 'cookie', 'choochy', and 'coochie snorcher' are extensions of them. 'Coochie snorcher', as in The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could from The Vagina Monologues, is a childish euphemism for 'cunt' that has generated the increasingly elaborate variants 'hootchy-kootchy', 'ootchimagootchi', and 'ouchimagooga'.

The feminine 'cu' word-base is also the source of the modern 'cow', applied to female animals, one of the earliest recorded forms of which is the Old Frisian 'ku', indicating the link with 'cu'. Other early forms include the Old Saxon 'ko', the Dutch 'koe', the Old Higher German 'kuo' and 'chuo', the German 'kuhe' and 'kuh', the Old Norse 'kyr', the Germanic 'kouz', the Old English 'cy' (also 'cua' and 'cyna'), and the Middle English 'kine' and 'kye'.

Furthermore, Hugh Rawson also links 'cu' to elliptical (thus, perhaps, symbolically vaginal) terms such as 'cod' ('bag'), 'cubby-hole' ('snug place'), 'cove' ('concave chamber'), and 'keel' ('convex ridge'). He even associates it with 'cudgel' ('weapon'), though none of these terms have the demonstrably feminine associations of 'cunt' or 'cow'.

'Cu' also has associations with knowledge: 'can' ('to know') evolved from the Middle English 'cunne', 'cunae', and 'cun', which are in turn derived from the Old Frisian 'kunna', the Old Saxon 'cunnan', the Dutch 'kunnen', and the Old Higher German 'kunnan', all of which contain the 'cu'/'ku' prefix. RF Rattray highlights the connection between femininity and knowledge: "The root cu appears in countless words from cowrie, Cypris, down to cow; and the root cun has two lines of descent, the one emphasising the mother and the other knowledge: Cynthia and [...] cunt, on the one hand, and cunning, on the other" (1961).

Indeed, there is a significant linguistic connection between sex and knowledge: one can 'conceive' both an idea and a baby, and 'ken' means both 'know' and 'give birth'. 'Ken' shares a genealogical meaning with 'kin' and 'kind', from the Old English 'cyn' and the Gothic 'kuni'. It also has vaginal connotations: "['kin'] meant not only matrilineal blood relations but also a cleft or crevice, the Goddess's genital opening" (Barbara G Walker, 1983).

The Latin 'cognoscere', related to 'cognate', may indeed be cognate with the sexual organ 'cunt'. Knowledge-related words such as 'connote', 'canny', and 'cunning' may also be etymologically related to 'cunt', though such a connection is admittedly tenuous. Less debatable is the connection between 'cunctipotent' and 'cunt': both are derived from the Latin 'cunnus'. Geoffrey Chaucer's 'cunt'-like term 'queynte' is yet another link between sex and knowledge, as he uses it to mean both 'vagina' and 'cunning'.

Cw: The Celtic Cu

In Celtic and modern Welsh, 'cu' is rendered as 'cw', a similarly feminine prefix influencing the Old English 'cwithe' ('womb'). The 'cw' prefix can be traced back to the Indo-European 'gwen', which also influenced the Greek 'gune' and 'gunaikos', the Sumerian 'gagu', and the feminine/vaginal prefix 'gyn' (as in 'gynaecology' and, more negatively, 'misogyny').

Sharing the 'cw' prefix is 'cwe', meaning 'woman', influencing the Old English 'cuman' and 'cwene'. Anglicised phonetically, 'cwene' became 'quean', and is related to the Oromotic term 'qena', the Lowland Scottish 'quin', the Dutch 'kween', the Old Higher German 'quena' and 'quina', the Gothic 'quens' and 'qino', the Germanic 'kwenon' and 'kwaeniz', the Old Norse 'kvaen' (also 'kvan', 'kvenna', and 'kvinna'), the Middle English 'queene' and 'quene', and the modern English 'quean' and 'queen'.

'Cwm' also shares the 'cw' prefix, however its feminine origins seem initially perplexing, as it means 'valley'. In fact, this topographical definition is clearly a vaginal metaphor, as valleys are as furrowed and fertile as vaginas (although the Welsh slang for 'vagina' is not 'cwm', it is 'cont', a variant of 'cunt' in the manner of the Irish 'cuint'). 'Cwm' is found in the title of the traditional song Cwm Rhonnda ('Rhonnda Valley') and the soap-opera Pobol Y Cwm ('People Of The Valley'), and, taking the vagina metaphor into account, we are all 'people of the valley' through birth.

'Cwm' is pronounced 'come', though 'quim', an English slang term for 'vagina', is a mispronounced Anglicisation of it. Variants of 'quim' include 'qwim', 'quiff', 'quin', and 'quem', and it has been combined with 'mince' to form 'quince' ('effeminate').

'Quim' has been extended to form 'quimwedge' (literally 'vaginal wedge', thus 'penis'), which is especially interesting as it utilises 'wedge' to mean 'penis' when, in fact, 'cunt' itself derives from the Latin for 'wedge' ('cuneus'). Another oxymoronic 'cunt'/'penis' connection is Dorion Burt's Decunta (197-); a pun on 'Decanter', it is a large sculpture filled with whiskey, blatantly phallic in shape yet vaginal in name. There is a lesbian magazine titled Quim, and related to the term are the portmanteau words 'queef', 'kweef', and 'quiff', all meaning 'vaginal fart' and derived from 'quim' in combination with 'whiff'.

In addition to the clumsily Anglicised 'quim', 'cwm' was also adopted into English with the more accurate phonetic spelling 'coombe', from the Old English 'cumb'. 'Coombe' and its variants 'combe', 'comb', and 'coomb' remain common components of surnames and placenames. Indeed, so common is the word in English placenames that Morecambe Bay is often mis-spelt 'Morecombe': as Ian Mayes is at pains to point out, "It is not Morcombe Bay [...] it is Morcambe Bay" (2001). In England, there are four villages called 'Coombe' (one each in Gloustershire and Hampshire, and two in Devon) and three called 'Combe' (in Berkshire, Herefordshire, and Oxfordshire).

In America, 'combe' appears in the name of 'Buncombe County', from which the slang term 'bunkum' is derived. Congressional representative Felix Walker, ending a long-winded House of Representatives speech in 1821, insisted that he was "bound to make a speech for Buncombe" (Jonathon Green, 1998). Thus, 'buncombe' became synonymous with nonsensical speech, and was later simplified to 'bunkum'.

Latin: From Cu To Cun

We have seen how 'cu' originated as an ancient feminine term. In the Romance languages, the 'cu' prefix became 'co', as in 'coynte', the Italian 'conno' and 'cunno', the Portugese 'cona', and the Catalan 'cony'. The prefix is also found in Spanish, which provides 'concha' ('vagina'), 'chocha' ('lagoon', a vaginal metaphor), and 'cono' ('vagina') - which Suzi Feay finds preferable to the coarser-sounding 'cunt': "I must say, 'cono' is a much nicer word than its English equivalent" (2003). This 'co' prefix may also suggest a possible link with the Old English 'cot', forerunner of 'cottage', though this is not proven.

The transition from 'cu' to 'co' can be seen most clearly in the progression from the Old French 'cun' and 'cunne', to the Middle French 'com' and 'coun', and the modern French 'con'. These terms contain the letter 'n', and this is a clue that their evolution from 'cu' was indirect. The missing link is the Latin term 'cuneus', meaning 'wedge'.

'Wedge' and 'cunt', however, seem unlikely associates, as Jane Mills explains: "I know what a cunt looks like, and the word 'wedge' doesn't sort of spring to mind!" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). The 'wedge'/'cunt' link actually rests on their shared cuneiform shape: 'cuneus' led to both 'cuneiform' and 'cunt', with both words describing wedge-shaped triangular formations. 'Cuneiform' (from the Latin 'cuneformis' and the French 'cuneiforme') has the variants 'cuniform', 'cuneoform', and 'cuneal', from the Latin 'cunealis'.

The Latin 'cuneat' and 'cuneare' both also derive from 'cuneus', and are the sources of the modern 'coin', whose variants include 'coing', 'coign', 'coigne', 'quoin', 'quoyne', 'coyne', 'coynye', 'coigny', 'coignye', 'coyn', 'quoyne', and 'kynge'. Tim Healey proposes that there may be "an ancient pun" (2000) at work between 'coin' and 'cunt' - the French 'bijou' means both 'jewel' and 'vagina', recalling Inga Muscio's vaginal term "anatomical jewel" (1998), and, as 'cunt' and 'coin' are etymologically linked by 'cuneus', a similar double-entendre is possible in English. Indeed, the French phrase 'petit coin' is a euphemism for 'cunt', and, furthermore, 'coin' is a euphemism for 'conceive' and 'coiner' can refer to a man who impregnates a woman.

Thus, 'cuneiform', 'coin', and 'cunt' share the same etymological origin: 'cuneus'. The connection between 'cuneus' and 'cunt' is 'cunnus' (Latin for 'vagina'), and this connection is most clearly demonstrated by the term 'cunnilingus' (comically mis-spelt 'cunnilinctus', 'cumulo nimbus', 'cunning linguist', 'cunning lingus', and Kinda Lingers). 'Cunnilingus' ('oral stimulation of the vagina') is a combination of 'cunnus' and 'lingere' ('to lick') - here, we can see that 'cunnus' is used in direct reference to the vagina; this meaning, and the prefix 'cun' shared with 'cunt', must be more than coincidental. 'Cunnus' also occurs in the phrase 'cunnus diaboli', mediaeval "cunt-shrine[s]" known as 'devilish cunts' and defined by Barbara G Walker as "Sacred places associated with the world-cunt [that] sometimes embarrassed Victorian scholars who failed to understand their earlier meaning" (1983).

There are many terms derived from 'cunnus' that have either literal or metaphorical vaginal or maternal connotations: the Roman Goddess 'Cunina', the Welsh 'cunnog', 'cuniculus' ('passageway'), 'cununa', and 'cunabula' ('cradle'). 'Cunctipotent', meaning 'all-knowing' or "having cunt-magic" (Barbara G Walker, 1983), is also derived from 'cunnus', and links sex to knowledge in the manner discussed earlier. Also from 'cunnus' is 'cundy', which means 'underground water channel' and is slang for 'vaginal fluid', a vaginal metaphor in the manner of 'cwm'. The slang term 'cunnifungus' ('diseased vagina') also derives its prefix from 'cunnus'.

Dutch: From Cun To Cunt

The Greek 'kusos', 'kusthos', 'konnos', and 'konnus', related to the Egyptian 'ka-t', were all influenced by 'cunnus'. Along with the Hebrew 'kus' and 'keus', they in turn influenced 'kunton', the Hittite and Persian 'kun', the Basque 'kuna' and 'cuna', the Danish 'kusse', the Old Norse and Old Frisian 'kunta' and 'kunte', the Middle Higher German 'kotze', the Icelandic 'kunta' (or 'kunt'), the Old Dutch 'kunte', and the Middle Dutch 'conte'. The modern Dutch 'kutt' (also spelt 'kut') has been used as the title of the lesbian porn magazine Kutt (2002), leading to Lee Carter's 'live and uncut' pun "live and unKutt" (2002). Gloria Bertonis cites the further examples of 'kundalini' ('feminine energy') and 'khan' ('Eurasian matriarch').

It is interesting that these Dutch examples include the suffixes 'te' and 'tt', as the final 't' of "the most notable of all vulgarisms" has always been "difficult to explain" (1961), according to Eric Partridge, who included 'cunt' in his Dictionary Of Slang & Unconventional English, the nearest lexicographical equivalent to an OED of colloquialisms. The complex etymological jigsaw of this "most notorious term of all" (1947) can now be broadly pieced together: the 'cu' is Proto-Indo-European, the 'n' is Latin, and the 't' is Dutch. The Middle English 'kunte', 'cuntt', 'cunte', 'count', and 'counte' bear the marks of each of these three influences.

Topographical & Hydrographical Metaphors: A Case Study

We have seen how the Celtic 'cwm' was influenced by the feminine prefix 'cu', a topographical vagina metaphor comparing the shape and fertility of valleys and vaginas. Other terms also have similarly vaginal connotations, such as 'cundy' ('underground water channel'), which is a hydrographical vaginal metaphor derived from 'cunnus'. Similarly, 'cuniculus', also from 'cunnus', means 'passageway', and was applied to Roman drainage systems. 'Konnos', the Greek for 'vagina', is derived from 'cunnus' and the Sanskrit 'cushi'/'kunthi', meaning 'ditch', as both vaginas and ditches are channels for water. The Spanish 'chocha' ('lagoon') is another vaginal metaphor. 'Cut', a further term meaning 'water channel', is a recognised euphemism for 'cunt', though is not etymologically related to it.

The vaginal water channel allusion is replicated by the River Kennet in Wiltshire, as 'Kennet' was originally 'Cunnit': "At Silbury Hill [the river] joins the Swallowhead or true fountain of the Kennet, which the country people call by the old name of Cunnit and it is not a little famous amongst them" (William Stukeley, 1743). Adjacent to the river is the Roman settlement 'Cunetio', also spelt 'Cunetione', 'Cunetzone', 'Cunetzione', and 'Cunetiu' (though now known as 'Mildenhall'). "The name ['Cunetio'] must be left unresolved", insist ALF Rivet and Colin Smith (1979), though its origin, like Kennet's, is the Celtic 'kuno'.

The rivers 'Kent' (formerly 'Kenet') and 'Cynwyd' share Kennet's etymology, and, as Michael Dames explains, Kennet's link to 'cunt' is readily apparent: "we may yet rediscover the Kennet as Cunnit, and the Swallowhead as Cunt. The name of that orifice is carried downstream in the name of the river. Cunnit is Cunnt with an extra i. As late as 1740, the peasants of the district had not abandoned the name[.] The antiquity of the form is clearly shown by the Roman riverside settlement called Cunetio - their principal town in the entire Kennet valley" (1976).

Cunt As A Proper Noun

The earliest 'cunt' citation in the Oxford English Dictionary features the word as a component of a London streetname: circa 1230 in Southwark, there was a street called 'Gropecuntelane' (though variants of the name include 'Groppecountelane' and 'Gropecontelane'). The street was part of the 'stews', the Southwark red-light district, though its name was not confined only to London. There was also a 'Gropecuntlane' in Oxford (later renamed 'Magpie Lane'), a 'Grapcunt Lane' in York, a 'Cunte Street' in Bristol (later renamed 'Host Street'), and a Rue Grattecon in Paris. London's 'Gropecuntelane' was later shortened to 'Grope Lane', and subsequently became 'Grub Street'.

Martin Wainwright cites a 'Grope Lane' in York, perhaps a sanitised form of 'Grapcunt Lane', which was further sanitised to 'Grape Lane' "by staid Victorians who found the original Grope - historically related to prostitution - too blatant" (2000). Other 'cunt'-related placenames include 'Coombe' and 'Kennet', discussed earlier, and the evocative American 'Ticklecunt Creek'. In Barcelona, there is a restaurant called 'Bar Cuntis', which attracts the same unwarranted attention as the English town 'Scunthorpe' (Who Put The *@!+ In Scunthorpe?, asked Empire in 1993).

There is a cocktail called a 'Cunt Pump', and Graeme Donald cites another form of 'cunt' used as a proper noun, this time in mediaeval surnames, two of which predate the OED's earliest citation: "Early records mention such female names as Gunoka Cuntles (1219), Bele Wydecunthe (1328) and presumably promiscuous male sporting names such as Godwin Clawecunte (1066), John Fillecunt (1246) and Robert Clevecunt (1302)" (1994). Explaining that "Any part of the body which was unusual [or] remarkable was likely to provide a convenient nickname or surname for its owner" (1988), James McDonald cites the further example of 'Simon Sitbithecunte' (1167, again predating the OED). Other 'cunt' names include that of the male witch 'Johannes Cuntius', the make-up artist 'Gabreil DeCunto', and the pseudonymous 'Ima Cunt' ('I'm a cunt').

The surname 'Kuntz' has a tantalising phonetic similarity to 'Cunts', and is especially notable in the case of WD Kuntz, whose 'cunt' connection is compounded by his position as a gynaecologist. In a similar vein, Matthew Norman quotes a letter from Archibald Clerk Kerr: "[I have] a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that his name is Mustapha Kunt ['Must have a Cunt']. We all feel like that [...] but few of us would care to put it on our cards" (2003). Immanuel Kant's surname has also been confused with 'cunt', as Reinhold Aman notes that "Cunt was a famous German philosopher" (199-), and Tom Conti has received the same treatment: "Conti should probably enter the vernacular as a term of abuse" (Gareth McLean, 2003).

Terence Meaden suggests that legal suppression of 'cunt' constituted "a series of vicious witch hunts encouraged by an evil establishment wishing to suppress what amounted to apparent signs of Goddess beliefs" (1992), and, indeed, there was a Japanese Goddess 'Cunda', a Korean Goddess 'Quani' (the Tasmanian 'quani' means 'woman'), a Phoenician priestess 'Qudshu', a Sumerian priestess 'Quadasha', and, in India, a Goddess known variously as 'Cunti-Devi', 'Cunti', 'Kun', 'Kunda', 'Kundah', and 'Kunti', worshipped by the 'Kundas' or 'Kuntahs'. These names all indicate that 'cunt' and its ancient equivalents were used as titles of respect rather than as insults (as does the Egyptian term, 'quefen-t', used by Ptah-Hotep when addressing a Goddess).

My own surname, Hunt, also has associations with 'cunt'. I have lost count of the number of times I have been called 'Mike' ('Mike Hunt'/'My Cunt') or 'Isaac' ('Isaac Hunt'/'I's a Cunt'). The 'Mike Hunt' pun can be traced back as early as the nineteenth century: "The dance was followed up by an out-and-out song by Mike Hunt, whose name was called out in a way that must not be mentioned to ears polite" (FLG, 1841). In Australian slang, 'Michael', from 'Michael Hunt' ('Mike Hunt'), is itself a euphemism for 'cunt', and the Antipodean band 'The Pork Hunts' ('The Poor Cunts') changed their name to 'The Porkers' in order that it could be spoken on the radio.

There are a plethora of 'Hunt'/'cunt' comparisons: I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue has been introduced as "the show that is to panel games what James Hunt is to rhyming slang!" (John Naysmith, 1998); in Head On Comedy a joke was made about "William Hunt" (Pati Marr, 2000); and the "rhyming slang potential" (Gareth McLean, 2001[a]) of 'Mr Hunt' has been commented upon. 'Colin Hunt' is another rhyming 'cunt' euphemism: "Colin Hunt, the perpetual office joker in The Fast Show, is evoked. That's all they are, really. A bunch of Colin Hunts" (Charlie Catchpole, 2001). Smut has a comic strip called Kevin Hunt, with the slogan "YOU GET THE GIST" (2001) implying the pun in the name. Kirsty Allsopp demonstrates how easy a 'Hunt'/'cunt' slip-of-the-tongue can be: "I had to stand outside a house and say, "Welcome to The Great House Hunt!" [though instead] I said, "Welcome to The Great House C[unt]!" I was so embarrassed!" (Polly Hudson, 2003).

The Viking invader King Canute's name was originally spelt 'Cnut', an anagram of 'cunt' in the manner of French Connection's 'fcuk'. 'Fcuk' and 'Cnut' are both tabooed words with their respective middle letters reversed, the difference being that 'fcuk' was a deliberate reference to 'fuck' whereas 'Cnut' was an accidental reference to 'cunt'. This accidental reference may explain why 'Canute' has now replaced 'Cnut', in an attempt to elongate the word and thus disguise its similarity to 'cunt'. French Connection initially insisted that the similarity between 'fcuk' and 'fuck' was merely coincidental, though they soon dropped their false modesty by pressing charges against the rival 'Cnut Attitude' clothing brand.

King Cnut, known as 'Cnut the Great', was one of several Danish Cnuts, including 'St Cnut'. His name now prompts predictable double-entendres, such as this from Simon Carr: "John Prescott made King Canute gestures with his hands. Or, more accurately, King Cnut gestures (I'm glad I'm not dyslexic)" (2003). Two Private Eye cartoons have drawn upon the humorous potential of 'Cnut': one by McLachlan (2002) depicts a man in a 'fcuk' tee-shirt looking at a historical waxwork labelled "cnut", and another by Mike Barfield (2003) includes "CNUT" in a collection of offensive anagrams. A split-second reference occurred in an advertisement for Kellogg's Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, when the final frame read "C NUT" (2002). In Believe Nothing, Rik Mayall played a character called 'Adonis Cnut', leading another character to ask him: "may I call you A Cnut?" ('may I call you a cunt?'; Claire Hinson, 2002). A Daily Star feature on the programme somewhat missed the point with the headline You Cnut Be Serious, using 'Cnut' as a pun on 'cannot'.

Euphemism

The euphemistic Spoonerism 'cunning stunts' ('stunning cunts') relies not on rhyme but on a reversal of the initial letters, a trick later imitated by Kenny Everett's "dangerously named" (Mark Lewisohn, 1998) comedy character 'Cupid Stunt', a Spoonerism of 'Stupid Cunt'. 'Cunning Stunts' is also the name of a female theatre-group and an advertising agency, and Metallica released a DVD titled Cunning Stunts in 1997. Another 'cunt' Spoonerism is Cunny Funt ('Funny Cunt'), the title of a Smut comic strip. Richard Christopher cites two further 'cunt' Spoonerisms (both of which are rather sexist): "What's the difference between a magician and a chorus line? - The magician has a cunning array of stunts [thus the chorus line has a stunning array of cunts]" and "What's the difference between pigmies and female track stars? - Pigmies are cunning runts [thus female track stars are running cunts]" (199-).

'Cunt' is known euphemistically as 'the monosyllable', 'the bawdy monosyllable', 'the divine monosyllable', and 'the venerable monosyllable', though, paradoxically, its earliest forms (such as 'cunte', 'cunnus', and 'kunta') were all disyllabic. Germaine Greer's Cunt-Power Oz lists a page of 'cunt' synonyms under the heading The Divine Monosyllable and Jonathon Green's Slang Down The Ages features a similar selection of vaginal slang terms headed The Monosyllable.

'Constable' is a further 'cunt' euphemism, due to the phonetic similarity of its first syllable. William Shakespeare uses it in Alls Well That Ends Well (1601[a]): "From below your duke to beneath your constable, it will fit any question", and, more recently, 'thingstable' has become a recognised euphemism for 'constable', acknowledging the 'cunt' link. The connection has also been extended to 'cunt stubble' and 'cony-fumble', and Ned Ward reversed the syllables of 'constable' to create "stablecunt" (1924).

Another euphemism for 'cunt' is 'the big C': "the big "C". No, I'm not talking Cancer. I'm talking Cunt" (Anthony Petkovich, 199-). The phrase was used as the headline for an article about 'cunt' by Joan Smith (The Big C, 1998). Similar terms are 'red c' ('red cunt', a pun on 'Red Sea') and 'open C' ('open cunt').

A handy two-birds-with-one-stone euphemism for both 'fuck' and 'cunt' is the phrase 'effing and ceeing' (thus, 'Woking FC' officially stands for 'Woking Football Club' though has also been extended to 'Woking Fucking Cunts'). 'Cunt' has also been combined with 'cock' to produce the portmanteau word 'cuntock' ('labia'), with 'bastard' to produce 'custard', with 'prick' to produce "prant [...] a sanitised amalgam of the vulgar terms for the male and female genitalia" (ACJ Scott, 2003), and with 'fuck' to produce Peter Sotos's Cuntfuck (1999).

'Cunt', in print, is often censored as 'c***', though 'c...', 'cxxt', 'c---', 'c*!@!', 'c**t', 'c*nt', '*unt', '*@!+', 'c#@t', and '****' have also been used. Using asterisks in this way, to replace letters (often vowels), serves to accentuate a word's obscenity, drawing attention to its unprintability.

Matthew Parris once called 'cunt' "a word beginning with 'c', which I couldn't possibly repeat" (Rod Liddle, 2001), and in keeping with this is the commonest 'cunt' euphemism: 'the c-word'. If 'cunt' can be a 'c-word', can 'cock' be one, too? Sex & The City seems to think it can (Nicole Holofcener, 2000):

"his big, beautiful cock."
"We're using the c-word now?".

Other loaded words beginning with 'c' have also occasionally been termed 'c-word's: "Don't mention the c-word" 'cancer' (The Guardian, 2000); "the c-word - class" (Dea Birkett, 2001); "Ah, the c-word: context" (Tom Shone, 1994); The C Word "cellulite" (Diane Taylor, 2002); "the 'C' is for 'Campbell', but we're a bit wary of using the c-word on air" (Abiola Awojobi, 2001); "he was anxious to avoid the c-word: 'corporate'" (Annie Dunkinson, 2003); "they wouldn't even allow the c-word - chainsaw" (Jamie Graham, 2001); "the C-word so often fallaciously slung at him: caricature" (Peter Bradshaw, 2002); "I'm gonna say the c-word [...] Clarkson!" (Katie Tyrll, 2003); "Predicting the effects of London's upcoming C-word (Congestion Zone)" (John Hind, 2003); and "[He] looked like someone who didn't even know what the C-word might be. Confidential? Cocoa?" (Simon Hoggart, 2003).

Headlines punning on 'the c-word' include The C Word ("celebrity") by Stephen Fry (199-) and Conservative Candidates Told To Avoid The C Word ("Conservative") by Andrew Grice (2001). Using 'cunt' in headlines is considered too risky, and 'c***' in large type is seen as clumsy, thus 'the c-word' is sometimes used instead: The Curse Of The C-Word by Mark Irwin (2001) and I Heard Maureen Lipman Say The C Word! by Catherine Bennett ("to urge an audience to shout "Cunt" seems like a real treat", 2001). Simon Carr reports how his children confuse 'the c-word' with "the K-word" (2001); he also quotes their confusion over 'cunt' itself: "Mummy, clint! That's a rude word, isn't it? Clint!".

An affectionately disguised variant of 'cunt' is 'cunny', whose variants include 'cunnie', 'cunicle', and 'cunnikin'. 'Cunny' is derived from 'cony' (also spelt 'coney'), which meant 'young rabbit' and was also a slang term for 'vagina'. William Shakespeare hinted at this second meaning in Loues Labour's Lost (1588), juxtaposing 'incony' with 'prick' ('penis'): "Let the mark have a prick in't [...] most incony vulgar wit!". 'Cony' can be traced back to the Middle English 'cunin' and 'cuning', the African 'coning', and the Old French 'conin'. Related is 'conyger' ('meaning 'warren' and also spelt 'conynger', from the Middle English 'conygere'), the Anglo-Latin 'coningera' and 'conigera', and the Latin 'cunicularium'. The word also appears in Old French, as 'conniniere', 'coniniere', 'coniliere', and 'connilliere'.

In an effort to minimise the scurrilous impact of 'cunny', 'cony' was phased out and the meaning of 'rabbit' was extended to animals both young and old. To retain the influence of 'cunny', the rhyming alternative 'bunny' was substituted. Spanish provides similar examples: 'conejo' means both 'rabbit' and 'cunt', and the similar term 'conejita' ('bunny girl') provides another link between the two elements.

The similarity of 'cony' to 'cunny' is echoed by the relationship between 'count' and 'cunt': "It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title 'Count' was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic 'Earl' [...] precisely because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt" (Geoffrey Hughes, 1991). Indeed, as early as 1572 a direct and bawdy comparison between 'Earl' and 'Count' was made by Stephen Valenger:

"Well ay thie wyfe a Countes be yf thou wilt be an Earle;
[...] All Countesses in honour her surmount,
They haue, she had, an honourable Count".

The phonetic similarity of 'Count' to 'cunt' is so striking that accidental obscenities abound: Gordon Williams notes that, "[during] a Restoration performance of Romeo and Juliet [an actress] enter'd in a Hurry, Crying, O my Dear Count! She Inadvertently left out, O, in the pronuntiation of the Word Count [...] which reduced the audience to hysterics" [sic, throughout] (1996).

An election edition of Have I Got News For You once ended with the words: "So, for our winners: the chance to go to Michael Portillo's constituency and see the count. For our losers: the chance to retype that sentence without the spelling mistake" (Paul Wheeler, 1997). An identical instance occurred when the first 'O' of a fake cinema sign was lower than the rest of the text: "THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO" (Marquee Meltdown!, 1998). Linacre Lane cites 'Count Of Monte Cristo' as a Scouse insult, adding dryly: "The first word is often intentionally mispronounced" (1966). Like 'count', 'countdown' also has comic potential if its 'o' is removed, as we shall see later.

In Cockney rhyming slang, 'Charlie Hunt' (abbreviated to 'Charlie'), 'John Hunt', 'James Hunt', 'Billy Hunt', 'Joe Hunt' (abbreviated to 'Joey'), and 'Sir Anthony Blunt' (abbreviated to 'Anthony Blunt' and 'Sir Anthony') are all euphemisms for 'cunt'. Other rhyming slang 'cunt' euphemisms are 'eyes front', 'Grannie Grunt', 'groan and grunt', 'gasp and grunt', 'growl and grunt', 'grumble and grunt' (abbreviated to 'grumble'), 'sharp and blunt', and 'National Front'. The Cockney pronunciation of 'cunt' was evocatively captured by Clark Collis ("You cahnt!", 2001) and Irvine Welsh ("CAHHNNTTT", 2002).

'Sir Berkeley' and 'Lady Berkeley' are also Cockney rhyming slang for 'cunt', albeit rather more tangentially. The 'Berkeley'/'cunt' connection stems from the rhyming slang term 'Berkeley Hunt', abbreviated to 'Berkeley' and also known as 'Berkley Hunt', 'Berkshire Hunt', 'Burlington Hunt', and 'Birchington Hunt'. It is from this that the mild insult 'berk' (or 'burk') is abbreviated, thus, "when [people] say 'You're a right berk', what they're actually saying is 'You're a right cunt', which is much more obscene" (Kerry Richardson, 1994).

Like rhyming slang, limericks also rely on rhyme for their effect:

'There was a young squaw of Chokdunt
Who had a collapsible cunt'.

In backslang, 'cunt' is 'tenuc' and 'teenuc', the extra letters being added to facilitate pronunciation, and 'cunt' in pig Latin is 'untcay'. The euphemism 'see you next Tuesday' utilises each letter of 'cunt' individually, with 'see you' sounding like 'c u', and 'n t' being the respective initial letters of 'next' and 'Tuesday'. See You Next Tuesday is also the title of a play adapted from the film Le Diner De Cons, thus both the play and the film have 'cunt'-related titles.

'Cunt' acronyms include:

* "Carlton United Network Television" (British Comedy Awards, 1999)
* CharlieUncleNorfolkTango (novel by Tony White, 1999)
* "Completely Unbearable Neo-Trash" (Sharon O'Connell, 2000)
* "Cuddly Uncle Ned's Trio" (John Spencer, 2001)
* "Combined Unified Now Team" (Trailervision's C.U.N.T., 2001)
* 'Can't Understand Normal Thinking' (military)
* 'Cambridge University New Testament [Society]' (apocryphal)
* 'Coventry University Netball Team' (unintentional)
* "Concentration, Understanding, Nous, and Tenacity" (Mark Mylod, 1997).

Almost an acronym is the "Kuwait Union for New Teachers", abbreviated to 'KUNT': "Teacher? New to Kuwait? Then you need the Kuwait Union for New Teachers. Become a KUNT, your friends can be KUNTs too" (Kuwait Times, 2001).

This example, 'KUNT', can perhaps be regarded as a sly joke by an English-speaking writer in Kuwait. Similarly, embedded within an article by Sally Vincent is the line "Point A moved to point B to point C until" (2003), which is probably an intentional reference. There is no ambiguity whatsoever surrounding "-cunthorpe", a deliberate truncation of the Humberside town 'Scunthorpe' on the back cover of a book by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (1995). Likewise, when a knight in Thomas Heywood's Wisewomen Of Hogsdon (16--) declares, in Latin, "Nobis ut carmine dicunt", he is described as "a beastly man" to highlight the embedded obscenity. 'Cunt' also appears surreptitiously in 'cuntur', the original Peruvian term for 'condor', and in the Latin term 'nascuntur'.

A To Z: The Cunt Lexicon

The sheer extent of the 'cunt' lexicon supports Scott Capurro's assertion that it is "plainly the most versatile word in the English language" (2000). Its versatility is demonstrated by the following 'cunt'-related words and phrases:

* 'Army Service Cunts' ('Army Service Corps')
* 'big cunt' ('large vagina')
* 'bucket cunt' ('large vagina')
* 'bushel cunt'/'bushel-cunted' ('large vagina')
* 'cow-cunt'/'cow-cunted' ('large vagina')
* 'cunt and a half' ('very idiotic')
* 'cuntbag' ('idiot')
* 'cunt book' ('in the bad books')
* 'cunt bubble' ('vaginal fart')
* 'cunt buster' ('erection')
* 'cunt butter' ('vaginal fluid')
* 'cunt cap' ('military hat')
* 'cunt carpet' ('pubic hair')
* 'cunt-collar' ('pussy whip')
* 'cunt-cuddling' ('masturbation')
* 'cunt-curtain' ('pubic hair')
* 'cunt down' ('pubic hair')
* 'Cunt Dracula' ('idiot')
* 'cunted' ('drunk')
* 'cunt-eyed' ('narrow-eyed')
* 'cunt face' ('ugly')
* 'cunt-faced' ('shit-faced')
* 'cunt fart' ('vaginal fart')
* 'cunt for hire' ('prostitute')
* 'cunt guff' ('vaginal fart')
* 'cunt-hair' ('hair's breadth')
* 'cunt-hat' ('felt hat')
* 'cunt-hatred' ('misogyny')
* 'cunthead' ('idiot')
* 'cunt-hooks' ('fingers')
* 'cunt-hound' ('sex-obsessed')
* 'cunt hunt' ('on the pull')
* 'cuntikin' ('little cunt')
* 'cunting' ('fucking')
* 'cuntino filet with white sauce' ('cunnilingus')
* 'cuntion' ('gumption')
* 'cuntish' ('stupid')
* 'cunt-itch' ('sexually aroused')
* 'cuntitude' ('bad attitude')
* 'cunt juice' ('vaginal fluid')
* 'cuntkin' ('little cunt')
* 'cunt-lap'/'cunt-lapper'/'cunt-lapping' ('cunnilingus')
* 'cuntlashed' ('drunk')
* 'cunt-leg' ('penis')
* 'cuntlet' ('little cunt')
* 'cunt-licker'/'cunt-licking' ('cunnilingus')
* 'cunt light'/'C-light' ('pornographic film lighting')
* 'cunt-like' ('vaginal')
* 'cunt-line' ('cont-line')
* 'cuntock' ('idiot')
* 'cuntocks' ('labia')
* 'cunt-pensioner' ('pimp'; abbreviated to 'cp')
* 'cunt pie' ('vagina')
* 'cunt positive' ('liberal feminist')
* 'cunt-power' ('female energy')
* 'cunt-rag' ('sanitary towel')
* 'cunt ruffler' ('provoker of women')
* 'cunt rug' ('merkin')
* 'cunt's blood' ('idiot')
* 'cunt scratchers' ('hands')
* 'cunt-screen' ('pubic hair')
* 'cunt-shop' ('knocking shop')
* 'Cunts In Velvet' ('City Imperial Volunteers')
* 'cuntsmith' ('gynaecologist')
* 'cunt-splicing' ('cut-splicing')
* 'cunt-stabber' ('penis')
* 'cunt-stand' ('sexually aroused')
* 'cunt-starver' ('errant ex-husband')
* 'cunt-sticker' ('penis')
* 'cunt-stirrer' ('penis')
* 'cunt-stretcher' ('penis')
* 'cunt-struck' ('sex-obsessed')
* 'cunt stubble' ('constable')
* 'cunt-sucker' ('cunnilinguist')
* 'cunt-tease'/'cunt-teaser' ('prick-teaser')
* 'cunt-tickler' ('moustache')
* 'cunt torture' ('sadomasochistic sex')
* 'cunt trumpet' (cunnilingus')
* 'cunt wagon' ('passion wagon')
* 'cunt warren' ('cunny-warren')
* 'cuntweep' ('vaginal fluid')
* 'cunty' ('idiot')
* 'cunty booby' ('confusion')
* 'cunty chops' ('beard')
* 'Cunty McCuntlips' ('idiot')
* 'decunt' ('withdraw the penis from the vagina')
* 'dirty cunt' ('unclean vagina')
* 'doss cunt' ('stupid idiot')
* 'double-cunted' ('large vagina')
* 'dumb cunt' ('stupid idiot')
* 'get some cunt'/'some cunt' ('male sexual gratification')
* 'mouth like a cow's cunt' ('talkative')
* 'pox-ridden cunt' ('diseased vagina')
* 'scabby cunt' ('diseased vagina')
* 'siffed-up cunt-hole' ('diseased vagina')
* 'silly cunt!' ('stupid idiot')
* 'sluice-cunted' ('large vagina')
* 'smelly cunt' ('malodorous vagina')
* 'stinky cunt' ('malodorous vagina')
* 'sweet cunt' ('lovely vagina').

Feminist Reappropriation Of Cunt

Language & Abuse

Children are taught this traditional mantra:

'Sticks and stones
May brake my bones
But words can never hurt me'.

However, as Julia Penelope points out, words do hurt us. Specifically, she demonstrates that, when one man insults another, an insult to women is often at the root of his words: "[words] used by men to insult other men, motherfucker, son of a bitch, bastard, sissy, and cunt insult men because they're female words" (1990). 'Cunt' insults men because it acts as a verbal castration, removing their masculinity by denying them their penis, implying that having a cunt is inferior to having a cock: Signe Hammer explained that to call a man a 'cunt' "is to call him a woman: castrated" (1977).

Jonathon Green highlights the inherent patriarchy of the slang lexicon: "Slang is the essence of 'man-made language', created by men and largely spoken by him too" (1993). This is a trend which has noticeably increased over time, as Germaine Greer explains: "The more body-hatred grows, so that the sexual function is hated and feared by those unable to renounce it, the more abusive terms we find in the language" (1970[a]). Jane Mills's Womanwords has been especially influential in highlighting this imbalance.

The status and deployment of 'cunt' as "The worst name anyone can be called [and] the most degrading epithet" (Germaine Greer, 1970[a]), and especially as the worst name a woman can be called, serves to reinforce the tradition of cultural patriarchy, as Jane Mills points out: "the use of 'cunt' as the worst swearword that anyone can think of says a great deal about misogyny in our society, and I think it reveals fear, disgust, and also [a] denial of female sexuality" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). Joan Smith agrees: "It is impossible not to make a link, as lexicographers and feminist writers have done, between the [...] decline [of 'cunt'] into obscenity and illegality, and fearful attitudes towards women and their sexuality" (1998).

William Leith notes that "We may have equality of the sexes but we do not have equality of sexual organs[.] Female sexual organs carry a powerful taboo. I can print the words prick, cock and dick as much as I like", adding coyly: "but I know I have to be careful with the c-word" (2000). Ed Vulliamy makes the same point: "the c-word is different. 'Cock', 'dick' and 'prick', and elaborations thereof, are fine - but not the female equivalent" (1999).

According to Brigid McConville and John Shearlaw, 'cunt' "reflects the deep fear and hatred of the female by the male in our culture. It is a far nastier and more violent insult than 'prick' which tends to mean foolish rather than evil. This violent usage is a constant and disturbing reminder to women of the hatred associated with female sexuality and leaves women with few positive words to name their own organs" (1984).

'Cunt' has a long history of misuse, though 'vagina' itself is a far from neutral term. 'Vagina' is Latin for 'sheath', 'scabbard', and 'quiver', protective coverings into which one slides swords or arrows, and is thus closely linked to pejorative conceptions of sex as a violent, male stabbing act. The German equivalent is even more demeaning: 'Schamscheide' ('vagina') translates literally as 'sheath of shame'.

Eve Ensler has said that 'vagina' "sounds like an infection at best, maybe a medical instrument[.] Doesn't matter how many times you say it, it never sounds like a word you want to say" (2001). Similarly, in Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence, Inga Muscio begins by denouncing the word 'vagina': "etymolog[ically] "vagina" originates from a word meaning sheath for a sword. Ain't got no vagina" (1998). Joan Larkin's Vagina Sonnet encapsulates her dislike of the word:

"Is 'vagina' suitable for use
in a sonnet? I don't suppose so.
A famous poet told me, 'Vagina's ugly.'
Meaning, of course, the sound of it[.]
This whole thing is unfortunate, but petty [...]
a waste of brains - to be concerned about
this minor issue of my cunt's good name" (1975).

The Subversion Of Abusive Language

Word-meanings are dictated by consensus and contemporary usage, thus negative meanings can be reversed when pejorative terms are systematically reappropriated: "Girls and women can thus reclaim the words in our language that have been used against us" (Gloria Bertonis, 200-).

The commonest derogative term for a woman - 'bitch' - is on the road to reclamation. The Bitch Manifesto prompted a positive reassessment of the word: "Bitches are good examples of how women can be strong enough to survive even the rigid, punitive socialization of our society" (Joreen, 1970). Casey Miller and Kate Smith discuss this transvaluation of 'bitch' and also cite "Groups of feminists who choose to call themselves witches [...] to rehabilitate that word in the same way" (1976).

Other formerly derogatory terms for women have also been reclaimed: "The feminist spirit has reclaimed some words with defiance and humor. Witch, bitch, dyke, and other formerly pejorative epithets turned up in the brave names of small feminist groups" (Gloria Steinem, 1979). 'Dyke' was used in the title of the New York lesbian newspaper Big Apple Dyke News, demonstrating that a word can be reclaimed when it is used consciously by the group to which its vehemence was previously directed. Jane Mills adds that "crumpet has recently been appropriated by women to refer to men [and] women today are making a conscious attempt to reform the English language [including] the reclamation and rehabilitation of words and meanings" (1989).

A less likely pioneer of reclamation is the self-styled 'battle-axe' Christine Hamilton, though her celebratory Book Of British Battle-Axes nevertheless marked a re-evaluation of the term. Most recently, the offensive term 'slut' has been reclaimed as an epithet of empowerment: Kate Spicer suggests that 'slut' is "a term of abuse that has been redefined by fashion to mean something cool[.] A fashionable woman can take those phallocentric terms of abuse like slut and slag and nasty girl and turn them into labels of postfeminist fabulousness" (2003).

In this case, the principal is the same as that pioneered by Madonna: that sexual aggression, feared by men and characterised by them in disrespectful terms such as 'slut', can be redefined as an assertive and positive attribute. It is not simply the word 'slut' that is being redefined, it is the lifestyle that the word represents - the meaning of the term 'slut' has stayed the same, though the cultural acceptance of its characteristics has increased.

Germaine Greer - who instigated the cunt-power movement, of which more later - wrote I Am A Whore, in which she consciously identified herself with the word 'whore', attempting to show that it can be positive rather than negative: "Whore is a dirty word - so we'll call everybody whore and get people uptight; whereas really you've got to come out the other way around and make whore a sacred word like it used to be and it still can be" (1971[b]).

Greer's biographer fundamentally misjudged her suggestion, calling it "a direct betrayal of what feminism was supposed to be about [...] it takes a truly eccentric and bizarre kind of feminism for one to identify as a prostitute" (Christine Wallace, 1997). In fact, far from identifying as a prostitute, Greer was implying that the word 'whore' could be removed from its pejorative associations.

A term with similar status is the racially abusive 'nigger', which has been reclaimed by African-Americans (such as Niggaz With Attitude), and is used in this context as a term of endearment. 'Nigger' has been reclaimed by the group against which it was used as a means of subjugation and oppression, and its reappropriation serves to dilute its potential to offend. Its reappropriation is not universally accepted, however: Spike Lee has criticised what he perceives as Samuel L Jackson's insensitivity towards the word's contentiousness.

Lenny Bruce made the point that the social suppression of taboo words such as 'cunt' and 'nigger' serves to perpetuate and increase their power: "the word's suppression gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness" (1970), arguing that only through repetition can we remove the abusive powers of taboo words: "If [you said] niggerniggerniggernigger [...] till nigger lost its meaning - you'd never make any four-year-old nigger cry when [they] came home from school".

The homophobic term 'queer' has also been positively - yet contentiously - reappropriated, for example by Queer Nation: "In recent years 'queer' has come to be used differently [and this] once pejorative term [is] a positive self-description[.] Proponents of the new terminology argue that to redeploy the term queer as a figure of pride is a powerful act of cultural reclamation [equal to] the transvaluation of 'dyke' from a term of abuse to an assertive and then routinely casual declaration of lesbian identity" (Annamarie Jagose, 1996). Larry Kramer began the transvaluation of another homophobic term with the title of his book Faggots.

The various epithets used to insult mentally handicapped people represent a further lexicon of reclaimed pejoratives. Mark Radcliffe profiles "people with mental health problems tak[ing] the sting out of stigma by reclaiming pejoratives" (2003), citing 'Crazy Folks' and 'Mad Pride' as groups whose names "reclaim some of the stigmatising language". This consciously humorous appropriation of 'crazy' and 'mad' must avoid being misinterpreted as a trivialisation of those whom it seeks to empower.

It is clear that "The conversion of a derogatory term into a battle cry by radicals is not uncommon" (Hugh Rawson, 1989), though 'cunt' itself has yet to emerge as a fully reclaimed term. Presently, the initial stages of its reappropriation are as contentious and complex as those of the epithets dicussed above.

Linguistic & Cultural Erogenous Inequality

The marginalisation of the feminine is apparent not only in relation to language but also in cultural attitudes towards the sexual organs themselves. A large penis is equated with potency and sexual prowess: 'size matters' has become a cliche, though it is still perceived as an index of masculinity by men. Phrases such as 'well hung' maintain the male obsession with penis size, and John Holmes became one of the world's most famous porn stars thanks to his fourteen-inch erection.

Size and the female reproductive organs, however, have a reversed relationship. A large vagina is seen as indicative of copious copulation, prompting accusations of prostitution or nymphomania. Or, as Germaine Greer puts it: "The best thing a cunt can be is small and unobtrusive: the anxiety about the bigness of the penis is only equalled by the anxiety about the smallness of the cunt. No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horse-collar" (1970[a]). Corrective surgery - namely a laser vaginal rejuvenation operation - is available in such circumstances, to make "the vaginal canal smaller and the opening of the vagina smaller" (Nicola Black, 2002), whereas male genital surgery serves to enlarge the organ rather than reduce it.

Crude terms such as 'big cunt', 'bushel cunt', 'bucket cunt', 'cow-cunt', 'double-cunted', and 'sluice-cunted', cited by Matthew DeAbaitua, equate dilation with repulsion: "Here, the rule is to imply the owner of the vulva is unhygienic; that it has sustained so much sex it has lost its shape" (1998). Thus, alongside the linguistic suppression of 'cunt', the vagina is also physically suppressed. There are inescapable biological reasons for this, namely that the penis is an external organ whereas the vagina is an internal one, and therefore the penis is naturally the more visible of the two. There is, however, a cultural emphasis placed upon this difference that acts to reinforce and extend it.

The bulging male groin ('lunchbox') is identified as sexually attractive, whereas women are encouraged not to emphasise their groins but to camouflage them: "the vagina is a culturally obscure little organ. Phallic references and penis jokes litter daily discourse, whereas vulval imagery is seemingly limited to pornography" (Joanna Briscoe, 2003). The male codpiece's exaggeration of penile protrusion can be contrasted with female chastity belts that lock away the vagina.

Excessive female pubic hair (the 'bikini line') is shaved, to render the area indistinguishable from any other part of the body: "If we do receive any information about the triangle between our legs, it is almost entirely negative; the multi-million-pound beauty industry encourages us to remove it for aesthetic reasons [because] it draws attention to the unremarkable-looking female genital area, making it stand out[.] Almost all sexualised images of women show them totally shaved, from pornography to paintings of Venus in high art" (Dea Birkett, 2003). The most severe, and painful, example of pubic shaving is the "humbling and hideous" 'Brazilian' wax (Mimi Spencer, 2003).

The physical differences between the male and female sexual organs are central to Sigmund Freud's theory of penis envy. This is the notion that a girl perceives her clitoris to be the result of her castration, and, faced with what Freud terms an "inferiority" (1924), develops a desire for the visible, external symbols of virility possessed by men. Joan Smith answers this with the proposition that "it's time to start talking, pace Freud, about the terrible problems men have in overcoming their cunt envy" (1998), a timely riposte to Freudian phallocentricity.

Germaine Greer's key feminist text is titled The Female Eunuch, though accusations of penis envy serve merely to trivialise the feminist feeling of physical and linguistic marginalisation. The 'female eunuch' is symbolic of the desexed representation of the female sexual experience, rather than representing a literal desire for a male organ. Patriarchal marginalisation is not, therefore, a literal neutering of women, though it does generate this metaphorical effect; while the penis is exaggerated, the vagina is rendered subordinate. This is graphically illustrated by Tom Cruise's character in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, whose mantra is: "Respect the cock and tame the cunt" (1999).

Our environment is becoming increasingly saturated with sexual images, justified by the maxim 'sex sells'. This situation, which Brian McNair terms "The sexualization of the public sphere" (2002), predominantly involves images of women, appealing to heterosexual male desires at the expense of heterosexual female ones. Significantly, however, they represent a "tit-and-arse landscape" (Barbara Ellen, 2001), with the breasts and buttocks over-exposed and the genital area airbrushed away.

As Germaine Greer notes, these images are "poses which minimize the genital area" and "The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity" (1970[a]): the imagery may be sexualised yet it de-emphasises the vagina as an erogenous zone. Greer returned to the subject in The Whole Woman, her sequel to The Female Eunuch: "Male genitals are drawn on every wall, female genitals only on doctor's blotters[.] Though Freud makes much of the fact that boys' genitalia are visible and little girls' are not, mere invisibility cannot account for the absence of any imagery of the womb from our general culture [...] wombs are out of sight and out of mind" (1999).

Albert Ellis explains that this obsessive interest in breasts and buttocks and disinterest in the vagina is the result of subconscious displacement: "Males in our culture are so afraid of direct contact with female genitalia, and are even afraid of referring to these genitalia themselves; they largely displace their feelings to the accessory sex organs - the hips, legs, breasts, buttocks, et cetera - and they give these accessory organs an exaggerated interest and desirability" (1951). Germaine Greer's explanation is more direct: she blames the linguistic and cultural marginalisation of the vagina on "centuries of womb-fear" (1970[a]).

Cunt-Hatred: Fear & Loathing

Germaine Greer's term 'womb-fear' highlights the underlying reason for both the cultural suppression of the vagina and the linguistic suppression of 'cunt'. At the heart of the abusive impact of 'cunt', and the paranoid marginalisation of the vagina, is the implication that the female genitals are disgusting and fearsome. Andrea Dworkin writes despairingly of the "repulsion for women [...] directed especially against her genitals[.] It is a goose-stepping hatred of cunt. [...] For the male, the repulsion is sexually intense, genitally focused" (1987). Indeed, such is the level of disgust with the "monstrous female genitals" that, as Eric Partridge notes, the abusive term 'cunt face' is "even more insulting than the synonymous shit face" (1961) - the cunt is regarded as even more disgusting than excrement.

The reductive usage of 'cunt' as a term of unparalleled abuse reflects both a fear of the vagina and a misogynistic hatred of it. Slang terms such as 'dirtbox', 'claptrap', 'siffed-up cunt-hole', 'pox-ridden cunt', 'burning bower', 'burning passage', 'firelock', and 'fireplace' also reflect this, equating the vagina with disease (as 'clap', 'siff', and 'fire' refer to venereal infections), as does this example of underground pornographic prose by Ramona: "I kept licking and sucking on her cunt even though I knew it was riddled with the deadly curse of syphilis[.] I buried myself in Ilena's stinky snatch" (1998). The film Souffrances D'Un Oeuf Meutri depicts "[a] girl's pudenda seething with maggots" (Mike Wallington, 1970), and this barrack-room ballad, The Ballad Of Lupe, is equally unpleasant in its imagery:

"Down in Cunt Valley where the Red Rivers flow, [...]
maggots crawl out of [the] decomposed womb" (19--).

More poetic, though no less offensive, is this monologue from King Lear:

"Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the Gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiends':
There's hell, there's darkness, there is the sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding" (William Shakespeare, 1605).

Vaginal terms such as 'nasty', 'stink', 'stinkhole', 'smelly cunt', 'smelly pussy', 'slime hole', 'smell-hole', 'stinky cunt', 'stink-pit', 'something crawled in and died', 'dirty cunt', 'rotten crotch', and 'scabby cunt' equate the "sulphurous pit" with filth and dirt: "Inescapably, a woman's body incarnates shame, her genitals especially signifying dirt and death" (Andrea Dworkin, 1987). There are many traditional limericks that draw their imagery from "[the] filth down there, between the legs, in the hole":

'There was an old hooker from Grotten
Who plugged her diseased cunt with cotton';

'A scrofulous woman from Chester,
Said [her] front is beginning to fester';

'There was a young girl called Dolores,
Whose cunt was all covered in sores';

'There was a young novice called Bell
Who didn't like cunt all that well[.]
He just couldn't get used to the smell';

'An unwashed girl from the Klondike
[has] never been had,
'Cos her cunt has a smell very cod-like'.

Not only are vaginas demeaned as dirty and diseased, they are also literally demonised, regarded as hellish 'cunnus diaboli'. Barbara G Walker's feminist interpretation of classical mythology - The Woman's Encyclopedia Of Myths & Secrets - gives a detailed account of this: "women's genitals [were likened] to the "yawning" mouth of hell, though this was hardly original; the underworld gate had always been the yoni of Mother Hel[.] To Christian ascetics, Hell-mouth and the vagina drew upon the same ancient symbolism[,] as if [one] was being drawn into the womb and destroyed there" (1983). Andre Schwarz-Bart cites the expression "Wash your devil" ('wash your cunt') and young Ifaluk women at puberty are traditionally told of "the "devil" beneath [the] skirt" (Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, 1978). Slang terms for 'vagina' such as 'mark-of-the-beast' perpetuate this association, as in the drama Witchcraze: "you have the devil's mark on your cunt!" (James Kent, 2003).

Medusa, the female demon, is also evoked in vagina mythology, leading Orlan to display images of her vagina "[alongside Sigmund] Freud's text on the head of Medusa [which] read: 'At the sight of the vulva the devil himself flees[']" (1995). Elaine Showalter also cites Freud's equation of Medusa with a deadly vagina: "According to Freud, the decapitated head of Medusa with its snaky looks is a "genitalized head," an upward displacement of the sexual organs, so that the mouth stands for the vagina dentata, and the snakes for pubic hair. For men to unveil the Medusa is to confront the dread of looking at the female sexual organs" (1992).

Thus, the "fearsome female genitals" (Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, 1978) are repeatedly associated with diseases and foul smells, regarded as abject, disgusting organs, stinking and pox-ridden. Furthermore, they are also equated with demonic and satanic figures such as Medusa and the devil.

These misguided male associations perpetuate male anxiety about women's genitals, and thus also perpetuate the avoidance of them in male-dominated language and culture: "Men desire access to the vagina, but also fear it and are disgusted by it. They see it as a gaping maw, at times toothed, frighteningly insatiable. [...] It is when vaginas are accessible that they evoke disgust and horror in their own right. It is then that male fears make them monstrous, hellish, and vile, disgust-evoking places" (William Ian Miller, 1997).

We have seen how the word 'cunt' and the vagina itself - the signifier and the signified - are both suppressed in language and culture. They are associated with uncleanness ('cunt' as a 'dirty word' and the vagina as 'smelly'), and this false projection of abject qualities is rooted in a fear of "the demonic bodies of women" (Edward Shorter, 1982). Fundamentally, fear of the vagina leads to its symbolic and linguistic representations being suppressed and its physical characteristics being demonised. Censorship of 'cunt', obliteration of vaginal imagery, and association of vaginas with disease all stem from a primal fear of the vagina itself.

It Won't Bite: The Vagina Dentata

Central to the discussion of male cunt-hatred and womb-fear is the myth of the vagina dentata, meaning 'toothed vagina' and connoting the male castration complex, which in this instance is the fear that, once it has entered the vagina, the penis will be bitten off and consumed. The vagina dentata myth is the most potent symbol of male fear of the "dread of the female genital" (HR Hays, 1964).

There are several possible explanations for the persistence of the vagina dentata myth, all of which relate to male fears of symbolic post-coital death. Semen can be said to symbolise life, thus the release of semen into the vagina may represent the transference of life from the penis to the vagina. Likewise, when the penis has ejaculated and withdrawn from the vagina, its flaccid state is perhaps symbolic of death when contrasted with its pre-penetration tumescence. Also relevant here is the previously discussed notion of the vagina as a harbinger of disease: perceived infections contracted from the vagina are perhaps symbolic of death.

The fact that the vagina extracts semen, induces penile flaccidity, and is perceived as a source of disease, contributes to the vagina dentata myth, the fear of the vagina as a murderous, violent demon. More potent than any of these explanations, however, is the male castration complex: "The boy discovers the fear of castration [...] through the disappearance of his penis in coition" (Juliet Mitchell, 1974).

The reason men feel their penis threatened inside the vagina is that they regard the vagina as a displaced mouth, as demonstrated by the mediaeval French tale of a talking vagina, Du Chevalier Qui Fist Parler Les Cons (----). Vaginas and mouths are both denoted by lips, thus, by extension, men fear that they also share teeth: "Vulvas have labiae, "lips," and many men believed that behind the lips lie teeth" (Barbara G Walker, 1983). As the vagina is considered a displaced mouth, fears of the penis being bitten, eaten, or swallowed manifest themselves.

Barbara G Walker calls the vagina dentata "the classic symbol of men's fear of sex, expressing the unconscious belief that a woman may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse" (1983) and HR Hays explains that "the cleft between a woman's thigh is felt to be a castrating scissors" (1964). Andrea Dworkin evocatively encapsulates male apprehensions: "the death connected with sex is held to be the death of the penis, trapped in the castrating cave, the vagina" (1987).

The vagina dentata is an all-pervasive image of terror, occurring throughout ancient mythology. Catherine lackledge discusses it at length in her book The Story Of V: "For many the most powerful of all vaginal myths and superstitions, the vagina dentata is also, perhaps, the most common. Its prevalence around the globe is stunning. [...] sexual folklore seethes with stories of snapping vaginal teeth" (2003).

Blackledge's book was praised by several reviewers as the definitive study of the history of the vagina, though it ignores significant cultural landmarks such as Cuntpower Oz and The Vagina Monologues. In its approach to vaginal mythology it is equalled by Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy and eclipsed by Barbara G Walker's Women's Encyclopedia Of Myths & Secrets. The Dangerous Sex, by HR Hays, is a fascinating study of the negative attitudes towards women embodied in ancient mythology, though we must remember that men, too, have been mythologically demonised, as devils, ogres, giants, and bogeymen.

The vagina dentata myth has been appropriated in contemporary culture by the Dragon Ladies performance group, who wear costumes with gaping, fanged mouths over their crotches, "exaggerat[ing] and mutat[ing] the ordinary into something fantastic and mythological" (David Kerekes, 1998). Similarly, Kevin Maher notes that the film The Isle "climaxes with [a] prostitute inserting a handful of large newly threaded fishhooks into her vagina and yanking them down again, with naturally devastating results" (2003), and there is a "vagina monster" in the film Schramm (David Kerekes, 1994). The sexist comic Smut has a strip titled Guillo Tina, the name equating the female character with a deadly blade, as in the figure of Mme Guillotine during the French Revolution: "SHE HAD A GUILLOTINE FOR A VAG" (200-). The most direct modern appropriation of the myth is that of the post-feminist 'riot grrrl' zine titled Vaginal Teeth.

The spectre of the vagina dentata is also evident in much of our contemporary slang vocabulary. Tim Healey cites 'fool's trap', 'venus fly trap', 'suck and swallow', 'fly cage', 'mousetrap', and 'cat' "that catches the mouse" (1980), a lexicon of metaphors which presents the vagina as a place of no escape. Similarly, James McDonald cites 'dumb glutton', 'biter', and 'vicious circle' as "expressions which humorously disguise an element of male apprehension about the vagina" (1988). Jonathon Green writes that "male fear and even hatred of the vagina persists unabated: emotions that are faithfully reflected in slang" (1993), citing examples such as 'snatch', 'snatch-blatch', 'snatch box', 'vacuum', 'sperm-sucker', 'wastepipe', 'fool trap', 'fly-catcher', 'bite', 'snapper', 'snapping turtle', 'carnal-trap', 'mangle', 'manhole', 'man-trap', 'prick-skinner', 'eel-skinner', 'eel-trap', 'mouse-trap', and 'skin-the-pizzle'. The perception here is of the vagina as a dangerous organ that will trap, snap, swallow, skin, or otherwise incapacitate the penis. Other examples include 'bite', 'beaver-trap', and 'man-entrapment', and Jane Mills cites 'snatch' as "at first meaning bite [thus associating] the vagina with a snapping jaw" (1989).

Cunt Shows & Cunt-Power

Male abuse of the word 'cunt' is compounded by male control of the reproduction of cunts in visual form, namely the pornography industry. Inspired by feminist critiques of pornography, some women have become proactive in creating and distributing pro-feminist porn, and are confounding male expectations by turning full-frontal exhibitions of the vagina into acts of empowerment. More traditional feminists, who cannot bring themselves to use either the vagina or the word 'cunt' as positive tools of empowerment, do not share these attitudes.

The most outspoken anti-porn feminist is Andrea Dworkin, who views 'cunt' as "the most reductive word" and sees porn as "the debasing of women" (1981). By contrast, Deborah Orr contends that "exposure of female bodies has been transmogrified into an expression of female freedom and power" (2000).

Female sexual assertiveness has a long history, though perhaps its most influential personification is Madonna, who appropriates the conventional tropes of male fantasy (posing naked for her book Sex and wearing a conical bra) yet does so for her own pleasure, subverting the expectations of her straight male audience: "In our society, a woman who is overtly sexual is considered a venomous bitch, or someone to be feared. So what I like to do is [to] take the traditional [...] overtly sexual [...] image and turn it around, and say, 'Well, yes, I can dress this way, or I can behave this way, but I'm in charge'" (Omnibus, 1990). With the names of her 'Slutco' video company and 'Siren' film company, Madonna also reappropriated two negative feminine terms, and her What It Feels Like For A Girl promo features an "OL KUNTZ" sign punning on 'old cunts' (2000).

This post-feminist sexual provocation, analysed by Brian McNair in Striptease Culture, has specifically increased the cultural visibility of the vagina, counteracting the sexist tits-and-ass landscape discussed earlier. Annie Sprinkle, in a performance entitled Public Cervix Announcement, allowed members of the public to crouch between her open legs and view her vulva. Sprinkle was attempting to remove the stigmas of fear and ignorance attached to the vagina: "One reason why I show my cervix is to assure the misinformed, who seem to be primarily of the male population, that neither the vagina nor the cervix contains any teeth[.] Lots of folks, both men and women, know very little about female anatomy and so we are ashamed and/or afraid of the cervix. That's sad, so I do my best to lift that veil of ignorance" (1998).

Heavily influenced by the Public Cervix Announcement were Orlan and Diamond Lil, who also presented their vaginas as performance art. Whereas Sprinkle's performance constituted a series of intimate and interactive moments in which each audience-member would encounter her cunt on an individual basis, Orlan and Lil used mirrors and magnification to display their cunts to audiences collectively. For her Amazing Cunt Show (2001), Lil used a mirrored box to give audiences a view of her cunt, and Orlan used a magnifying glass to display her vagina.

In the 1960s, Fluxus artist Shigeko Kubota performed Vaginal Painting, for which she held a paintbrush between the lips of her vagina and painted whilst squatting over a canvas. A decade later, Carolee Schneemann unravelled a scroll of paper from her vagina and read from it, in a performance titled Interior Scroll. This directly inspired Babe, during her concerts with Rockbitch, to pull a rolled-up sheet from her vagina on which was written a speech celebrating 'cunt': "it's not disgusting. It's not shameful. It's fucking beautiful" (Hull, 2003).

The sole male equivalent of these performances is Puppetry Of The Penis, in which penises are manipulated into unusual shapes. This genital origami is clearly a comedy act, however, whereas Annie Sprinkle and the others had a serious agenda. This division between comedy and seriousness applies not just to the performances mentioned here but also to general attitudes towards male and female genitalia. Whereas male genitals are seen as mildly amusing (with jokes about one-eyed trouser-snakes, for instance), vaginas inspire only loathing and fear, with any jokes about them confined to misogynistic references to disease or dirt.

Directly confronting this loathing and fear, Germaine Greer edited an issue of Oz in which she extolled the virtues of cunt-power, her manifesto of female sexual empowerment. The issue was introduced with the words "Welcome to Cuntpower Oz" (1970[b]), though its title was officially Female Energy Oz. It included light-hearted elements, such as a "cunt-thatch woollen bikini" (1970[d]), though its most important feature was Greer's editorial, The Politics Of Female Sexuality.

Greer exposed the systematic cultural sublimation of female sexuality, and specifically the sublimation of the vagina: "One of the chief mechanisms in the suppression of female humanity is the obliteration of female sexuality. [...] In order that the pork sword might be seen to rule the world unchallenged, women obligingly hid their sex, at first with a hand [though later the] devices for minimising the organs of femaleness became more sophisticated; women began to wear knickers, then to deodorise their genitals, douche them, shave them, pluck them. Modesty rotted their innocence. They learned to prize smallness, inaccessibility. Their rich juices were prevented from flowing" (1970[c]).

Greer's solution was to foster an awareness of the positive power and significance of 'cunt', the word and the organ: "Revolutionary women may join Women's Liberation Groups [...] but did you ever hear of one of them marching the public street with her skirt high crying 'Can you dig it? Cunt is beautiful!' The walled garden of Eden was CUNT. The mandorla of the beatified saints was CUNT. The mystical rose is CUNT. The Ark of Gold, the Gate of Heaven. Cunt is a channel drawing all towards it. Cunt is knowledge. Knowledge is receptivity, which is activity. Cunt is the symbol of erotic science, the necessary corrective of the maniacal conquest of technology. Skirts must be lifted, knickers (which women have only worn for a century) must come off forever. It is time to dig CUNT and women must dig it first. [...] The only [words women] may employ have been deformed by centuries of sadistic male use. You CUNT, gash, slit, crack, slot... Women have no names of their own for what is most surely their own. It ought to be possible to establish a women's vocabulary of cunt, prideful, affectionate, accurate and bold".

Honing her theme in an essay titled Lady Love Your Cunt (1971[a]), Greer further clarified the problem of vaginal oppression: "Primitive man feared the vagina[.] It looks bad. Shave it. Pluck it. Cover it with your hand[.] It smells bad. Wash it. Scour it. Douche it. DEODORIZE it. It tastes bad. Wash it some more. It's sloppy. Mop it. It's dry. Lubricate it. The language of pornography is full of cunt-hatred. [...] If you doubt that the cunt is hated and feared by most of the population, how will you explain the hundreds of pounds spent in persuading women that they have an intimate deodorant problem? [Women are told] that cunts smell bad, not just when dirty or menstruating, but all the time".

As The Politics Of Female Sexuality had called for "a women's vocabulary of cunt", Lady Love Your Cunt likewise demanded: "we must regain the power of the cunt. CUNT IS BEAUTIFUL. [...] Give it your own loving names, not the fictions of anatomy books, or the condescending diminutives that men use [...] or the epithets of hate[.] What we need is a genuinely descriptive terminology of cunt".

Cunt-power as a feminist movement was initiated by Greer in 1969, in her "first-ever cunt-power piece" (1986), an open letter to John Gorton: "cunt power is black, baby, black, and it's my cunt is telling me to write this letter, white man. [...] One day the women of the world will fill their cunts with razor blades for the likes of you". Many years later, she memorably persuaded an embarrassed Jonathan Dimbleby to say 'cunt' on live television: "try to say it! It'll do you good!" (Sheree Folkston, 1991), a tactic later employed by Whoopi Goldberg in Boys On The Side.

Greer also co-edited the porn magazine Suck in the early 1970s, and asked of her female readers: "WHY NOT SEND US A PHOTOGRAPH OF YOUR OWN CUNT, WITH YOUR NAME LABELED ON?" (1971[a]), thus she can be credited not only with the origination of cunt-power (both the term itself and its philosophy) but also as one of the inspirations for the liberating exhibitionism of Annie Sprinkle, Orlan, and Diamond Lil. The ultimate origin of vagina exhibitionism, however, is the ancient custom of skirt-raising, a method of warding off negativity: Catherine Blackledge discusses the phenomenon of The Catalytic Cunt, presenting exposure of the vagina as "an effective catalyst in dispelling a sombre mood or static state" (2003).

Cuntlovin': Reclaiming Cunt

The embracing of pornographic imagery by liberal feminists such as Germaine Greer was fundamentally an attempt to utilise the vagina as a symbol of female empowerment. The vagina is marginalised by social phallocentricity, and this is subverted by feminist attempts to increase its visibility in such a way that control is maintained of both the organ itself and the reproduction of its image.

The vagina is also, in the form of the word 'cunt', employed as a tool of linguistic misogyny, and it is here that radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin reveal their truly illiberal ideology. Dworkin employs male terminology by referring to porn models as 'cunts' and 'whores', whilst simultaneously noting the reductivist implications of the words. This reminds us of the cruelty inherent in male usage of the terms, though it also appears defeatist, seeming to wallow in the injustice of the status quo. Jeanette Winterson even equates pornographic modelling with "being turned into a stupid cunt" (2000); she seemingly feels so betrayed by such women that, startlingly and regressively for a feminist writer, she resorts to unironic and abusive usage of the ne plus ultra of linguistic misogyny.

'Cunt', deemed a "vile insult" by Joan Smith (1998), unequivocally "tops the tree [of offence]" according to Matthew DeAbaitua (1998), and, while radical feminists cling to its abusive male sense, an increasingly influential liberal feminist campaign, gathering momentum since the cunt-power days of the 1970s, seeks to reclaim it as a term of endearment. Thus, Minnie Bruce Pratt sees 'cunt' as "the universe reduced to one part of a woman's body, cursed on the street" though also as "[a] word caught and caged" (1995), implying that reappropriation of the word will remove its reductivism and simultaneously uncage it.

The earliest recorded female reappropriation of 'cunt' is surely that of the Wyf of Bathe in Geoffrey Chaucer's Tales Of Caunterbury (1400): "she is certainly remarkably free in thought and speech, given the general constraints on women of her status in the Middle Ages. Indeed, the broadness of her language makes her virtually unique as a literary figure in her times" (Geoffrey Hughes, 1991). A bawdy and down-to-earth character who espouses the power women can gain over men through sex, she assures her betrothed:

"For certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve,
Ye shul have queynte right y-nough at eve".

'Queynte' should be seen not as a 'cunt' euphemism but rather as a phonetic variant, retaining the bluntness of its source. The Wyf is sometimes more coy, notably when she creates a new context for the term 'quoniam':

"And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me,
I had the beste quoniam mighte be".

'Quoniam' is Latin for 'whereas', and is used here euphemistically to mean 'whatsit' or 'thingy': she is boasting that she has the best 'whatsit' ('cunt') in Bath. As James Winny writes, "The Wife is understandably pleased to repeat this basic complement. Her Latin euphemism quoniam [...] is probably used for its alliterative likeness to the blunter term she has previously used" (1965).

Several contemporary feminists have followed the Wyf's example, challenging male monopolisation of sexual discourse and seeking specifically to reappropriate the word 'cunt' itself, "reinvesting [it] with a more positive meaning" (Deborah Cameron, 1985) to counteract its "anachronistic slur on female sexuality" (Joan Smith, 1998). 'Cunt positive' writer Jane Mills explains that she is keen to reclaim the word: "to use the word 'cunt' in a positive way, to say 'Right, this is a sexual organ, and we're proud of it', would be no bad thing" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). Whoopi Goldberg's character in Boys On The Side also advocates reappropriation: "I have to hear you say it! Oh, come on. C-u-n-t, go on, please! Please! It'll free you!" (Herbert Ross, 1995). This encouragement prompts Mary-Louise Parker's character first to whisper "Cunt" and then to shout and sing it aloud.

Eve Ensler, who has said that "c[unt] has the possibility to be a great word" (Andrew Goldman, 1999), wrote The Vagina Monologues, adapted from interviews she conducted with women about their vaginas. The Monologues include a poem called Reclaiming Cunt (1996) that "play[s] around with [the word,] tak[ing] the different letters of the word and break[ing] down the sound of it with colours and images" (Richard Brooks, 1999). Ensler has certainly turned 'vagina' and 'cunt' into buzzwords, though this begs the question: why celebrate the word 'vagina' when, as discussed earlier, it is a word she so dislikes? (Perhaps she should call it 'The Cunt Monologues' instead?)

Ensler's ability to encourage an entire audience to chant 'Cunt!' makes for an entertaining evening at the theatre: "The entire auditorium conjoins in a mass chant, reclaiming 'cunt' [which is] a detested word in most female vocabulary. [Ensler] demonstrated how it was only vulgar because of the way we associated it largely due to male usage of the term. As a result of this re-education, most of the audience were not embarrassed when they were asked to shout it out" (Natalie Ingham and Jonathan Haynes, 2002).

However, many women have problems with the central message of the Monologues. Ensler seems to feel that women should be defined solely by their vaginas ("Your vagina is the story of your life", 2001), yet this is, unwittingly, dangerously close to the sexist, reductivist notion that the vagina is the only significant part of a woman: "by talking about their vaginas as if they were defined by them alone, women are in danger of objectifying and fetishising their bodies as much as men" (Barbara Ellen, 2001). Thus, Ensler's concentration on the vagina has been interpreted as regressive: "Actually, the struggles of the past 40 years have been an attempt to show that we are so much more than just cunts" (Lynn Gardner, 2001).

The Reclaiming Cunt poem itself is flawed because, in it, Ensler seeks to extract a non-existent erotic potential from the harsh phonetic components of the word: "C C, Ca Ca [...] ugh, ugh, u [...] n-, cun, cun, then t [...] tell me, tell me "Cunt cunt," say it" (1996). Her moans of pleasure when enunciating the individual letters do not convince: "The attempt to reclaim and beautify the word 'cunt' is embarrassing" (Kate Kellaway, 2001[b]). This problematic beautification is redeemed, however, by Ensler's subsequent conversational examples of reclamation ("did you just call me a cunt? Thank-you so much!", 1996), which are far more persuasive.

The most grating element of the Monologues is Ensler's self-congratulatory hyperbole regarding the show's impact. It seems as if she "believes she has been mystically called upon to enlighten us" (Catherine Bennett, 2001), as, for example, when she begins her introduction to the show by saying "I am not sure why I was chosen" (2001). Gillian Anderson's comment, "Eve Ensler is the Pied Piper. She's leading women and the world to a different consciousness of the essence of women" (Kate Kellaway, 2001[a]), is the apogee of this vagina hyperbole.

Perhaps more provocatively, Inga Muscio has written Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence, a manifesto of linguistic change in which she calls 'cunt' "a venerable ally in my war against oppression" (1998). Writing 'cunt' with a capital 'C' as a mark of status and respect, she foresees an end to the word's negative connotations: "When viewed as a positive force in the language of women - as well as a reference to the power of the anatomical jewel which unites us all - the negative power of Cunt falls in upon itself". She sees it as a source of unity for womankind: "we are suddenly equipped with a word that brings all women together [...] besides global subjugation, Cunts are the only common denominators I can think of which women irrefutably share".

Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence is a personal account, drawing on riot grrrl influences, of issues relating to women's bodies (menstruation, contraception, prostitution, and rape). Thus, chapters include Blood & Cunts, Reproductive Control For Cunts, Orgasms From Cunts, Acrimony Of Cunts, and Rape Not Cunts. It ends with a list of further reading titled Cuntlovin' Guide To The Universe. Muscio also devotes sections to topics such as Cuntlovin' Ovulation Alert, Cuntjuices, Misc. Cuntlovin' Enterprises, Cuntlovin' Consumerism, and Cuntlovin' Investment Portfolio. Furthermore, she coins terms such as "Cuntlovin' Public Retaliation", "Cuntlovin' Women's Art Movement", "Cuntlovin' Women's Economic System", "cuntdreams", and "cuntlove".

Clearly, 'cuntlovin'', namely women's respect for their own bodies, is Muscio's major theme. She proclaims herself to be "the Cuntlovin' Ruler of My Sexual Universe", and is clearly eager to reclaim 'cunt' (she has fun imagining it as a "Raging Cunt" monster-truck, and distributes Cunt stickers), though unfortunately she devotes very little space to the word itself. Instead, she uses it merely as a segue into a long account of her sexual self-exploration.

Muscio's cuntlovin' philosophy, and Germaine Greer's Lady Love Your Cunt essay, written almost twenty years previously, inspired a group called Ladies Art Revival to distribute knickers bearing the slogan I Love My Cunt An online shop, Cafe Press, sells tee-shirts, mouse mats, boxer shorts, mugs, bags, and caps also emblazoned with I Love My Cunt (all by Cuntlove, 199-); it also retails a similar range of C.U.N.T. tee-shirts, mugs, boxer shorts, and caps by Trailervision.

Whereas Germaine Greer, Eve Ensler, and Inga Muscio seek to alter the meaning of 'cunt', transforming it from a negative word into a positive one, Kathy Acker and Jane Gallop highlight the word's harshness by employing it repetitiously and forcefully. Acker recreates masculine usage of it, using exaggeration to draw attention to its misogynism. The first part of her novel Algeria is titled CUNT, and chapter titles include CUNT, The Next Crazy CUNT, and A CUNT Does Not Belong To Any Man.

Acker replaces each of her female characters' names with "THE CUNT" and "it", the substitutions drawing attention to male objectification of women: "There is no such thing as a woman. Henceforth a woman is A CUNT" (1984). The viciousness of the term is revealed by her deliberate over-use of it. For example, she writes about the suicide of her mother: "THE CUNT ate at the most expensive restaurants in New York[.] It stole money and jewelry from THE CUNT its mother[.] THE CUNT'S THE CUNT mother had made two million by marrying a rich man when it was thirty years old. On Monday THE CUNT asked THE CUNT its mother for money. THE CUNT mother refused. Now THE CUNT had driven itself as close to suicide as it could get[.] In the hotel room THE CUNT ate down all its Librium and died". By harshly objectifying her mother in this way, she reveals the cruel impact of similar male objectifications.

There are also more light-hearted methods of reclamation. Comediennes Jenny Eclair and Jackie Clune, for example, both use 'cunt' openly in their stand-up routines, their "liberal use of the word indicat[ing] that its novelty hasn't quite worn off" (Fiona Sturges, 2001). In her show Bland Ambition, Lucinda Cowden combines comedy with feminist theory. This culminates in a celebratory 'cunt' monologue in which she discusses her positive usage of the word: "I use it a lot. I really enjoy the word, actually[.] I've got one, so why the hell can't I say it? You know, men are allowed to talk about their dicks [so] why aren't girls allowed to say 'cunt'?" (2001). Her performance concludes with a song called I'm Just A Girl Who Can Say Cunt:

"I'm just a girl who can say 'cunt';
People all look at me strange.
Soon as I say that naughty word,
They think that I'm deranged. [...]
I think it's just my style -
I do say 'cunt'!".

Zoe Williams criticises "People who object to the word cunt" (2001): "Get over it. Just because it makes a cute Anglo-Saxon explosive noise doesn't mean it's any worse than, say, willy". Lisa Jardine "used to be offended by the word cunt, but not any more[.] For years it has been fine to call the male genitalia by names, but not the female ones. It should change" (Richard Brooks, 1999). Similarly, Natasha Richardson is "not offended by ['cunt'] at all" (Andrew Goldman, 1999) and Kate Moss is surprised that "People don't like the word". Kathy Lette seeks a reclamation of its original anatomical usage: "The c-word is only offensive when used derogatively. We can live with 'cunt' if we get equal pay", and Joan Smith reveals that "some of my friends use it quite deliberately when they talk about their own bodies. This is [an] effective way of removing its sting [...] and it makes me wonder what the lads will do if we succeed in taking away their worst insult" (1998).

Con & Cunt: A Case Study

Like Kathy Acker, Jane Gallop also emphasises the misogyny of 'cunt' by suffusing her writing with it, graphically demonstrating that, even within masculine discourse, the feminine retains a presence. She takes her cue from the appearance of the French term 'con' as an English prefix, replacing 'con' with 'cunt' to create "cuntvince [...] cuntaminates [...] cuntdemnable [...] cuntfiguration [...] cuntjunction [...] cuntstruction [and] cuntcerted" (1982). Aided by the alternate French spelling 'com', she also creates the hybrid "cuntprehending", and, tracing the suffix 'centric' back to the Greek 'kentrein' ('to prick'), she converts 'concentric' into 'cuntprick'.

Gallop was surely inspired by William Shakespeare, who also realised that an abundance of 'con' prefixes can have vaginal overtones. In Cymbeline (1611), a character mentions "confounded one the other [...] 'Twas a contention [...] without contradiction" within the space of only a few lines, and, compounding the allusion, the character is identified only by his nationality - he is French. A similar instance appears in Henry The Fift, when Burgundy uses another set of 'con' prefixes in suspiciously close proximity: "conjure in her [...] a hard condition for a maid to consign to. [...] I will wink on her to consent" (1599). Shakespeare also uses 'conceit' as a 'cunt' pun, in The Taming Of The Shrew (1596):

"take up my mistress' gown for thy master's use!"
Why, sir, what's your conceit in that?"
"O, sir, the conceit is deeper than you think".

Shakespeare evokes 'cunt' in Othello, with 'continuate':

"I shall in a more continuate time
Strike off this score of absence" (1622);

and in Henry The Eight he uses 'confessor' to similar effect:

"O, that your lordship were but now confessor
To one or two of these!" (1613).

The opening lines of his Sonnet CLI also utilise 'con' as a pun on 'cunt':

"Love is too young to know what conscience is;
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?" (1609).

Stephen Clark has described these lines as an "erotic charge of phonetic decomposition", and he traces the pun in "conscience" to "'con-science', 'con-sense', 'cunt-sense'" (1995).

'Con' is used in its literal French sense as a slang term for 'vagina' in the mediaeval Du Chevalier Qui Fist Parler Les Cons and Louis Aragon's Le Con D'Irene ("I'm granting you a glance at Irene's cunt. O delicate cunt of Irene", 1928). However, whilst it does mean 'vagina', it is used far more commonly in France as a term of gentle mockery. It does not convey the same vehemence or taboo as 'cunt': "['con'] is quite acceptable and doubles in normal conversation for 'idiot'" (Graeme Donald, 1994).

Thus, Francis Veber's play and film Le Diner De Cons (1998), concerning a dinner party for idiots, translates not as 'The Dinner Of Cunts' but 'The Dinner Of Fools'; likewise, Roland Lethem's Bande De Cons! (1970) translates as 'Band Of Fools!' and Gerard Lauzier's Petit Con (1984) is 'Little Fool'. To avoid confusion, Le Diner De Cons was released in Britain as The Dinner Game, and, in his article Con Trick, Peter Bradshaw comments on the translated title: "cunt isn't quite right[.] Its direct aggression, for so many the terminus of the Insult Line, does not generally convey the distinctly comic sense of con" (1999). In the film's English subtitles, 'con' is rendered inconsistently as 'asshole', 'dumbo', 'idiot', 'dummy', 'jerk', and 'dolt'; the subtitles for the earlier French film A Bout De Souffle translate it as 'son-of-a-bitch'.

When Le Diner De Cons was adapted for the stage in England, it was titled See You Next Tuesday (2002), a reference to 'cunt' which therefore preserves the literal meaning of the original French title. Publicity material for the play styled it 'See U Next Tuesday', to make the allusion even clearer, although the word 'cunt' never actually occurs in the play's dialogue. Instead, the central premise is defined as "A dinner for twats" (Ronald Harwood, 2002), with 'twat' (slang for 'vagina', thus a literal synonym for 'con') used consistently throughout.

Andrew Sisson, in his rather xenophobic essay Is French A Sexist Language?: Doing Cunteries In France, discusses the Gallic ubiquity of 'con': "In France nowadays, it is fashionable to call everybody a 'cunt'. Yes, a cunt, or con, meaning a stupid or dumb person of either sex. [...] Con is not an insult in our English sense. For us to call someone a 'cunt' or a 'dumb cunt' constitutes a crude sexist remark [b]ut most of the younger French who call each other con are apparently unaware of this fact" (199-). Sisson cites 'cawn' as an Anglicised pronunciation of 'con' and also mentions the extended version "fait des conneries [literally] 'To make cunteries', meaning 'to do stupid things'". Other words created with the addition of 'cunt' prefixes include "cuntiousness-raising" (Marianna Beck, 1998), "cuntspiritualising" (Cindy Patton, 1999), and "cuntionary" (Henry Beard & Christopher Cerf, 1992).

The Difficulties Of Reappropriation

The purpose of the reappropriation of 'cunt' is to reclaim it as a neutral or even positive anatomical term, replacing its persistently pejorative male usage. This is to return 'cunt' to its original status, to revert to its pre-taboo usage. The word's power can only be maintained so long as its taboo is maintained: "reappropriation by feminists may slacken its bite in time" (Mark Irwin, 2001[a]). Male usage of 'cunt' has created a climate of fear and disgust around the word, however, and the freeing of it from these associations is not an easy process: "The history of the C-word means that reclaiming the word will be an uphill struggle" (Rhonda Pietrin, 2001).

For Andrea Dworkin, 'cunt' is an inherently violent word, and is symptomatic of society's inherent misogyny. She argues forcefully that 'cunt' cannot be successfully reclaimed until the general hatred of women is removed from society: "There have been radical efforts to make malignant words take on an innocent or benign meaning [however] the meaning[s] did not change. Change requires a change in power relations, a redistribution of power, an equality of worth that is socially true. The meaning of words that express derision of inferiors does not change [...] unless the hate and power they signify change[s.] Dirty words stay dirty because they express a hate for [...] women's genitals" (1987).

Dworkin's vehement opposition to reappropriation seems, as discussed earlier, defeatist and even self-pitying (as she highlights social misogyny yet denies women the capacity to change it). Furthermore, she declares that men who use 'cunt' in positive contexts are merely compounding their inherent misogyny - "Worshipping "cunt" and hating women [are] not, in real life, exactly distinguishable" - and, given my position, I find myself in considerable disagreement with her argument here.

The reappropriation of 'cunt' has not been widely accepted by women, as Jane Mills admits: "I can't go 'round saying 'cunt' all the time on my own, it doesn't go down very well!" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). The extent of our 'cunt' taboo has overshadowed its reappropriation. Since the cunt-power sexual liberalism of the 1970s, reappropriation has been repeatedly called for, though it is yet to be widely accepted, either by women or men. Inga Muscio has built upon the work of the previous generation, though she also covers the same ground, as her predecessors did not have a widespread impact. As she herself admits, she does not expect "to pluck on the heartstrings of [...] All Women" (1998).

Germaine Greer, despite her passionate advocation of cunt-power, regretfully acknowledged that, thirty years later, the word's pejorative potential remained undiluted: "Nothing that any[body] can call anybody is worse than the word 'cunt'" (1999). She even confessed to the failure of cunt-power to garner sufficient support: "Cunt-power as I defined it has still to manifest itself". For Linda Grant, cunt-power was theoretically enlightening though practically impossible: "The Cunt Power revolution would have required a massive realignment of our culture, our history, our mythology, our art" (1993).

Indeed, during the supposedly 'liberated' 1960s, even the avant-garde was perceived as phallocentric: Carolee Schneemann described herself as a 'cunt mascot' (a 'token female'), and felt that her sexually explicit performances were misinterpreted as pure titillation. It remains the case that most women "find the c-word very, very objectionable" (Sasha Baron-Cohen, 1999) and "by and large, are not fond of using it" (Andrew Goldman, 1999): as a lexical weapon in the battle of the sexes, 'cunt' is still used to wound women rather than to empower them.

Cunt-Art

'Cunt' has been reclaimed not only by feminist writers but also by feminist artists. Indeed, an American cunt-art movement emerged from the Womanhouse collective of Fresno State College in the early 1970s. Cunt-art was initiated by Womanhouse artist Judy Chicago, who painted Star Cunts (1968), The Cunt As Temple Tomb Cave Or Flower (1974), and Entering The Mystery Through The Blue Rock Cunt (1974). Like Germaine Greer, she seeks to promote both the word 'cunt' and the vagina itself, using a variety of media (such as embroidery and porcelain) to create vaginal imagery.

Chicago's play Cock & Cunt (1970) confronts male and female power-relations, through the two archetypal characters 'He' and 'She'. He refuses to help She wash the dishes: "a cock means you don't wash dishes. You have a cunt. A cunt means you wash dishes"; She replies: "I don't see where it says that on my cunt". She is thus fated to be "defined by the fact that [she has] a cunt" (Andrea Juno and V Vale, 1991).

Chicago cites social patriarchy as amongst her reasons for employing 'cunt' in her art: "I use the word 'cunt' deliberately, for it involves society's contempt for women. In turning the word around, I hope to turn society's definition of the female around and make it positive instead of negative. Because I had a cunt, I was despised by society [...] I was trying to affirm my own femaleness and my own power and thus implicitly challenge male superiority" (Pat Caplan, 1987).

Her contemporary, Faith Wilding, reveals how Chicago inspired her: "In her efforts to explore female sexual imagery Chicago was now working with us in the studio, making a cut paper "cunt alphabet." This inspired the idea of doing images of "cunts" - defiantly subversive, and fun, because "cunt" signified to us an awakened consciousness about our bodies and our sexual selves" (1994). Chicago's work, along with that of other feminist artists, has been exhibited under the collective title Female Imagery: The Politics Of Cunt Art, and her influence is discussed by Amelia Jones in Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party In Feminist Art History.

Also at Womanhouse, Cay Lang, Vanalyne Green, Dori Atlantis, and Sue Boud posed as Cunt Cheerleaders in 1970, each with a pink outfit emblazoned with, respectively, 'C', 'U', 'N', and 'T'. There have been many other works influenced by Chicago and the Womanhouse group. Karen LeCocq's Feather Cunt (1971) is a silk sheet forming an oval, surrounded by a feather boa. Tee Corinne's Cunt Coloring Book (1975) is a collection of drawings of women's cunts to be coloured in (similar in style to Tom Wesselmann's Shaved Cunt pencil drawing from 1966). Mira Schnor's painting "Cunt" (1993) uses quotation marks to anchor the image as signifier rather than signified. Millie Wilson's Wig/Cunt (1990) juxtaposes drawings of Regency wigs with anatomical drawings of vaginas, highlighting the visual similarity of the two. "Bluntly spelling out the word cunt rather than attempting to symbolise it in visual form" (Amelia Jones, 1995) is Marlene McCarthy's CUNT (1990).

Tracey Emin's CV: Cunt Vernacular (1997) is a video of her describing the abuse she has suffered at the hands of men, and her No Chance is a patchwork of slogans including "THEY WERE THE UGLY CUNTS" (1999). For Weird Sex (2002), she embroidered "I'm Going to Get you, You Cunt You Bastard" and "YOUR BRAINS A FIRST CLASS CUNT" onto a pink sheet and hand-wrote it onto a canvas, the masculine harshness of the language contrasting with the symbolically feminine applique and colour scheme. She used the word more positively, however, in her neon sign My Cunt Is Wet With Fear (1998), and Suzanne Cotter notes correctly that "The force of Emin's art lies in her uncompromising use of language" (2002).

The other significant artistic appearances of 'cunt' come in the works of Gilbert & George. Their Dirty Words series (1977) - including Cunt, Cunt Scum, and Bent Shit Cunt - is a study of "aggressive and brutally coarse" (Wolf Jahn, 1989) linguistic abuse, utilising the graffiti they encountered. This graffiti is a realistic representation of the intolerance of modern society; A Magazine Sculpture: George The Cunt & Gilbert The Shit (1969), however, has no such legitimising context, and its derogatory epithets reflect "[a] schoolboyish sense of mischief and the wish to shock" (Daniel Farson, 1991). That same impulse to shock prompted Jake and Dinos Chapman to produce their grotesque child-mannequins with erect penises for noses and deliberately offensive titles, castigated by Liz Hoggard: "while I'm as keen as the next woman to reclaim the C-word, titles such as Two Faced Cunt and Def Cunt are not encouraging" (2003). Two Faced Cunt (1995) is a freakish mannequin whose two heads are both joined at the cheek by a displaced vagina: "[a] simple embodiment of the abusive term - two faces and a cunt" (Mark Holborn, 2003).

The Dirty Words Pictures were not widely shown at first, though to mark their silver jubilee in 2002 they were regrouped and even reproduced as postcards. Like the Dirty Words, 'cunt' itself emerged from the censorship of the past to become commodified and omnipresent.

Censorship & The Cunt Taboo

Dating The Cunt Taboo

In some contexts, 'cunt' remained a socially acceptable word until very recently: "in rural areas [of England in the 1960s] the word was still being used as an ordinary everyday term, at least when applied to a cow's vulva" (James McDonald, 1988), although besides this location- and usage-specific example, 'cunt' has been the primary English language taboo for over five centuries. It was excluded from the Oxford English Dictionary until 1972.

'Cunt' was used medically by Lanfranc, who, in the early fifteenth century, wrote: "In wymmen [the] neck of [the] bladdre is schort, & is maad fast to the cunte" (14--). Two hundred years later, however, the 'cunt' taboo was firmly in place: Minsheu rendered it "Cu&c" ('Cu etc.', 1617) and John Fletcher resorted to "They write sunt with a C, which is abominable" (1622). It is not possible to unequivocally identify the date from which 'cunt' first became taboo, though we can use the available evidence to make a rational estimate.

Southwark's 'Gropecuntelane' dates from 1230, indicating that, at that time, the word may have been bawdy but was not obscene. Similarly, the earliest example of a 'cunt' surname is that of Godwin Clawecunte from 1066, and the latest is Bele Wydecunthe's from 1328. Lanfranc, writing one hundred years later, does not disguise the word, though Geoffrey Chaucer does.

Chaucer, in his Tales Of Caunterbury, employs the deliberately faux-archaic spelling 'queynte' (variants: 'queynt', 'qwaynt', 'quaynte', 'queinte', 'coynte', and 'coint'; modern spelling: 'queint') as a substitute for 'cunt'. Eric Partridge suggests that, to form 'queynte', "Chaucer may have combined Old French coing with Middle English cunte or he may have been influenced by the Old French cointe" (1931), though the simplest explanation is that he added the 'nte' mediaeval suffix of 'cunt' to the feminine 'qu' prefix.

Andrew Marvell uses similar literary camouflage in To His Coy Mistress, with a reference to "quaint honour" (1653):

"Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: the worms shall try
That long preserved virginity:
And your quaint honour turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust".

Three hundred and fifty years later, an If... cartoon by Steve Bell also disguised 'cunt', this time by rendering it as the faux-French "QUEURNT" (2003). Perhaps this comic example adds a new dimension to Chaucer's 'queynte', which can be seen as a similarly exoticised rendering of 'cunt'.

The Tales Of Caunterbury, which are full of more minor swearwords such as 'shit' and 'piss' though not the tabooed 'cunt' (except in disguised form), were written at the very end of the fourteenth century, thus it seems that 'cunt' was an acceptable term throughout the Middle Ages, becoming taboo during the late fourteenth century. Peter Fryer contends that "it has been avoided in written and polite spoken English since the fifteenth century" (1963). There was almost certainly a period of transition, during which the word's status gradually changed from acceptability to taboo, just as, five hundred years later, it is in transition again, from taboo to acceptability.

A Short History Of Swearing

The earliest recorded linguistic taboos are Middle English blasphemies such as ''slids' ('God's eyelids') and ''sfoot' ('God's foot'). It is interesting that these early curses were related to parts of God's body - the eyelids and feet - as contemporary swearing has become secularised though bodily taboos have remained: from eyelids and feet we have moved to erogenous zones such as 'cunt', 'cock', 'tits', and 'arse'.

Whilst the church exercised considerable power over society in the Middle Ages, its authority diminished following the Reformation of the sixteenth century. With this revolutionary iconoclasm came a reduction in the potency of religious profanity, thus, for example, the insulting term 'devil' was significantly weakened: "the first use of devil as 'merely a term of reprobation', sometimes playfully applied, [occurred] after the main ructions of the Reformation" (Geoffrey Hughes, 1991).

The transition from religious to secular swearing, reflecting the concurrent transition in society, changed the boundaries of linguistic taboo. Religious curses ('damn') were replaced by taboos relating to bodily functions such as sexual intercourse ('fuck') and excretion ('shit'). In the twentieth century, these in turn were joined by new taboos relating to 'politically incorrect' language, including homophobic ('queer'), sexist ('bitch'), and racist ('nigger') abuse.

In Swearing, his history of profanity, Geoffrey Hughes notes that "genital, copulatory, excretory and incestuous swearing" has now largely replaced religious oaths: "[the] great and obvious force behind most medieval swearing was Christianity [...] the grisly invocation of Christ's body, blood and nails in the agony of the Crucifixion seems as grotesque and bizarre to us now as modern [...] swearing would have seemed to medievals" (1991).

Jesse Schiedlower traces the history of swearing from religion to sex and beyond: "Throughout the centuries, different topics have been considered incendiary at different times. Several hundred years ago, for example, religious profanity was the most unforgivable type of expression. In more recent times, words for body parts and sexually explicit vocabulary have been the most shocking[.] Now, racial or ethnic epithets are the scourge" (1995).

Mark Irwin calls 'cunt' "THE ULTIMATE INSULT" and "the most obscene non-racial English curse" (2001[a]), though he also suggests that racist insults such as 'nigger' may eventually replace 'cunt' as the ultimate taboo: "Even in the 1970s, ['nigger' appeared in] TV sitcoms and in print - even in children's books - while the words fuck and cunt were never seen[.] The move from religious to sexually orientated [swear]words took place 300 or so years ago in English [and a] hundred years from now, words such as cunt and fuck may be viewed as quaint oddities" (2001[b]).

Shakespeare & Post-Reformation Censorship

After the Reformation, literary censorship was performed by the Privy Council and theatrical censorship was the portfolio of the Master of the King's Revels. Mindful of these restraints, William Shakespeare's references to 'cunt' are all in disguised forms. Thus, in Measure For Measure, we find 'counsellors' used as a pun on 'cunt-sellers': "Good counsellors lack no clients" (1603). Similarly, in Henry The Fift, Katharine confuses the English terms 'foot' and 'coun' ('gown') with the phonetically similar French 'foutre' ('fuck') and 'con' ('cunt'), calling them "mauvais, coruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d'honneur d'user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France, pour tout le monde" (1599).

In Twelfe Night, Malvolio virtually spells out the word: "By my life, this is my lady's hand! these be her very C's, her U's, and her T's" (1601[b]). Sir Andrew Aguecheek understands the cheeky allusion: "Her C's, her U's, and her T's: why that-", though he is swiftly interrupted by Malvolio before he can state the obvious. 'C', 'U', and 'T', of course, spells 'CUT'; the missing 'n' is contained in the 'and' of "and her T's", with 'and' "no doubt be[ing] pronounced 'en'" (Peter Fryer, 1963) to heighten the similarity.

Four hundred years later, 'cut' and 'cunt' were still being confused. David Lodge punned on 'Silk Cut' with his phrase "Silk Cunt" (1988). John Spellar delivered a speech in the House of Commons, as reported by Simon Hoggart: "[Spellar tried to say] "We recognise that these cuts in the defence medical services had gone too far," but he inserted an unwanted letter "n" in the word "cuts". It still made perfect sense" (2000).

'Cut' was itself a recognised euphemism for 'cunt' in Shakespeare's time, and there are three reasons for this: firstly, its almost identical spelling; secondly, its meaning as 'water channel', alluding to the vagina and its fluids; and finally, its meaning as 'wound', which alludes to the vagina as a gash. None of these reasons persuaded Dover Wilson, however, as he steadfastly maintained that Shakespeare's 'CUT' was merely "a typographical error for C-U-E" (Eric Partridge, 1947). A further 'cut'/'cunt' pun was provided by Thomas Middleton, whose A Fair Quarrel includes a reference to "callicut" (1617).

Shakespeare's most famous 'cunt' pun is from Hamlet, when the Prince asks Ophelia: "Do you think I meant country matters?" (1602), emphasising the first syllable of "country" to make the allusion clear. In the unlikely event that his audiences should fail to detect the 'cunt' in "country matters", Shakespeare qualified it with Hamlet's leery references to Ophelia's groin: "Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [...] my head upon your lap? [...] between maid's legs".

Ophelia, however, responds dismissively: "I think nothing, my lord". Undeterred, Hamlet describes "nothing" as "a fair thought to lie between maid's legs". Ophelia is fully aware of his double-entendres, commenting sarcastically: "You are merry, my Lord". The allusion in her 'nothing' reference is a little convoluted: 'nothing' can mean 'zero', which is represented numerically by the digit '0', which can also be seen as a graphical representation of a vagina. Furthermore, 'thing' is a euphemism for 'penis', thus "nothing" can indicate 'no thing' ('not a penis', thus 'a vagina').

Scholars have always been cautious in embracing these most indelicate of the Bard's allusions: "editors of even scholarly editions frequently shied away from sexual glosses" (Stanley Wells, 2001). Laurie E Maguire writes that successive Shakespeare editors have relied upon "the safe refuge of Latin euphemism. Thus "pudenda" appears frequently in footnotes [though] it is not [...] pudend[a] but a slang word for the female pudendum, and we have an exact equivalent today: cunt" (2000).

Like Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer also suffered from posthumously euphemised annotations and translations: "in the Miller's Tale, a young Oxford don named Nicholas is making advances to a girl named Alison. Chaucer says forthrightly, "He caught her by the queynte." Robert Lumiansky, translating, says, "He slipped his hand intimately between her legs." This [...] is still bowdlerism" (Noel Perrin, 1969).

Typical of this evasive trend is William Blackstone's footnote to Twelfe Night's 'CUT' pun: he mentions that "some very coarse and vulgar appellations are meant to be alluded to by these capital letters" (1793), though he does not reveal exactly what those "coarse and vulgar appellations" are. Even the annotations of modern editions do not explicitly connect 'CUT' to 'cunt': Michael Davis merely notes that "These letters [...] can provide coarse amusement" (1966).

Regarding "country matters", Edward Dowden writes coyly: "I suspect that there is some indelicate suggestion in country" (1899). Writing almost a century later, Philip Edwards defines "country matters" with misplaced literalism as "the sort of thing that goes on among rustics in the country" (1985), though he does go on to cite the "sexual pun in 'country'". Phyllis Abrahams and Alan Brody's somewhat bizarre explanation is that the phrase "probably refers to the sexual activities of barn-yard animals" (1968). The most specific notation is that of Harold Jenkins, who comments on "a popular pun on the first syllable" of "country" (1982).

Country Matters: A Case Study

'Cunt' and 'country' (pronounced 'cunt-ry'/'cunt-ree'/'cunt-er-ee') are phonetically rather than etymologically related, though, coincidentally, the Old French for 'country' and 'county' are 'cuntree' and 'cunte' respectively. Alan Bold has compared 'cunt' and 'country' in relation to Shakespeare's Hamlet pun: "'Cunt' is regarded as unlovely while the word 'country', which contains it, is the word for all things bright and beautiful. Even Shakespeare, hypersensitive to verbal sound, exploited the similarity of the two words" (1979).

Prince Hamlet's phrase "country matters" has become so well known that it is now used as a pun in newspaper headlines. For example, Jay Rayner's rural restaurant review in The Observer was headlined Country Matters ("Countryside alliance", 2001). There have also been several Country Matters headlines in The Guardian: one for a letter by Lindsay Hill (a member of the "Union of Country Sports Workers", 2001), a second for a television review by Mark Lawson ("country life", 2001), and a third for a letter by Richard Chandler (concerning "The Countryside Alliance", 2002). Country Matters was also used as a chapter title in The Guardian Year 2000, a Guardian anthology.

The Bard's use of 'country' as a suggestive pun on 'cunt' was not limited to Hamlet. In The Comedie Of Errors (1590) we find: "she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her", and in The Second Part Of Henry The Fourth (1597): "The rest of thy low-countries have made a shift to eat up thy holland". In this last example, "low-countries" is a reference both to the phonetics of 'cunt' and also to the vagina's position in the lower half of the body.

Outside the realm of literature, the similarity of 'cunt' and 'country' has been highlighted by Billy Connolly, who called himself "the man who put the 'cunt' in 'country music!" (1979), and by Rowan Atkinson, who has been introduced as "the man who put the 'tree' back into 'country'" (1980). Terry Wogan joked about 'country and western' sounding obscene, and Lily Savage joked that she would release an album called "Total Country" (Terry Kinane, 2000). Stephen Fry punned on the imaginary word 'cuntricide' with the fake definition "'Countryside': to kill Piers Morgan" (John Naysmith, 2002). A poster featuring comedian Jerry Sadowitz transformed 'Your Country Needs You' into Your C*nt He Needs You and, of the many slang phrases referring to the groin being 'down below', 'low-countries' and 'county down' also allude to the similarity of 'cunt' and 'country'.

A missing 'O' caused problems when the headline "PROTECTING THANET'S CUNTRYSIDE" (2000) appeared in Adscene due to a subeditor's typographical error, and a similar mistake occurred when a Leicestershire council press release was headed Cunty Councillor Ian Morris (2002). A split-second example of a missing 'o' can be found in the title-sequence of Countryfile: the letters of the title are displayed in various computer-generated combinations, including "C untryfile" (Sarah Eglin, 200-). Country Music Plus magazine and Country Grain bread both employ logos in which the 'o' of 'Country' is enveloped inside the capital 'C', giving the appearance of 'Cuntry Music Plus' and 'Cuntry Grain' respectively.

Religious Sexual Repression

Shakespeare symbolises profanity's thematic transition from religion to sex, though it is the relationship between these two themes that is the ultimate source of many contemporary taboos. The direct influence of religion on the lives of the population has steadily decreased, though its indirect influence remains substantial. Religious oaths lost their earlier vehemence, replaced by a taboo against sexual discourse, though this new taboo can itself also be attributed to the influence of the church.

Sex is now, according to JC Flugel, "the most taboo-ridden of all subjects in the modern world" (Eli M Oboler, 1974). One method of social regulation is through language, thus the lexicon of sex is tabooed in order to repress sex itself: "Prudery's first line of defence is the regulation of speech. Feelings of shame and guilt about the organs of sex [...] tend to become closely associated with the words that are used for these things. These words become taboo" (Peter Fryer, 1963).

As the vagina is a sexual organ, 'cunt' signifies sex; and, as 'cunt' does not enjoy the medical acceptability of 'vagina' or 'vulva', it is tabooed: "[there is an] exact correlation between degree of taboo in verbal usage and the degree of taboo in [...] the referent" (Geoffrey Hughes, 1991). Because the signified (sex) is the source of the taboo, censorship of the signifier ('cunt') represents an attempt to repress what it signifies, thus the marginalisation of 'cunt' acts essentially as a social pacifier, marginalising sexual thoughts.

This Freudian notion of socially acceptable patterns of thought - 'dominant consciousness' - is the first of the "levels of censorship" listed by William Albig (1956). He defines a process of self-censorship whereby individuals unconsciously filter non-productive thoughts from their minds, driven to do so by legal, social, and cultural censorship of that which does not conform to the hegemonic dominant ideology.

Thus, censorship of the word 'cunt' ensures that the population's collective consciousness is focussed upon financially or culturally productive pursuits and is not distracted by recreational sex. Edward DeBono highlighted this repressive tendency in his evidence at the obscenity trial of Oz magazine: "the potential of [Oz] to put people off sex is only about thirty per cent of that of the average sermon in any church[.] A lot of our emphasis in society is to put people off sex" (Sheree Folkston, 1991).

Eli M Oboler ascribes the source of this desire to dissuade society from recreational sex to the concept of original sin, citing Theodor Reik's identification of the causal link between original sin and carnal desire: "religion, particularly Christianity, traces the guilt feeling [...] back to an 'original sin,' which is conceived as sexual transgression, to the 'weakness of the flesh,' or to sexual desire" (1974). Thus, it is Christian doctrine that determines our sexual repression and instigates our taboos against sexual terms such as 'cunt'. Regular attendance at religious services is low, yet it seems that we are still restricted by a religious sexual repression.

Belief in the sinful nature of sex was most readily apparent in the doctrine of seventeenth century Puritanism, and John Calvin's Puritan position has been evocatively summarised by Eli M Oboler: "The sin of Adam, which is the sin of mankind, is regarded as a perennial fountain of filth and uncleanness which is perpetually bubbling up in black streams of perverted and degraded impulse" (1974). Contemporary attitudes towards sex have barely changed, with slang terms such as 'dirty weekend' demonstrating the underlying shame with which sex is still regarded. Similarly, sexual swearwords such as 'cunt' are still thought of as 'filthy language' and 'dirty words'.

Oboler's "fountain of filth" is perhaps best personified by John Wilmot, whom Paddy Lyons credits with "drawing into poetry plain terms to describe bodily parts and genital functions" (1996). Wilmot "wrote more frankly about sex than anyone in English before the twentieth century" (Margaret Drabble, 1995), disregarding the Puritan doctrine and instead composing sexually anarchic poetry with no taboo left unbroken. He described, according to Geoffrey Hughes, "a world seen from crotch level" (1991):

"though St. James has t' honour on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and cunt[.]
You may go mad for the north wind,
And fixing all your hopes upon 't
To have him bluster in your cunt,
Turn up your longing arse t' th' air" (1672);

"A touch from any part of her had done 't,
Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt" (16--[a]);

"Each man had as much room as Porter, B[lount],
Or Harris had in Cullen's bushel cunt" (1674);

"Now heavens preserve our faith's defender,
From Paris plots and Roman cunt.
From Mazarine, that new pretender,
And from that politic Grammont" (1676);

"Oh why do we keep such a bustle
'Bout putting a prick in an arse,
Since Harvey's long-cunted muscle
Serves Stuart instead of a tarse" (16--[b]).

Wilmot's most notorious work was a play titled Sodom, whose dramatis personae includes characters such as 'Queen Cuntigratia' and her maid 'Cunticula'. Henry Spencer Ashbee notes that Wilmot wrote it anonymously: "Sodom [...] is generally supposed to be by John Wilmot [...] in spite of [his] having most strenuously disowned it [though] one has but to glance through his poems to find ideas as lewd, couched in language as gross and as obscene" (1885).

In 'outing' Wilmot as the anonymous author of Sodom, Ashbee is not a little hypocritical, as his own account of the play was written under the pseudonym 'Pisanus Fraxi' and his journal My Secret Life was also pseudonymous and only posthumously attributed to him.

In this extract from Sodom, Cunticula and Cuntigratia discuss a third character, General Buggeranthos:

"He has such charms,
You'd swear you had a stallion in your arms,
He swives with so much vigour; in a word,
His prick is as good metal as his sword."
"With open cunt then swift to him I'll fly,
I'll hug, I'll kiss, and bear up, till I die;
Oh! let him swive me to eternity!" (1684).

Victorian Duality: Sex & Swearing Publicly Prohibited

Victorian attitudes to sex were demonstrated by a repressive linguistic purge of sexual colloquialisms from acceptable discourse. 'Offensive' terms such as 'cunt', 'cock', and 'fuck' were prohibited, as Terence Meaden explains: "['cunt' was] a perfectly normal, useful word [...] until a puritanical government legislated against it" (1992), and milder terms such as 'piss', 'arse', and 'bugger' were also subsequently suppressed.

Michel Foucault contrasts this linguistic purge with the relative leniency of the pre-Victorian era: "At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common [and] words were said without undue reticence [although in] Victorian [society] there was an expurgation - and a very rigorous one - of the authorized vocabulary[.] Without question, new rules of propriety screened out some words" (1976).

Foucault suggests, in reference to the sexual vernacular, that the Victorians were not repressing the language but, rather, compartmentalising it. He discusses "[the] taxonomical impulses of the nineteenth century [and the] explosion of distinct discursivities which took form in [...] biology, medicine, psychiatry [and] psychology", arguing that they were inclusive rather than exclusive. He saw this as a positive attempt to classify human behaviour: "Rather than a general prudishness of language [...] the wide dispersion of devices that were invented for speaking about it [were] a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse".

This taxonomy is more problematic than Foucault concedes, however, as it results in a polarisation between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' language: 'vagina' and 'vulva' were confirmed as acceptable medical terms whereas 'cunt' was demoted to unacceptable slang. It is no surprise, then, that My Secret Life, the graphic Victorian diaries of sexual conquests written by Henry Spencer Ashbee, were published only surreptitiously. Ashbee even wrote under a pseudonym, 'Walter', to avoid detection, and his Secret Life includes this celebration of 'cunt': "After the blessed sun, sure the cunt ought to be worshipped as the source of all human happiness[.] God bless cunt" (1880).

Obscene Literature: Don't Show It To The Servants

Sexually explicit language was deemed a corrupting influence as early as 1564, when the Council of Trent decreed: "books professedly treating of lascivious or obscene subjects [...] are utterly prohibited, since not only faith but morals [...] are readily corrupted by the perusal of them". Three hundred years later, identical reasoning was applied when the Obscene Publications Act was drafted: Hansard records that it was envisaged as being applicable to "works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of youth" (1857). Even today, there are debates concerning the 'harmful' effects of obscene material: whether pornography encourages rape, for instance, and whether film violence encourages violent crime. These irrational anxieties stem from the earlier religious condemnation of obscenity.

Literary censorship, fuelled by this religious zeal, occasionally verges on the ridiculous, as when Jacob Tonson's censored edition altered the register of John Wilmot's work by replacing the word 'cunt' with "Love":

"With wine I wash away my cares,
And then to Love again" (1691).

Similarly, Allan Ramsay's censored edition of the sixteenth century poem A Bytand Ballat On Warlo Wives inexplicably substituted "Sunt" for 'cunt': "Sunt Lairds and Cuckolds altogither" (1724). Ramsay added a mistakenly self-congratulatory footnote: "Sunt [...] is spelled [here] with an S, as it ought, and not with a C, as many of the English do". As Noel Perrin puts it, "Instead of omitting an offensive word, [Ramsay] changed it into a harmless one" (1969), a tactic employed extensively by the most famous literary censor, Thomas Bowdler, who sanitised Chaucer and Shakespeare's works and later came to epitomise Victorian linguistic censorship.

The Obscene Publications Act gave Bowdlerism a seal of official approval, and was used to condemn some of the most acclaimed works of modern literature simply by dint of their perceived incoherence. Thus, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Archibald Bodkin, not only criticised James Joyce's Ulysses (featuring a character called "CUNTY KATE", 1922), as "unmitigated filth", he also expressed his bemusement at its stream-of-consciousness prose: "I am entirely unable to appreciate [...] what the book itself is about. I can discover no story. There is no introduction which gives a key to its purpose" (Alan Travis, 1998).

Henry Miller's Tropic Of Cancer ("I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt", 1934; expertly deconstructed in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics), Allen Ginsberg's Howl ("fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt", 1956), and Wiliam Burroughs's Naked Lunch ("They could have heard you screaming over in Cunt Lick County", 1959) were all also investigated by the Vice Squad. Fortunately, however, as Barry Miles explains, artistic merit is often an acceptable defence for obscenity: "Coarse and vulgar language is used in treatment and sex acts are mentioned but unless the book is entirely lacking in 'social importance' it cannot be held obscene" (1989).

The most archetypal demonstration of the censor's ideological flaws is the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Penguin planned a mass-market paperback publication of DH Lawrence's explicit novel, though the Home Office, which accused them of obscenity, initially thwarted their attempt. (Penguin later published CH Rolph's account of their vindication, The Trial Of Lady Chatterley.) In his opening address at the obscenity trial, prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones pointedly dismissed arcane Victorian pruderies: "do not approach this [case] in any priggish, high-minded, super-correct, mid-Victorian manner" (CH Rolph, 1961), though his objections to the novel were themselves somewhat priggish and Victorian. He naively disapproved of Lawrence's "set[ting] upon a pedestal promiscuous and adulterous intercourse [and] advocat[ion of] coarseness and vulgarity of thought and language".

The defence called a great many witnesses, who each attested to the literary merits of Lawrence and, to a lesser extent, Chatterley itself. These defence witnesses were only seldom cross-examined (as CH Rolph puts it: "'No questions', said the surprising Mr Griffith-Jones [...] he was to say it many times", 1961), and the prosecution called no witnesses of its own at all ("Griffith-Jones now made the surprising announcement that he was calling no witnesses[.] The gasp of surprise in Court was reprehensibly audible").

This lack of cross-examination and prosecution witnesses was compounded from the beginning of the trial by Griffith-Jones's question to the jury: "would you approve of your young sons, young daughters - because girls can read as well as boys - reading this book[?] Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?". This patronisingly sexist and outdated social attitude was a factor in the jury's 'not guilty' verdict; Rolph called it "the first nail in the prosecution's coffin".

Griffith-Jones also took the trouble to keep a detailed tally of the novel's profanities, informing the jury that the word 'cunt' occurs some fourteen times. What he did not mention, however, was that 'cunt' was used (perhaps unrealistically) as a term of endearment. John Lydon has described its use by Mellors as "insistent (yet curiously innocent)" (1990): "'Th'art good cunt, though, aren't ter? Best bit o' cunt left on earth!['] 'What is cunt?' she said. 'An' doesn't ter know? Cunt! It's thee down theer[.] Cunt! Eh, that's the beauty o' thee, lass!'" (DH Lawrence, 1928).

The Chatterley prosecutor's elitism and condescension is characteristic of much of the censorship performed in Britain. The British Board of Film Classification, for example, contends that it must censor images that may be a corrupting influence, yet the material has yet to corrupt any of the BBFC examiners who view it 'on our behalf'. Similarly, sexually explicit material is passed by the BBFC for 'arthouse' films with middle class audiences, though populist entertainment is more heavily censored. Taboos - from their religious origins to the modern restrictions on sexual words and images - exist as methods of social regulation, and censorship is maintained for this purpose despite its outdated religious provenance and the paradoxes inherent in its execution.

The contemporary ubiquity of sexualised imagery can be seen as a liberating (albeit exploitative) reaction by an increasingly secular society against religious repression, and this current cultural preoccupation with sex can arguably be regarded as a consequence of the Chatterley trial, as the novel's publication symbolised the beginning of the 'permissive society'. The defeat of the Chatterley obscenity charge at the beginning of the 1960s set a trend for sexual liberation which came to define the decade, and the demystification of sex was indeed Lawrence's stated aim in writing the novel: "the obscene words [in Lady Chatterley] are meant to show [Mellors's] frank carnality and its vivifying power. So they are an integral part of Lawrence's purpose. But still more, one suspects they are part of the extracurricular activity of bringing [...] sex out into the open" (Graham Hough, 1956).

Whereas writers such as Wilmot and Ashbee used 'cunt' for its bawdiness, Lawrence's intention was exactly the opposite. He sought to create a "proper vocabulary to discuss sex [by using] the obscene words familiarly and seriously, so that the tabooed acts and parts of the body can be talked about in natural and native words" (HM Daleski, 1965). Lawrence's use of swearwords can thus be distinguished from those of his contemporaries: he "enhance[d] the value of the [tabooed] words by fashioning new contexts for their use, employing them in contexts which support neither an abusive nor a shameful nor a scornful connotation. His practice, in this respect, is markedly different from that of James Joyce in Ulysses, for Joyce's use of the words [...] in effect perpetuates their debasement".

Decensorship: Cunt In The Media

The First Cunt Is The Deepest

It was ten years after the Lady Chatterley trial until 'cunt' hit the headlines again, when it was uttered for the first time on live television in 1970. David Frost was interviewing the Yippies during ITV's The Frost Programme, and introduced Jerry Rubin as "a reasonable man". Felix Dennis shouted back, jokingly, "He's not a reasonable man, he's the most unreasonable cunt I've ever known in my life!". There ensued an atmosphere of general pandemonium; Dennis admitted to behaving "bloody abominably" (Richard Cowles and Colin Campbell, 2002) and Rosie Boycott later accused him of "wreak[ing] havoc on live television [and] effectively [bringing] the show to a standstill" (Andy Baybutt, 2002).

The very nature of live broadcasting makes unexpected events a distinct possibility. If a programme is broadcast live, mistakes cannot be rectified in the editing room, and advantage can be taken of the situation because a live broadcast allows unfiltered access to the airwaves.

The first scripted use of 'cunt' on television - the first time its use was premeditated by a broadcaster, in contrast to the unforeseen use by the Yippies - was in the ITV drama No Mama No:

"What did he say?"
"He said your Dr Cawston is a cunt" (1979).

Verity Lambert persuaded the Independent Broadcasting Authority that the use of 'cunt' was dramatically valid: "I had a lot of correspondence with the IBA about that word. I think it was a real insult, and she needed to say that particular word. And, in the end, to be fair to them, they accepted that as an explanation" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). By contrast, American television was a 'cunt'-free zone until as late as 1994, when chat-show host Phil Donahue used the word "in relating and condemning an employer's insult to a female employee" (Jesse Scheidlower, 1995).

Such is the word's scarcity on television that several programmes have been erroneously credited with being the first to broadcast it. Auberon Waugh cites No Mama No as "perhaps the first use on television of the most controversial word of all" (Kerry Richardson, 1994), though, as noted previously, 'cunt' was scripted into this 1979 drama nine years after it was uttered live on The Frost Programme.

Years later, John Walsh confidently declared that 'cunt' was used on live TV for the first time as late as 2002: "It is, or was, the last linguistic taboo, the final insult, the unsayable word. [...] But now history has been made. For probably the first time, someone has said the "c-word" live on British television". Walsh was referring to This Morning, the live daytime ITV programme during which Caprice, discussing her role in The Vagina Monologues, said: "One of my monologues is called Reclaiming Cunt. It is very challenging" (Siubhan Richmond, 2002). This was certainly groundbreaking, as the word was spoken on morning television, though it was clearly not the first time the word had ever been broadcast live.

A similar mistake was made by Matthew Beard and Victoria Coren, both of whom mistakenly claimed that the 2003 drama Witchcraze marked the BBC's first broadcast of the dreaded word. In C-Word Allowed To Make Debut On BBC Television, Beard wrote that "A drama-documentary on witches on BBC2 is to risk the wrath of viewers by featuring the "C-word" - previously considered so unutterable that it has never been passed by BBC television censors" (2003). Coren agreed that "[in Witchcraze] BBC airwaves played host for the very first time to what I believe the more delicate members of society refer to as 'the c-word'" (2003).

The Channel 4 drama Mosley was yet another programme incorrectly cited as the first to contain the word 'cunt'. In its final episode, a prison guard shouted "You cunt!" (Robert Knights, 1998) at the eponymous character. This, predictably, caused revulsion from the Mail On Sunday, which reported that Channel 4 "will break the last taboo over bad language on television [...] with the deliberate use of the only word in the English language considered more offensive than the F-word" (Michael Burke, 1998). The newspaper did not print 'cunt' itself, though it solemnly proclaimed the word to be "an anatomical reference [which is] deeply offensive to women in particular".

The Mail declared that 'cunt' "has not been scripted into a mainstream television drama before", though this is incorrect on two counts. Firstly, Mosley is not a mainstream drama, as Channel 4 is not a mainstream channel; secondly, 'cunt' had appeared previously, in the mainstream ITV drama No Mama No. Regarding Mosley, Laurence Marks explained that the decision to include 'cunt' was not an easy one to make: "it is intensely powerful [...] we debated long and hard about using the word. There were many on the production team who thought we should not. The word is the most reviled single utterance in the English language[.] We know this word will jar but it was used for dramatic effect" (Michael Burke, 1998).

The premiere appearance of 'cunt' in the press is a matter of equally contentious debate. When, in 1988, Mike Gatting publicly criticised a cricket umpire with the phrase "fucking, cheating cunt", The Independent was the only newspaper to publish his comments unexpurgated. Bill Bryson has since claimed that this marked "the first time that cunt had appeared in a British newspaper" (1990), as has Ian Jack: ""Cunt" as well as "fucking" was included, perhaps the word's first appearance in a British newspaper" (2002).

In fact, 'cunt' was first used in a 1987 article by Bernard Levin, published in The Times. Levin criticised the common newspaper practice of asterisking swearwords, commenting sarcastically that "If the words are printed with only their initial letters, followed by asterisks [...] they are at once and entirely robbed of their dreadful power". He then went on to quote unasterisked lines from Tony Harrison's poem V:

"Aspirations, cunt! Folk on t'fucking dole
'ave got about as much scope to aspire
above the shit they're dumped in, cunt, as coal
aspires to be chucked on t'fucking fire. [...]
Yer've given yerself toffee, cunt. Who needs
yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own" (1985).

Levin's article marks the one and only occasion that The Times has printed 'cunt' uncensored, and the first occasion that the word appeared as such in any newspaper. David Glencross, writing in The Observer, was nonplussed by the article: "When an extract [from V was] printed in The Times, embedded in an article by Bernard Levin, the social fabric of the nation survive[d]" (1987), though Levin's fellow Times columnist Ronald Butt castigated him for "[choosing] to reproduce a verse of unmitigated obscenity [...] in what was clearly a gratuitous taboo-breaking exercise" (1987).

V was also published unexpurgated in The Independent shortly after The Times's extracts, with a warning regarding its "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT LANGUAGE" (Blake Morrison, 1987). These extracts in The Times and The Independent came months before Mike Gatting's cricket outburst, though they were overshadowed by the controversy surrounding V's recital on television.

Cunt On Television

Whilst the earliest uses of 'cunt' on television - both live and scripted - were on ITV, it is Channel 4 that has subsequently virtually monopolised the broadcasting of the word. It has a deserved reputation as a broadcaster that pushes further than the others at the boundaries of acceptability, and thus regularly invokes the wrath of Mary Whitehouse, the Daily Mail, and the 'moral majority': "Channel 4 has the most liberal policy of all [...] a good example is the airing of [...] Saint Jack which left in two occurrences of the word 'cunt'" (Kevin Hilton, 1996).

The channel famously broadcast a recital by Tony Harrison of his poem V, in which he verbally attacks the vandals who desecrated his parents' gravestones:

"The prospects for the present aren't too grand
when a swastika with NF (National Front)'s
sprayed on a grave, to which another hand
has added, in reddish colour, CUNTS. [...]
If love of art, or love, gives you affront
that the grave I'm in's graffitied then, maybe,
erase the more offensive FUCK and CUNT
but leave, with the worn UNITED, one small v" (1985).

The Daily Mail, certainly the most right-wing of the national newspapers and always eager to campaign with vitriol against cultural liberalism, protested with the front-page banner headline "FOUR-LETTER TV POEM FURY" (John Deans and Garry Jenkins, 1987), warning of "a torrent of four-letter filth [and] the most explicitly sexual language yet beamed into the nation's living rooms". The Mail helpfully informed us that "The crudest, most offensive word" - our old friend, 'cunt' - "is used 17 times", in an echo of Mervyn Griffith-Jones's Lady Chatterley prosecution.

Ian Hislop wrote perhaps the most considered contemporary defence of the poem: "There are apparently 47 expletives [and] that more or less concludes the case for the prosecution. It obviously does not [take into account] that there might be a reason for putting in expletives and that the cascade of obscenity is sparked by the poet's own anger at seeing the words on a grave" (1987).

Other commentators were less balanced in their arguments, using sensationalist water metaphors such as "torrent of foul language" (Daily Express, 1987) and "stream of four-letter words" (Harvey Lee, 1987). Richard Brooks warned that the poem contained "the most sexually explicit language ever heard on British television" (1987) and The Sun similarly anticipated "the most explicit language ever broadcast" (1987). This media moral panic was accompanied by an early day motion tabled by Gerald Howarth in the House of Commons, in which he condemned V's "stream of obscenities" (1987).

Brenda Maddox, in an extremely lucid analysis of the poem's media coverage, noted that much of the 'outrage' was motivated less by genuine concern and more by a desire for publicity: "Politicians who call the poem "a torrent of filth" and "packed with obscenities" know more about getting headlines in the Daily Mail than they do about writing poems" (1987). Uniquely amongst the commentators of the time, she recognised that, underlying the debate surrounding obscenity, was a specific concern about the broadcasting of 'cunt': "the C-word [...] is still so taboo that it hardly ever reaches the air, even in films late at night. Its liberal use in [V] is probably the real reason for the current storm".

Channel 4 continues to give writers consistently more freedom than other channels, as this extract from their comedy series The Book Group (Annie Griffin, 2001) demonstrates:

"Little cunt!"
"Hang on, am I the cunt?"
"I think I'm the cunt."
"We're all cunts".

The channel has also broadcast Irvine Welsh's drama The Granton Star Cause, and - from HBO - Sex & The City, Oz, and a documentary on The Vagina Monologues.

Documentaries on other channels have generally been more linguistically restrained, though an exception is BBC2's The World's Best Sellers, which included unbleeped extracts from the Derek & Clive sketch This Bloke Came Up To Me (Peter Cook & Dudley Moore, 1976):

"I said, 'Who are you fucking calling 'cunt', cunt?!'"
[...] "The cunt come back with 'You fucking cunt, cunt!'!".

Satirising TV's repressive attitudes towards swearing, Charlie Brooker's TV Go Home devised a spoof programme called "Cunt" as part of a confrontational collection of television listings, with programmes featuring "Grade-A fuckfaced cunthole[s]", "CUNTHEADS", and "upper-middle-class cuntsack[s]", mocking viewers as "mungo-headed cuntwits" (2001). This profane surrealism also included obscene names such as "Mary Qunt" (a parody of 'Mary Quant'), and song titles such as "Stop That Cunt!" and "Arise Sir Cuntmaker".

Brooker's aggressive comedy reached its zenith with this extended fictional programme title: "Look at the Tiger. Look at the Fucking Tiger. Stop Picking Your Nose and Look at the Fucking Tiger. It Took Us Ages to Film This, so the Least You Ungrateful Little Cuntsniffs Could Do is to Pay Some Fucking Attention for Once, Instead of Sitting There Slurping Your Fucking Sunny Delight and Fiddling With Your Shoelaces. Got That? Good: Now Stop Crying and Look at the Tiger, and You'd Better KEEP Fucking Looking at it or I'll Come Round and Belt-Whip You Into the Oblivion Ward of the Nearest Fucking Hospital, OKAY?".

No television station, not even Channel 4, is as gleefully obscene as TV Go Home, and, in practice, most televisual appearances of 'cunt' are censored before transmission. The commonest form of censorship is the electronic 'bleep', the aural equivalent of 'c***'. The other is a process called 'post-synchronised dubbing', whereby another word is dubbed over a swearword. For this to be successful, the swearword and its anodyne replacement must sound similar and contain the same number of syllables, so that the new word will synchronise with the actor's lip-movements. A good example is ITV's dubbing of Jonathan Demme's The Silence Of The Lambs, which replaced 'cunt' with "scent" (199-):

"He said, 'I can smell your scent'."
"I see. I myself cannot".

Cunt In America

Until very recently, the American media simply did not use 'cunt' at all; even now, their newspapers do not print it and their network television and radio stations do not broadcast it. As noted earlier, the word's American television debut came as late as 1994. Only cable TV dares to transmit this most tabooed word, a situation made possible thanks to the HBO comedy series Sex & The City: "HBO gives writers much more freedom than the conservative American networks, and [Sex & The City] took that freedom and ran with it, pushing back the boundaries" (Andrew Abbott and Russell Leven, 2003). Darren Starr explains that his aim with the show was to create a sense of realism through language: "I wanted to do a show where people use language that they actually use in life, not [...] sanitised for television".

Sex & The City's potential for unsanitised language was tested in its very first season, when the word 'cunt' was broadcast for the first time by HBO. The episode in question, The Power Of Female Sex (Susan Seidelman, 1998), discusses the limits of sexual politics and liberal feminism. It also features a male artist who paints large-scale close-up portraits of vaginas: "The cunt[.] The most powerful force in the universe. The source of all life and pleasure and beauty. I used to paint full nudes, but as I got older I realised that the truth was to be found only in the cunt".

Richard Brooks notes that the occurrences of 'cunt' in Sex & The City are anatomical rather than insulting. This, he suggests, may be deemed less problematic by the British regulators: "[it] may not break television guidelines because the word is used to describe female genitalia, not as a swearword" (1999). Guidelines issued by the Broadcasting Standards Commission state that "the Commission would expect the abusive usage of any of the synonyms for the female genitalia" - though, in practice, only 'cunt' - "to have been referred to the most senior levels of management" (1998).

The crucial word here is "abusive", highlighting the importance of context in determining obscenity, as 'cunt' is more readily permitted on television if it is used in an anatomical context rather than as a term of abuse. Katharine Viner condemns the word, though only in its abusive context: "The fact remains that when the c-word is used as abuse, the intention behind it is violent and contemptuous" (1992); indeed, for Georges Bataille, 'cunt', in the correct context, can be "by far the loveliest of the names for the vagina" (1928). Victoria Coren disagrees, citing 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' contexts yet concluding: "It doesn't add up. Surely these words are either rude or they're not?" (2003).

Since Sex & The City, the HBO series Oz by Leslie Libman ("She's a lying cunt, a miserable lying cunt", 2001) has also occasionally included the c-word. HBO has also broadcast extracts from The Vagina Monologues, including the Reclaiming Cunt poem, accompanied for good measure by a montage of women saying 'cunt' both individually and collectively (Sheila Nevins, 2001):

"Cunt!"
"Cunt!"
"Cunt!"
"Cunt!"...

Ed Vulliamy contrasts British and American social usage, suggesting that 'cunt' is used a great deal more prolifically in Britain: "Not only do you never say ['cunt'] in America - you never even talk about why it is never used[.] In Britain, as we know, the taboo is rather weaker" (1999). In the same article, Thom Powers agrees that "In England or Ireland, the word has no power. It's c[unt] this, c[unt] that, he's a c[unt], she's a c[unt], my broken car's a c[unt]".

This is, however, an oversimplification of attitudes towards 'cunt'. In fact, the vast majority of the population (of Britain as of elsewhere) still has many inhibitions about its use: "ring up some other English person, and say, 'I'm glad you answered the phone, ya c[unt], you.' I think they won't be very happy".

In an interview with Madonna, Jonathan Ross asked her specifically about American attitudes towards the c-word, his question itself being evidence that the word is becoming a more acceptable discussion topic. Ross cited 'cunt' as a word "which the Americans don't use at all [but] which we [Brits] use with regularity" (Mick Thomas, 2003):

"if you say [it] to Americans [...] they want the smelling salts"
[...] "it's really bad to say the c-word [in America]."
"And over here it's fairly commonplace, isn't it?"
"Yeah, everyone's a c[unt]!".

Cunt On The Radio

American media regulations regarding swearing date from 1973, when a New York radio station broadcast George Carlin's Filthy Words at two o'clock in the afternoon. The monologue was a comic assessment of seven swearwords - 'cunt', 'shit', 'piss', 'fuck', 'cocksucker', 'motherfucker', and 'tits' - and its afternoon broadcast provoked complaints from parents. The ensuing controversy led to advertisers refusing to associate themselves with programmes which included strong language, thus, for commercial reasons, none of the seven words Carlin listed are permitted on either radio or network television: "Without advertisers to placate, writers [for HBO] can include bad language and explicit sex scenes [though they are] nowhere on network TV" (Grace Bradberry, 2002).

Radio in Britain is more liberal than in America, though even in Britain the word 'cunt' only rarely graces the airwaves. Its presence on the radio, however, causes significantly less controversy than its use on television. A good example is the Breakfast Show morning programme on Radio 1, which is regarded by its succession of presenters as a forum for uncensored, naturalistic repartee. Thus, Chris Evans invited listeners to suggest pet names for the vagina and reacted with mock outrage when one of his co-presenters posed as a caller and said "The cunt" (199-). In the same time-slot, a disc jockey who mispronounced The Cult Of Ant & Dec as "The Cunt Of Ant & Dec" (1999) simply laughed and noted his "Freudian slip". On Radio 3, Gilbert & George discussed their montage George The Cunt & Gilbert The Shit, by name, at six o'clock in the evening, during a pre-recorded interview in 2002.

Again, it is the context in which the word is used that dictates the level of offence it causes. The offensive potential of these two breakfast-time examples was diffused by humour, and the Gilbert & George example went unbleeped because Radio 3 is not felt to be a station listened to by children. When 'cunt' is used insultingly or aggressively, however, it causes considerably greater offence. In a live Radio 1 interview with Steve Lamacq, Liam Gallagher - renowned for his coinage of the insult "cuntybollocks" (Matthew DeAbaitua, 1998) - threatened to "beat the fucking living daylight shit out of [any] cunts that give me shit" (1997). Though broadcast late in the evening, this angry outburst drew more complaints than any of the incidents broadcast in earlier time-slots.

As discussed previously with reference to the Lady Chatterley trial, simple tallies of swearwords do not recognise the importance of context, though Lamacq has suggested that Radio 1 has a swearword hierarchy in which "one c[unt] is as bad as five f[uck]s" (2000). The British Board of Film Classification has a similar hierarchy, classifying swearwords in ascending order as 'very mild' ('damn'), 'mild' ('bastard'), 'moderate' ('prick'), 'strong' ('fuck'), and 'coarse' ('cunt'). Television regulators also have a linguistic hierarchy: 'cunt' "tops the watchdog Broadcasting Standards Commission's list of most offensive words" (Tara Conlan, 2002).

Furthermore, there is an unwritten code which determines the warnings given by continuity-announcers before television programmes: a warning of 'strong language' implies 'fuck' and one of 'very strong language' implies 'cunt'. Channel 4's announcement, before a repeat of V, that viewers should prepare themselves for "the strongest possible language" (Gavin Weightman (1998) can be seen as both an over-cautious warning and a proud boast.

Cunt & Cinema

After the first use of 'cunt' on live television in 1970, the word's first cinematic outing came the following year, in Carnal Knowledge, when Jack Nicholson called Ann-Margaret a "ball-busting, castrating, son-of-a-cunt bitch" (Mike Nichols, 1971). Reviewing the film on its initial release, Julian Jebb noted "the explicitness of the dialogue" (1971), and Leslie Halliwell's Film Guide reminds us that the film is "conscious of its own daring in subject and language" (Leslie Halliwell, 1977).

A year later, John Waters made his trashy, amteurish, exploitative classic Pink Flamingos, a calculated exercise in shock tactics. Waters also scripted the film, which includes the line "You're a real cunt, you know that? A real fucking cunt!" (1972), and 'cunt' was employed precisely because it had barely been used in films before. In an out-take from the film, another character says, with misplaced romanticism: "A lot of people like cunt [...] but your eyes are like a cunt to me[.] Them cunt-eyes".

The only film to include truly extensive usage of 'cunt', however, is Nil By Mouth, in which Ray Winstone, "spraying c-words like bullets" (Stuart Jeffries, 1997), brutally assaults Kathy Burke whilst shouting "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" (Gary Oldman, 1997). The lines would be familiar to Winstone, whose previous role in Ladybird Ladybird involved a similar sequence in which he verbally abused Crissy Rock by calling her "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" (Ken Loach, 1994). Gary Oldman has said that the brutal language was an essential part of Nil By Mouth's authenticity: "I knew that I could give it an integrity and honesty[.] I'm not making the language more palatable[.] I want a bare knuckle film" (Ian Nathan, 1997).

Lisa Kuhne directed a porn film titled Cunt Dykula in 1993, and other pornographic film titles include Mondo Cunt, Cunt-Eating Frenzy, Cunt Hunt, and Cunt Hunt II (all 19--). Lazy Frog gave us the fictional title "Cunty Elliot" (2001, a pun on Billy Elliot), and Kevin Smith's Clerks features the equally fictional titles "My Cunt Needs Shafts [and] Girls Who Crave Cunt" (1994). The anonymous director of Wonders Of The Unseen World was credited with the pseudonym 'Ima Cunt' ('I'm a cunt', evoked by Craig Brown's "amacunt" in 1999), and a make-up artist for Babylon Five and Planet Of The Apes is one Gabreil DeCunto.

Cunt & The Music Industry

In the music industry, perhaps the most notable usage of 'cunt' does not technically involve the word itself. Instead, 'cunt' is strongly implied, by a forced pronunciation of 'vacant', in Pretty Vacant by The Sex Pistols: "Oh, so prettyyyyaaaaah vay-cunt" (1977).

This connection is used to more bawdy effect in the Rugby song Three Jews of Norfolk (19--):

"there were no beds vacant
VAY-AY-AY-AY-CUNT-CUNT-CUNT
VAY-AY-AY-AY-CUNT-CUNT-CUNT
VAY-AY-AY-AY-CUNT-CUNT-CUNT".

In another example of The Sex Pistols almost-but-not-quite using the word, their song Silly Thing was "originally 'Silly Cunt'" (Alan Parker, 2001).

The Sex Pistols do not quite use the word, and indeed it is very rarely used even by hip-hop performers: "Not even [...] the meanest-mouthed gangsta rapper would use it" (Ed Vulliamy, 1999), sadly undermining Matthew Norman's spoof gangsta rap title "I'm a Motherf[ucking] Cop-Killing C[unt]" (2002). Even The 2 Live Crew's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989), often cited as the epitome of rap's violent and misogynistic lyrical content, features 'cunt' only once ("Like the 'doggy style' you get all the cunt").

Instead, 'cunt' is primarily reserved for use by underground punk and nu-metal bands, ideally suited to record-labels with names such as Cunt Records and Fucking Cunt Records. 'Cunt'-related band names include:

* C-U-N-T
* Selfish Cunt
* Cunt Valley
* Prosthetic Cunt
* Rotten Cunt
* Anal Cunt ('AC')
* The Cunts
* New Cuntry
* Elvis Is A Cunt
* Filthy Maggoty Cunt
* Immanuel Cunt
* Sawtoothedcunt
* Unholified Through Cunt.

The material produced by bands such as these is often misogynistic, homophobic, and deliberately offensive. Examples include If You Don't Listen To Anal Cunt You're A Fucking Cunt by Mail Bomb ("you're a fucking cuuuuuuuunt", 199-), I Smoked Crack With Anal Cunt by Schlitzkreig ("Shove a rusty wire hanger up your [...] cunt", 199-), I Want Cunt by The Queers ("I want cunt, I want it now", 199-), Razors In Ya Cunt by Rellik Laires ("Ya bleedin' in ya cunt cuz there's razors in ya cunt", 199-), Xerox God Save The Queen by CDJ ("fucking cunt, fucking cunt, fucking cunt", 199-), Funky Cunt by CDJ ("funky cunt, funky cunt, funky cunt", 199-), The Stupid Cunt Song by Psychotic Reaction ("stupid cunt", 199-), Just Like A Cunt by Whitehouse ("You taste just like a cunt. Cuntfuck just like a cunt", 1996), and A Cunt Like You by Whitehouse ("You must be fucking joking, cunt", 1998).

Less aggressive examples are Howard Stern's Candle In The Wind spoof Candle In My Cunt (199-), Elisabeth Belile's My Country My Cunt (1994), and Sleeper's Cunt London ("I'll send a letter to you: cunt, London", 1997).

The following is a further selection of 'cunt' song and album titles:

* My Cunt's A Cunt (The Queers, 199-)
* Just Say Cunt (The Queers, 199-)
* Cunt Whore Of The Damned (Paraplegic Necrophiliacs, 199-)
* Cunt Master (Drugface, 199-)
* Sad Cunt (The Creatures, 199-)
* Cunt Action (Copyright, 2002)
* Bala Cunt El Negru (Vad Vuc, 2001)
* Bala Cunt El Negru 2002 (Vad Vuc, 2002)
* Don't Cunt Out (Super, 199-)
* Shit Piss Fuck Cunt (Blink 182, 199-)
* Oi Cunt! (Disturbance, 199-)
* Survivor (I'd Be A Survivor If I Was A Rich Cunt) (Coy Arnold, 199-)
* Cunt (Zvuki, 199-)
* Oblique Cunt Episodes (Physical Remix, 199-)
* Cunt Tease (Pussy Galore, 199-)
* Cunt Hunt (Rock, 199-)
* Cunt Like A Bear-Trap (Thorazine, 199-)
* Sad Cunt (The Creatures, 199-)
* Cunt Valley Song (Cunt Valley, 199-)
* Cunt (Blood Duster, 2001)
* Don'tcallmehomeboyya'cunt (Blood Duster, 2001)
* A Stranger's Just A Cunt You Haven't Met (Figure Four, 199-)
* Smell You Cunt (Anal Blast, 199-)
* Richard B***r Is A Fat Cunt (Spikee King, 199-)
* Whore Cunt (Vehemence, 199-)
* I'm Just A Cunt About You (MacLean & MacLean, 199-)
* Hey Santa Claus You Fucking Cunt (199-)
* Cunt Rock (199-)
* Cunt (Aphex Twin, 1993)
* From The Cunt Of The Fucking Whore (Lethal Aggression, 2002)
* Cunty Pig (Lethal Aggression, 2002)
* Australia The Lucky Cunt (Tism, 1993)
* I Might Be A Cunt But I'm Not A Fucking Cunt (Tism, 1998)
* Dripping Cunt (Newton, 199-)
* Throws Cunt A Tear (To Live & Die In LA, 199-)
* Razor Cunt (Grotesque Blessings, 199-)
* Entrails Ripped From A Virgin's Cunt (Cannibal Corpse, 1992)
* Lady Love Your Cunt (S*M*A*S*H, 1994)
* Cunt (Diamanda Galas, 1996)
* Berkshire Cunt (Conflict, 1996)
* Cunt Face (Bloody Fist, 1996)
* Nazi Cunts (UK Subs, 1997)
* Cunty The Feeling (Rageous Projectin, 1997)
* Conformist Cunt (Snap-Her, 1998)
* Teenage Cunt (Rocking Dildos, 1998)
* Trans Cunt Whip (Tsatthoggua, 1998)
* Drink The Cuntshake (Trash, 1998)
* Just Another Cunt (The Nobodys, 1999)
* Stupid Drunkin Fuckin' Cunt (Dayglo Abortions, 1999)
* Fuck Off You Cunt What A... (Chaotic Discord, 1999)
* Cuntrie Girl (Da Shortiez, 1999)
* Cunty (Kevin Aviance, 1999)
* Cuntgirl (Spoonfed, 2000)
* Cunt Face (Nasenbluten, 2000)
* Cunt Maniac (Green Machine, 199-)
* Worthless Cunt (Purgatoria, 199-)
* Flush Cunt (Headcrash, 199-)
* You Fucking Cunt (Regal Beagle, 199-)
* Hard Nuts & Hard Cunts (Hard Skin, 199-)
* Ispellgodcunt (Cumchrist, 199-)
* Cunt Renaissance (Big, 199-)
* The Cunt Song (Frozen Death, 199-)
* You're A Fucking Cunt (Anal Cunt, 199-)
* Anal Cunt (GG Allin, 1994)
* Cunt-Suckin' Cannibal (GG Allin, 1994)
* Bloody Mary's Bloody Cunt (GG Allin, 1995)
* Jesus & Mother's Cunt (GG Allin, 1998)
* Stick A Cross Up A Nun's Cunt (GG Allin, 1998)
* Fucking Dead Babies Cos I'm A Sick Cunt (Intense Hammer Rage, 199-)
* Rip Out Your Spleen With A Meat-Hook & Jam It Up Your Cunt! (Gorecorpse, 199-).

The Sacred & The Profane: A Case Study

The shock of the word 'cunt' is compounded if it is used to defile sacred symbols. Thus, in Channel 4's The Granton Star Cause, 'cunt' is most frequently used by a character identified as God. Played as a man with supernatural powers drinking in a pub, God describes himself as "a lazy, apathetic, slovenly cunt" (Paul McGuigan, 1997), these character traits being his explanation for the continued existence of greed, famine, and war in the world.

This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane - God saying "cunt" - recalls Sigmund Freud's two-fold definition of 'taboo' (both religion and defilement). The intense controversy generated following this succinct juxtaposition demonstrates that one plus one can sometimes equal four. In other words, when sacred and profane symbols are combined, they produce more than the sum of their parts.

The band Cradle Of Filth exploited the potency of this equation with their Vestal Masturbation tee-shirt, emblazoned with the slogan "JESUS IS A CUNT" (199-). The slogan (also used on Jesus Is A Cunt stickers) was parodied by the New Musical Express as "Cradle Of Filth Are Even Bigger Cunts" (2000). The aim was to construct a slogan that was both as offensive and as succinct as possible; by appropriating our culture's most revered icon (Jesus) and equating it with our greatest taboo ('cunt'), they achieved their goal.

Bill Drummond mounted a similarly iconoclastic enterprise in 2002, with his multi-faceted event Is God A Cunt?, acclaimed by Arthur Smith as "possibly the world's most provocative title" (2002). Invited to contribute to an exhibition provisionally titled God Is Not A Cunt, Drummond set up a telephone voting system, advertised on the side of a bridge: "I'm standing [on the M25 motorway] staring at this big wall of virgin-grey concrete. In one hand I have a large pot of black paint, in the other a brush. I get to work. I daub on the wall, in letters as big as I can manage, for all passing motorists to read, 'Is God a Cunt?'. Underneath I then paint in a smaller and more controlled hand, 'To Vote Yes Phone 0870 240 4174' and 'To Vote No Phone 0870 240 4175'" (2002[a]).

The telephone numbers were genuine, and a poll was conducted to determine whether or not God is indeed a cunt. Callers were greeted with the recorded message "Thank-you for calling the ['Yes' or 'No'] line to the Is God A Cunt? poll" (2002[b]), and comments were also invited to be written onto a large "IS GOD A CUNT?" painting. Drummond publicised these ventures with a pamphlet "published specifically for all those that may consider asking the question Is God A Cunt?". He also chaired a public debate on the topic and compiled an "is God a cunt? book" (2002[c]). Drummond's inventive provocations can be contrasted with these heartfelt lines from Exorcising His Life, John Mateer's reaction to his father's death:

"Fucking bastards! Fucking bastards!
IF THERE'S A GOD HE'S A CUNT" (1997).

Cunt On The Page

Stewart Home has a permanent association with the word 'cunt', due to the publication of his novel Cunt in 1999 ("it will take forever to get the bastard stiff enough to ram him up my cunt", 1999[a]). Home admits that the book's title made it "difficult finding a publisher" (1999[b]), though this is, in fact, a massive understatement, as forty-three printers initially rejected it.

This troubled publication history led to several puns on the 'countdown' to Cunt's release, with headlines such as Final Cuntdown and The Final Cuntdown (both 1999). The 'cuntdown'/'countdown' connection has also been humorously exploited by Viz with their Cuntdown article featuring Countdown's "Cuntdown Conundrum" (2001), and accidentally by a Singaporean sign (1999) which was rendered as 'C untdown' thanks to a faulty lamp used to represent the 'o'.

It was finally agreed that Home's title could not be printed on the spine of the book (so as not to offend bookshop browsers) and Cunt stickers were provided instead, to be stuck onto the spine after purchase - or, as Time Out suggested, "stick it on [your] boss's computer" (1999).

Cunt's title is applicable in both the anatomical and abusive senses of the word, as Home explained in Will They Let Me Put Cunt On The Cover?: "[it] is called Cunt because it is narrated by a cunt in search of a cunt" (1999[c]). Prior to its publication, Kim Fowley and Esther Wiggins from the pressure-group Women Against Violent Language wrote to Time Out to extol the traditional feminist position: "the title and content of [Cunt is] deeply oppressive to women. It [...] reduces this very personal and private aspect of women's bodies to an obscene insult" (1999). In reply, the liberal Feminists Against Censorship group stressed that "calling a book [Cunt is not] deeply offensive to women or to anyone".

Other 'cunt' book titles include:

* Cunt Coloring Book (Tee Corinne, 1975)
* Big Cunt: Poeting From 1981-1982 (Billy Childish, 1982)
* A Good Cunt Boy Is Hard To Find (Doug Rice, 1998)
* Cunt-Ups (Dodie Bellamy, 2001)
* Cunt (John Giorno, 1969)
* Oh! My Cunt! (1899)
* Cunt Collector (Max Royal, 1971)
* Taking The Cunt Prize Ring Stories (Charles E VanLoan, 1915)
* Farewell The Floating Cunt (DA Levy, 1964)
* Cannabis I: Glasgow Cunt Sez Shite U No Like (Gary G Graham, 1999)
* Cannabis V: More News From The Home Cunt? (Gary G Graham, 1999)
* Cunt Of Hope (Ben Prosser, 2000)
* Dwindles Of Cunt (Arthur Craven, 1993)
* La Farlane Cunt (Delfo Zorzut, 1919)
* Lo Cunto De Li Cunti (Giambattista Basile, 1960)
* Lo Cunto Dell'Uerco (Giambattista Basile, 1960)
* L'Amur & Moardt Desperattium Dalg Cunt Othavo (Fadrich Wietzel, 1885).

In addition, Viz created the fictional book "NEW CUNTS" (2001), an anthology fit for "the Discerning Masturbator". Almost a 'cunt' title is Lawrence Durrell's book Tunc (1968), an anagram of 'cunt' that means 'next' in Latin.

The Pearl printed a poem titled Cunt in 1879:

"Cunt is a greedy, unsatisfied glutton.
All women are ready to yield up their mutton"

and the modern poem Woman's Cunt expresses equally antiquated notions of sexual availability:

"Woman's cunt
Sweet-dewed benefaction,
Sheath to sword
Seeking satisfaction" (19--).

The Guardian proudly proclaims that 'cunt' "occurs more frequently in [this paper] than in any other newspaper on earth" (Ian Mayes, 2002). It was the first newspaper to use the word uncensored on its front page, when Paul Kelso quoted Roy Keane's criticism of the Irish football manager: "you're not even Irish, you English cunt" (2002). As the newspaper later admitted, "Reproduction on the front page of the unexpurgated words of Keane brought protests not only from many readers, but from one or two members of staff" (Ian Mayes, 2002). Indeed, Keane also attempted to distance himself from the word (ironically, in an interview with The Guardian): "you did not employ the term, 'an English cunt'? Keane looks pained and deeply affronted. 'No. No way. I have to live in England, and to be accused of saying that sort of thing, it's not nice for my wife and family[']" (Sean O'Hagan, 2002).

'Cunt' has yet to appear in any newspaper headlines, being replaced by 'c***' (as in Last Taboo Broken By Sex & The C*** (1999) by Richard Brooks) and by '****' (as in a "stupid ****" headline in The Sun from 2003). The word's first appearance on a magazine cover came when Viz produced their "SWEARIEST COVER EVER", including the line "I THOUGHT I WAS A DAFT CUNT!" (2000).

Viz also initiated an occasional feature titled Celebrity Cunts, for which readers were invited "to nominate stroppy stars for the title of Britain's No. 1 celebrity cunt" (1998). Danny LaRue ("Brief encunter", a pun on Brief Encounter), Rod Stewart ("Do ya think I'm cunty?", a pun on Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?), and Michael Crawford ("supercunt") were all duly nominated. (Their fellow nominee Jim Davidson was summarily dismissed by Euan Ferguson in 2001, who defined 'cunt' as "a woman's genitalia or a man who is Jim Davidson"). Some years after Celebrity Cunts, a suspiciously similar exercise was mounted by Front magazine, which published a list of Britain's Biggest C**ts! (2003). The list asserted Chris Tate's inalienable "right to cunthood" and rightly proclaimed Michael Winner to be "the Count Of Cuntdom". Front's editor claimed that the list "set a world record in 'use of the c-word'" (Eoin McSorley, 2003), and the article's body-text is indeed liberally sprinkled with 'cunt's, though its large-font title was never printed without asterisks.

Smut and Lazy Frog, two further Viz rivals, have both excelled themselves by producing 'cunt' posters: Smut's election banner proclaiming "VOTE FOR NONE OF THE CUNTS!" and Lazy Frog's Billy Elliot parody "Cunty Elliot" (both 2001). Furthermore, Smut has a comic strip called Watch Out Beadle's A Cunt (200-).

The only magazines actually to use 'cunt' in their titles are the fictional "Cunt On Cunt" (Brett Easton Ellis, 1991) and the underground hard-core duo Cunts & Grunts and Sewer Cunt (both 19--). Music magazine Uncut is known disparagingly amongst its rivals as 'Ucunt' (an anagram of the title, meaning 'you cunt'), and Manhunt is known by its own editor, Eric James, as "mancunt" (2002). Kutt magazine is named after 'kutt' - the Dutch term for 'cunt' - and there is also a magazine called Quim, its title etymologically linked to 'cunt'. Quim has featured a short story by Linda Sanchez titled Greedy Cunt ("I measure your needs and wants by the wetness of your cunt", 2001), and Antaeus has included one called Lucky Pierre & The Cunt Auction (1974).

Cunt On The Stage

We have seen how cable television has challenged America's 'cunt' taboo, though there is something more intrinsically shocking about hearing an actor in the theatre using the word. On television, we can channel-hop at will, though in the theatre the audience has no such control. Thus, Patrick Marber's play Closer, despite featuring 'cunt' merely in a throwaway line, opened on Broadway to a great deal more controversy than Sex & The City's 'cunt' episode. In Closer, a male character uses 'cunt' in the presence of a woman and instinctively apologises. She is not offended, and replies: "I'm a grown-up. Cunt away!" (1997). Prompted by the fuss surrounding this anodyne dialogue, Andrew Goldman noted America's "grudging acceptance [and] unease with the word" (1999).

As Closer demonstrates, what is unremarkable in Britain can be highly controversial across the Atlantic. Patrick Marber himself advises caution with regard to the word: "In England, you can call another man a c[unt] but you should know him quite well. It's not a good idea to go c[unt]ing around in London".

Even in Britain, "there was a gasp when [Chris Klein] said the c-word" during the play This Is Our Youth (Steve Smith, 2003), according to Graham Norton who interviewed the play's cast. Freddie Prinze was unfazed: "It's a funny word!", and Norton agreed: "We say it a lot[.] Driving, I hear it a lot!". The gasp from the British audience was perhaps an expression of surprise that the word was spoken by a young American actor, rather than an expression of shock at simply hearing the word itself. Lynn Gardner reported a similar situation during a British performance of The Vagina Monologues: "When the word ['cunt'] was first said a little gasp rippled through the audience, but within 90 seconds most of the audience were chanting the word" (2002).

One play whose language has genuinely shocked British audiences is Stitching, by Anthony Neilson (2002). A raw and brutally honest examination of the rebuilding of a miserable relationship, the play's most graphic language comes when its central couple exchange insults:

"If you'd turned out to be a total cunt I wouldn't [be here]."
"I thought I did turn out to be a total cunt."
"Did you?" [...]
"That's what I took from you calling me a total cunt."
"When did I call you a total cunt?" [...]
"Monday."
"Yes, well, on Monday, you were a total cunt".

Johann Hari complains of Stitching that "Some lines are deliberately provocative and offensive" (2002), and Sarah Burrell is concerned that the viciousness of the play's dialogue jars with the reconciliatory plot: "That this is a world where female genitalia cannot be referred to enough, and never without the C-word, is understood, but matching the sadomasochistic language of the couple's past with the Relate-style counselling of the play's present is something of a challenge" (2002).

Bunt Lunt Punt: Acceptance Through Comedy

Broadly, the appearances of 'cunt' in the media can be categorised as either euphemistic or repetitious. That is, 'cunt' either appears obliquely (in a disguised form) or repeatedly (uttered over and over again). The former is popular in contemporary comedy, while the latter is largely confined to less mainstream arenas. The euphemistic appearances in contemporary comedy are an indication of the word's increasing mainstream acceptance. In these instances, the word is never used directly; rather, it is humorously implied, with the humour reducing its potency and the euphemism removing its shock-value.

There are many examples of the 'cunt' taboo being challenged by this comic, euphemistic usage. The Monty Python sketch Crunchy Frog, for instance, includes a character called "Constable Kuntt" (1976). (Compare this to "Phil MaC[un]ttup" - 'Fill My Cunt up' - from Oooer Surgery, 2001). An earlier Python sketch, Travel Agent, features a character who calls himself a "silly bunt" (1972) after establishing that he always replaces the letter 'c' with 'b'. The 'bunt'/'cunt' link was also employed by Tim Dowling in this fictitious chat-room transcript (2002):

"I'M A (FILTERED) SALESMAN"
"I'm showing you a yellow card for swearing"
[...] "IT WAS A TYPO[.] I'M A BUNTING SALESMAN".

After 'bunt' came 'Lunt': Jack Dee joked about a schoolteacher who was teased because "his name was Mr Lunt" (Juliet May, 1992). Clearly a pattern is emerging: after 'Lunt' came 'Punt', as Dan Antopolski suggested "There once was a woman called Punt" as an ideal first line for a limerick (Becky Martin, 2000). There was even a BBC Choice panel-game titled Stupid Punts (2001), punning on 'Stupid Cunts'. Like earlier Cockney rhyming slang such as 'Berkshire Hunt', 'bunt', 'Lunt', and 'Punt' all rhyme with 'cunt' - explaining Richard Adams's insistence that 'punt' "rhymes with bank manager" (2001). Similarly, Gareth McLean suggested that "there are only so many rhymes you can do with "shunt" before you reach Margaret Thatcher" (2001[b]).

Kenneth Williams has declared: "I'm a cult figure, you see. I'm an enormous cult. I am!" (Wogan, 198-), punning on the similarity of 'cult' and 'cunt'; likewise, a headline in Bizarre read Bunch Of Cults (2000). Frank Skinner made a similar joke about "Kent': "I went out last night to a golf club in Kent. I knew where I was [because everyone] shouted 'Kent!' when I [arrived]!" (Peter Orron, 2001).

In The League Of Gentlemen, the line "Sit up straight, you bone-idle, lazy cun-" (Steve Bendelack, 1999) was cut off before the final 't' could be heard. Similarly, on The Eleven O'Clock Show, Ricky Gervais turned "you stupid c-" (2000) into a running joke, always being interrupted before he could say 'unt'. An episode of the situation comedy Hippies parodying the Oz obscenity trial used a speech-bubble saying "I AM A CUN" (Martin Dennis, 1999) on the cover of the fictional Mouth magazine. The 'T' was obscured by a character's finger and a piece of paper, and, when spoken aloud, the word was drowned out by the sound of a gavel. In the programme, 'cunt' was described as "[THE] WORST WORD IN [THE] ENGLISH LANGUAGE [...] an horrific word describing something very mysterious and taboo".

In Goodness Gracious Me, "FUKCNT" (Nick Wood and Christine Gernon, 2000), which can be rearranged to form 'FUCK' and 'CUNT', was shown on a series of Scrabble tiles. In Let Them Eat Cake there were several references to "the old Comte" (Christine Gernon, 1999), which, like 'Count', bears a phonetic similarity to 'cunt'; co-writer Jennifer Saunders has said of 'cunt', "because it's still the only taboo word, it's the funniest word" (Peter Higgins, 1999). In I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, 'cunt' was suggested by the line "Dear Clint, sorry about the spelling mistake in my last letter" (John Naysmith, 2001).

In a particularly subtle reference, at the British Comedy Awards Jonathan Ross obliquely described 'cunt' as "consonant, vowel, consonant, consonant" (1998). The Fast Show recited a list of alliterative vaginal synonyms, including "mountain of minge" (Mark Mylod, 2000), though "a cornucopia of" was followed by a suggestive pause, requiring as it does a vaginal term beginning with 'c'.

The proximity of 'cunt' and 'can't' was exploited in a newspaper reference to Stewart Home's novel Cunt: "[the] book has such a rude, albeit brief, title that one "can't" print it in a family newspaper" (Mark Sanderson, 1999). A very similar instance is that of 'cant', as in this pun on 'cunt' and 'cigar':

"Shameless cant."
"Close but no cigur!" (Paul Wheeler, 2002).

All of these various 'cunt' euphemisms in modern British comedy (which, of course, follow a tradition set down by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare) demonstrate an increasing willingness to acknowledge the word's existence and an attempt to belittle the taboo against it. By laughing at our inability to utter a forbidden word, we recognise the arcane nature of the taboo and begin to challenge it.

For instance, Ian Hislop, in a speech at Coventry Cathedral, joked about "a four-letter word beginning with 'cu' [that isn't] 'cute'" (2000). This example is especially interesting, due to the context in which it was spoken. Hislop's speech was addressed to a primarily middle-aged audience at Coventry Cathedral, and he was introduced by the Bishop of Coventry. That 'cunt' could be joked about in such circumstances is a clear indication of the public's increasing tolerance towards it.

Cunt Cunt Cunt: Repetition & Over-Use

In tandem with the trend towards 'cunt' euphemism is a significant, though less prolific, trend towards the over-use and repetition of the word, as in Stephen Fry's delicious phrase "cuntly cunt" (1991) and Stewart Lee's extraordinary "cunting cunting cunting cunt" (2002). The genesis of this 'cunt' overkill can be traced back to a series of improvisations by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, the Derek & Clive recordings. Cook and Moore's earlier collaboration Not Only... But Also... (James Gilbert, 1970) was restricted by television regulations regarding acceptable content; using alliterative substitution, it used the phrase "fish off, chip chips" to pun on 'fuck off, cunty chops', the reference being permitted by virtue of its convolution.

By contrast, Derek & Clive avoided any form of subtlety or euphemism; the sketch You Stupid Cunt sets the tone, beginning with the words "Hello, cunt! You stupid cunt!" (1977). What is remarkable about these recordings, sustained attempts to express "every idea and emotion through swearing" (Francis Hanly, 2002), is that they are completely unrestrained and yet have been censored neither by the artists themselves nor by their record company.

Indeed, so uninhibited were the dialogues that Moore later attempted to distance himself from them, attributing their extreme content to Cook and not himself: "[Peter] made my jaw drop a couple of times. I thought, 'Are you really saying that?' [H]e probably wanted to shock people, and he did, you know, he shocked me" (Louise Heaton, 1996). In fact, it was Moore who made the most frequently obscene contributions, often punctuating Cook's streams of inventiveness with a token 'cunt' or 'fuck', as Francis Hanley confirms: "In order to keep up with Peter, Dudley would often result to pure smut" (2002).

Moore was more candid with his biographer, Douglas Thompson, paraphrasing This Bloke Came Up To Me as "You're calling me a cunt, you cunt?" (1996) and admitting that his mother thought 'cunt' was "the filthiest word that had ever been invented". His obscene sense of humour was revealed during a stage show in the 1970s when he "bared his arse [to the restless audience], while exclaiming 'I'll tell you why you're waiting. The cunt's drunk! The cunt's drunk! The cunt's drunk!'" (John Hind, 2002). Years later, while discussing alternative names for 'Tesco' on Clive Anderson Talks Back, he suggested "Tescunt" (199-).

The Derek & Clive recordings prefigured the 'four-letter fury' headlines later accorded to V; even the water metaphors were the same, with Derek & Clive being described by William Cook as a "profane stream of semi-consciousness" (2002) and, in Peter Cook's parody of a fulminating tabloid, "a shower of filth" (1976). James Ferman, in banning the Derek & Clive film, cited their raison d'etre as "to be as offensive as possible and to break every taboo the performers can think of, however outrageous" (William Cook, 2002). Moore's biographer agreed, dismissing them as "schoolboy lavatory language zipped up to the nth degree" (Douglas Thompson, 1996).

While the Derek & Clive recordings set the benchmark for comic offensiveness, their album sleeves were less explicit. Their first, most graphic recording, Come Again, featured "SEE YOU EN TEE" (1977) on its sleeve, a phonetic rendering of the letters 'C U N T'. This recalls the popular euphemism 'see you next Tuesday', and was copied virtually verbatim many years later by It's Only TV But I Like It (Ian Lorimer, 1999):

"See you-"
"N T".

Another notable over-exponent of 'cunt' is Alexi Sayle, one of whose stage characters, 'Mr Sweary', used to shout "Fucking c[unt], you wanker. Fucking c[unt], you wanker. Fucking c[unt], you wanker" (Peter Higgins, 1999). For Sayle and other alternative comedians, 'cunt' became a symbol of anti-mainstream rebellion, as Rik Mayall remembers: "[when] we weren't allowed to say the c-word, for example - the four-letter word that begins with 'c' that's even ruder than the f-word - that was it, even for Alexi. That's when we said 'Fuck this!'[.] So that's when we started using the c-word as much as possible!".

Two comedians - Jerry Sadowitz and Matt Lucas - became indelibly associated with 'cunt' on the comedy circuit, due to their frequent usage of the word. Sadowitz, whose unique brand of ironic homophobia is demonstrated by his fictional booklet titled "DON'T PUT YOUR COCK IN ANOTHER MAN'S ARSE, YOU STUPID CUNT!" (2003), was "famous for being the bloke who said "c[unt]" on stage" (Ben Marshall, 1998) and has been described as "a man who seems to have dedicated his life to destigmatising the C-word" (Richard Vine, 2001). Lucas admits to being styled "the c[unt] comedian" (2000) for much the same reason. More surprisingly, Stanley Kubrick also used the word a great deal, according to Frederic Raphael: "As if to prove what buddies we now are, he uses the word "cunt" a lot. He talked of a "shaggy-cunt story" when I outlined my role-playing scenario for the orgy" (1999).

The Vagina Monologues "regularly got theatres full of women, and celebrities like Melanie Griffith and Gillian Anderson, to chant "C[unt]!" over and over again, as a way to exorcise the venom from the word" (Andrew Goldman, 1999); indeed, Glenn Close encouraged "18,000 people to stand and chant the word cunt at Madison Square Garden" (Eve Ensler, 2001). With less noble intentions, "a woman [spent] an hour shouting the word "cunt" at the top of her voice" (Jon Wilde, 1997) as part of the performance art event Art Shock Blowup. At the end of UFO, Chubby Brown repeats (to little disagreement) "I'm a cunt, I'm a cunt, I'm a cunt" (Tony Dow, 1993). The sexually liberated band Rockbitch (profiled by Channel 5's This Is Rockbitch) urged the audiences at their concerts to chant "Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!" (Norman Hull, 2003) in celebration of the vagina's capacity for sexual pleasure.

Irvine Welsh, who chanted "cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt" (1996) during a Primal Scream single, has become one of the most prominent over-exposers of the word 'cunt', which he describes as "the all-purpose term for someone else, either friendly or unfriendly" (Ed Vulliamy, 1999). Welsh's novel Trainspotting ("That cunt, that cunt 'n' his fuckin' mates back thair, that's the cunts thit fuckin' stabbed ma brar!", 1993) and Danny Boyle's film of the book ("That lassie got glassed and nae cunt leaves here 'til we find oot what cunt did it!", 1996) introduced mainstream audiences to gritty contemporary Scottish fiction, as characterised by Private Eye: "So what is that generation saying? "Yacuntya!" on every page" (Bookworm, 2002).

Welsh's novel Glue includes a section called Young Cunts ("The definition of 'young cunts' covered everybody younger than himself", 2001), and his novella A Smart Cunt includes a chapter titled Christmas With Blind Cunt ("even more of a cunt. Like Blind Cunt", 1994). In his novel Porno (2002), Welsh has fun repeating the word ("CUNT... CUNT... CUNT... CUNT...") and creates the evocative alternative "CAHHNNTTT".

Maya Baran describes Welsh's attitude to 'cunt': "For Irvine, saying c[unt] was like Americans saying the word 'like'[.] We would have to send him to a speech therapist and a hypnotist to make him stop" (Andrew Goldman, 1999). Constant repetition of 'cunt' in this way - "to repeat the word until it [is] evacuated of its power" (Simon Carr, 2001) - serves to reduce its offensive potential, as we become desensitised and conditioned to its use: "to be shocking relies on being inappropriate to the context [so] as soon as the shocking becomes familiar, it's no longer shocking[.] What was originally shocking because it was inappropriate to the context has ceased to be so because it has become the context" (Hermann Vaske, 1999). Sometimes, however, even a single usage is one too many: Welsh recalls that his most embarrassing moment was when he described a female colleague as a "poisonous cunt" to his employer, not realising that the woman in question was the employer's wife (2003).

For Sally Vincent, Welsh's frequent usage of 'cunt' can still retain its shock-value in certain contexts: "if [Welsh] says, "I got completely cunted in the pub last night", it means he got plastered rather emphatically. The point is, where he comes from it would be offensive to use the term to mean female genitalia. Apart from that, it's a good, blunt word, a cosh of a word. Unlike prick, which is so insubstantial" (2002). This view is supported by a female interviewee of John Doran, who feels that, if 'cunt' is used endlessly, its literal meaning ('vagina') is devalued: "If your boyfriend has been spending all day calling his car a cunt, calling the referee a cunt, calling the dog a cunt... it's the last word you want to hear in relation to yourself" (2002).

Using a diametrically opposite tactic, Ian McEwan's novel Atonement includes a long description of the word though rarely employs it directly: "The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely[.] Rhyming words took their form from children's books - the smallest pig in the litter ['runt'], the hounds pursuing the fox ['hunt'], the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow ['punts']. Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word's existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which - Briony was certain - the word referred. The context helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters ['c', 'u', and 'n'] were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings" (2001).

Cunt As The New Fuck

'Cunt' is making tentative, and frequently euphemistic, appearances in the contemporary media, though, by contrast, 'fuck' seems omnipresent, its taboo having largely been eradicated: "it is becoming more and more acceptable to use fuck in social contexts that would have been unthinkable even a generation ago" (Jesse Scheidlower, 1995). As 'fuck' becomes increasingly acceptable in mainstream popular culture, 'cunt' is left as the last swearword with any true power to shock: "Swearwords are no longer truly obscene [...] only the c-word has any real shock value" (Tom Shone, 1994).

'Fuck' is used only once in films with 'PG-13' classifications and, likewise, 'cunt' is gaining mainstream acceptance through single appearances in many film scripts. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver is a classic example: "Here is someone who stood up against all the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit" (1976). Several novels and plays also include a single 'cunt', and a solitary usage of the word has great dramatic effect at the end of David Mamet's play Oleanna: "You vicious little bitch[.] I wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot pole. You little cunt" (1992).

Several comedians are also testing the water with single uses of 'cunt', hence Rob Newman's reference to compassion fatigue and the Ethiopian famine: "Wipe those flies off your face, you lazy cunt!" (Steve Bendelack, 1992). Chris Morris, in his television satire Brass Eye, flashed an "obscene subliminal message" (Jade Garrett, 2001) that read "[MICHAEL] GRADE IS A CUNT" (Michael Cumming, 1997) and appeared onscreen for only a single frame. Grade was Chief Executive of Channel 4 at the time, and had delayed broadcasting Brass Eye; the subliminal insult was Morris's angry reply. He was recommissioned by Channel 4, however, and his next series, Jam, featured a tee-shirt with the slogan "LITTLE CUNT" (2000). Morris's subliminal stunt had a predecessor some ten years older, as, in the 1980s, 'cunt' made a subliminal, subversive appearance when "an issue of International Musician had a big feature in which emboldened drop letters spelled ['MARTIN ELLIS IS A CUNT']" (Street Of Shame, 2001).

In his Innit video cassette, Ali G discusses the tape's classification: "to get it an '18' I is gonna 'ave to use a word which I 'as never used before [...]: 'cunt'" (Sasha Baron-Cohen, 1999). The irony here is that it was actually classified '15', indicating that the word is becoming more acceptable to the censors. When it is used insultingly, however, that acceptance is rescinded, as Ken Loach discovered when his Sweet Sixteen was given an '18' certificate due to its "aggressive use of the c-word" (Fiona Morrow, 2002).

Sweet Sixteen's screenwriter, Paul Laverty, put it more succinctly - "we get an 18 because of the c-word" (Dayle Crutchlow, 2002) - and complained bitterly about the decision: "I'm furious about it[.] It's like, this is an aggressive word which really gets up the nose of polite society. Just like it would get up her nose if you tried to use it in front of your working-class granny, but [...] the kids on the street corners use it all the time. [...] We let the kids speak the way they actually speak. Can you imagine saying to the kids, 'OK, you can swear and curse - just don't say that word'?".

Laverty was especially angry that the BBFC should find 'cunt' unacceptable in the context of his film yet permissible in other contexts: "I think there is [a] very important point of principle here; it concerns the world of the story. "Cunt," as used in polite Manhattan society [...] is of a totally different nature to the word as used by these kids on street corners in the west of Scotland. In many ways all they have in common is the spelling. In terms of its resonance, its rhythm, its acceptance, and many other cultural subtleties I genuinely do wonder if it is even the same word" (2002).

Swearing Chic: The End Of The Cunt Taboo?

'Cunt' is currently undergoing a period of transition. Feminist attempts to reappropriate it have so far achieved only limited success, and liberal attempts to ingratiate it into popular culture have not yet seen it accorded the same ubiquity as 'fuck': "the c-word has seemed safely on the other side of propriety. Until now[.] The real question is whether or not c[unt] is going to lose its taboo" (Andrew Goldman, 1999).

For the time being, however, 'cunt' stands alone: whilst 'fuck' is everywhere, 'cunt' is conspicuous by its absence. The drama Never Never, for instance, runs through the full gamut of profanity, with one notable exception; it has been described as "probably the most swearisome broadcast of the year. Someone says "fuck" every couple of seconds. [...] All your other slang favourites put in an appearance too, with the exception of the "c" word" (Charlie Brooker, 2000). James McDonald notes that 'cunt' "is much less likely to be heard on the wireless or seen in newspapers than the word fuck" (1988), though standards of acceptability are in constant flux. What is unacceptable to one generation becomes acceptable to the next. Tony Thorne is correct that 'cunt' remains "the most obscene of the [...] sexually-related taboo words" (1990), though his further claim that it is "probably the only word that is still banned from British newspapers and television" is already out of date. Its position as "the most taboo and insulting word in the English language" (Catherine Blackledge, 2003) will not last forever.

Gilbert Adair accepts this notion, though he is disturbed by it: "Nowadays, with fewer and fewer exceptions, print journalists are free, should the context require it, to bandy about [...] all four-letter words, not excluding the last to resist common usage, "cunt"[.] Thus individuals who would never dream of using the word "cunt" in their private verbal exchanges now risk finding themselves confronted with it on the printed newspaper page" (1999). (Paradoxically, in the process of writing a newspaper article condemning the use of 'cunt' in newspapers, he himself uses the word twice.)

Neil Lyndon also problematises the increasing popularity of 'cunt': "Today there is just one word - describing female genitalia - which is still considered taboo and is as unacceptable on television as the word f[uck was] 20 years ago. F[uck is now] constantly in use [...] so you can see what will happen next" (2000). In a surreal exchange during the Oz obscenity trial, George Melly insisted that many liberated people use swearwords quite openly, even amongst their own children. The prosecutor, amazed, asked him: "Would you call your eight- or ten-year-old daughter a little cunt?" (Sheree Folkston, 1991), to which Mellie replied: "I don't think she is one, but I might refer to a politician as one [...] these words have lost a great deal of their ability to shock".

This form of cultural liberalism is as distasteful to some as it is revelatory to others: "There are many who would say [the old] days were better [and] that as a society we've become more coarsened, and that our freer use of "rough" language is one indicator" (Tom Aldridge, 2001). Rather than condemning it as a coarsening of the language, however, we should celebrate it as a symbol of our collective liberation from cultural repression.

'Cunt' should be used openly and freely, without censorship, euphemism, or innuendo. Only then will its power as a misogynistic insult will be diminished, will our language become more inclusive, and will outdated notions of sin and obscenity be discarded. In the words of Stephen Fry: "there won't be any swearing [in the future], because [...] almost every swearword now is more-or-less acceptable in broadcasting and every other form [therefore] it is impossible to imagine that there will be any taboo words which are unsayable, unless you invent new disgusting parts of the body that we haven't thought of yet!" (Simon Elmes, 2000).

'Fuck' is now ubiquitous on badges and tee-shirts, and 'cunt' is catching it up. As mentioned earlier, Cafe Press distributes a wide variety of I Love My Cunt and C.U.N.T. items, though this is merely the tip of the iceberg and there is a great deal of other 'cunt' merchandise on sale. The Brighton stationer Kiss Me Kwik produces Happy Birthday Cunt and Jesus Loves Everyone Except For You You Cunt! greetings cards (both 199-). Bizarre magazine has launched a wrapping-paper range (199-) including You Cunt, Cunt Cuntface Cunting Motherfucker, and Merry Christmas You Cunt. One can buy a You Fat Cunt mobile telephone picture-message (2002) and a Jesus Loves You Everybody Else Thinks You're A Cunt tee-shirt (Shock Horror, 200-). Mahogany Central manufactures a Cunt necklace (200-), which was worn with pride by Janet Street-Porter during her Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in 2003 (ironically, during the show she also used 'cunt' as an insult to convey her hatred for her mother, echoing Kathy Acker's use of the term in Algeria). There is also a range of 'cunt' badges by Almighty Marketing: Cunt, Got Cunt?, I'm Pro-Cunt & I Vote!, and Cunt Is My Co-Pilot (all 199-). This increasing cultural presence represents a contemporary cultural trend that can be termed 'swearing chic': "swearing and obscenity [have] achieved a kind of folk-heroic position within contemporary culture" (Michael Bracewell, 2002).

Unsurprisingly, this situation does not please everybody: campaigning against swearing in the media, Lady Olga Maitland has called for a return to "good, clean entertainment, which is a pleasure for us all [...] and high literature provides all of that" (Kerry Richardson, 1994). In fact, "high literature" is far from 'cunt'-free. The word appears in Ulysses, one of the greatest modern novels. It is hinted at in Hamlet, perhaps the greatest example of dramatic literature. It also appears in modern editions of classic reference books, notably the Oxford English Dictionary and Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus.

It is not hard to imagine a future in which our cultural, audio-visual, and literary ambience is completely surrounded by the word. Imagine the scene: wearing an I Love My Cunt tee-shirt and reading Cunt by Stewart Home whilst listening to Cunt by Aphex Twin on the hi-fi. With, for good measure, some of Judy Chicago's cunt-art on the wall. Or perhaps, on your birthday, receiving a Happy Birthday Cunt card and a Cunt necklace wrapped in You Cunt paper. Welcome to Cuntland!

Appendix: Works Quoted

* Phyllis Abrahams & Alan Brody (1968) The Tragedy Of Hamlet Prince Of Denmark [The Magnum Shakespeare]
* Kathy Acker (1984) Algeria: A Series Of Invocations Because Nothing Else Works
* Gilbert Adair (28/9/1999) Welcome To Planet Porn [The Independent, Tuesday Review]
* Richard Adams (12/12/2001) City Diary [The Guardian]
* William Albig (1956) Modern Public Opinion
* Tom Aldridge (12/4/2001) The Seven Forbidden Words [Nuvo Newsweekly #12.6]
* Reinhold Aman (199-) The Official New Man's Sex Quiz [Maledicta]
* Paul Thomas Anderson (1999) Magnolia
* Louis Aragon (1928) Le Con D'Irene
* Henry Spencer Ashbee (1880) My Secret Life
* Henry Spencer Ashbee (1885) Catena Librorum Tacendorum
* Rowan Atkinson (1980) Live In Belfast
* Abiola Awojobi (1/12/2001) Home Truths
* Mike Barfield (24/1/2003) Apparently: Wordsearch Through The Ages [Private Eye #1072]
* Sasha Baron-Cohen (1999) Innit
* Georges Bataille (1928) Histoire De L'Oeil
* Battle To Ban Shock TV Poem (12/10/1987) [The Sun]
* Andy Baybutt (2002) When Hippies Ruled The World
* Henry Beard & Christopher Cerf (1992) The Official Politically Correct Dictionary & Handbook
* Matthew Beard (29/1/2003) C-Word Allowed To Make Debut On BBC Television [The Independent]
* Marianna Beck (1998) [Libido #10.4]
* Steve Bell (17/1/2003) If... [The Guardian, G2]
* Steve Bendelack (15/2/1999) Escape From Royston Vasey [The League Of Gentlemen]
* Catherine Bennett (21/6/2001) I Heard Maureen Lipman Say The 'C' Word! [The Guardian, G2]
* Gloria Bertonis (2003) Stone Age Divas & The Origins Of Civilization
* Dea Birkett (2/8/2001) Don't Lock The Kids Up Let Them Out [The Guardian, G2]
* Dea Birkett (4/3/2003) All Of Me [The Guardian, G2]
* Nicola Black (2002) Designer Vaginas
* Catherine Blackledge (2003) The Story Of V: Opening Pandora's Box
* William Blackstone (1793) The Plays Of William Shakespeare
* Alan Bold (1979) The Bawdy Beautiful: The Sphere Book Of Improper Verse
* Bookworm (27/6/2002) Piss... & Shit With It [Private Eye #1059]
* Danny Boyle (1996) Trainspotting
* Michael Bracewell (2002) Writing The Modern World [Dirty Words Pictures]
* Grace Bradberry (20/10/2002) Swearing Sex & Brilliance [The Observer, Review]
* Peter Bradshaw (2/7/1999) Con Trick [The Guardian, Friday Review]
* Peter Bradshaw (18/10/2002) Family Misfortunes [The Guardian, Friday Review]
* Breakfast Show (1999)
* Joanna Briscoe (30/8/2003) Snatch Squad [The Guardian, Review]
* Britain's Biggest C**ts! (10/2003) [Front #62]
* British Comedy Awards (1998)
* British Comedy Awards (1999)
* Broadcasting Standards Commission (1998)
* Charlie Brooker (4/11/2000) Screen Burn [The Guardian, The Guide]
* Charlie Brooker (2001) TV Go Home: TV Listings The Way They Should Be
* Richard Brooks (11/10/1987) Clear Road For Rude Ode [The Observer]
* Richard Brooks (14/2/1999) Last Taboo Broken By Sex & The C*** [The Observer] Craig Brown (20/8/1999) Diary: Frederic Raphael [Private Eye]
* Lenny Bruce (1970) The Essential Lenny Bruce
* Bill Bryson (1990) Mother Tongue: The English Language
* Michael Burke (1/3/1998) Mosley Obscenity Breaks TV Taboo [The Mail On Sunday]
* William Burroughs (1959) Naked Lunch
* Ronald Butt (22/10/1987) Disdain Vs Manners [The Times]
* Deborah Cameron (1985) Feminism & Linguistic Theory Pat Caplan (1987) The Cultural Construction Of Sexuality
* Scott Capurro (2000) Straight Jacket [Index On Censorship, The Last Laugh]
* Simon Carr (3/7/2001) Parental Advisory: Explicit Content [The Independent, Tuesday Review]
* Simon Carr (9/1/2003) The Sketch: Weasel Words Let Forth A Sickening Flood Of Cynicism [The Independent]
* Lee Carter (4/2002) Who's Got The Crack? [The Face #3.63]
* Charlie Catchpole (4/6/2001) Just A Weird Bunch Of Show-Offs Who Want Your Votes [Daily Express]
* CDJ (199-) Funky Cunt
* CDJ (199-) Xerox God Save The Queen
* Celebrity Cunts (1998) [Viz]
* Richard Chandler (3/1/2002) Country Matters [The Guardian]
* Channel Four (1999)
* Geoffrey Chaucer (1400) The Prologe Of The Wives Tale Of Bathe [The Tales Of Caunterbury]
* Judy Chicago (1970) Cock & Cunt
* Richard Christopher (199-) Poonerisms [Maledicta]
* Stephen Clark (1995) Something Generous In Meer Lust?: Rochester & Misogyny [Reading Rochester]
* Clive Anderson Talks Back (199-)
* Clark Collis (5/2001) Wasted Youths: Twenty-Five Things No-One Worries About Anymore (Q #176)
* Billy Connolly (1979) My Granny Is A Cripple [The Secret Policeman's Ball]
* Peter Cook (1976) Alias Derek & Clive [Sheffield & North Derbyshire Spectator]
* Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (1976) Derek & Clive: Live
* Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (1977) Derek & Clive: Come Again
* William Cook (2002) Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook
* Victoria Coren (2/1/2003) It's Enough To Make You Cuss & Blind [The Observer, Review]
* Suzanne Cotter (2002) Exhibition Guide [This Is Another Place]
* Council of Trent (1564)
* Lucinda Cowden (2001) Bland Ambition
* Richard Cowles & Colin Campbell (29/4/2002) When TV Gets Tough
* Cradle Of Filth (199-) Vestal Masturbation
* Dayle Crutchlow (10/10/2002) Loach: My Four-Letter Film Fury [Weekly Tribune]
* Michael Cumming (5/3/1997) Decline [Brass Eye]
* Cunt (1/7/1879) [The Pearl]
* Cuntdown (12/2001) Viz #111
* Cunty Elliot (2001) [Lazy Frog #1]
* HM Daleski (1965) The Forked Flame: A Study Of DH Lawrence
* Michael Dames (1976) The Silbury Treasure: The Great Goddess Rediscovered
* Michael Davis (1966) Twelfth Night [The Kennet Shakespeare]
* Matthew DeAbaitua (1998) Expletive Deleted: A Full & Frank Guide To Foul Language For The Modern Gentleman [Deluxe]
* John Deans & Garry Jenkins (12/10/1987) Four-Letter TV Poem Fury [Daily Mail]
* Martin Dennis (17/12/1999) Disgusting Hippies [Hippies]
* Graeme Donald (1994) The Dictionary Of Modern Phrase
* John Doran (3/2002) The Joy Of Swearing [Loaded #96]
* Tony Dow (1993) UFO
* Edward Dowden (1899) The Tragedy Of Hamlet [The Arden Shakespeare, The Works Of Shakespeare]
* Tim Dowling (23/5/2002) Citizen Cocaine [The Guardian, G2]
* Bill Drummond (2002[a]) The Daffodils [Penkiln Burn #19]
* Bill Drummond (2002[b]) Is God A Cunt?
* Bill Drummond (26/7/2002[c]) email to Matthew Hunt
* Annie Dunkinson (13/8/2003) PM
* Andrea Dworkin (1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women
* Andrea Dworkin (1987) Intercourse
* Philip Edwards (1985) Hamlet Prince Of Denmark [The New Cambridge Shakespeare]
* Sarah Eglin (200-) Countryfile
* Barbara Ellen (6/5/2001) Getting In Touch With Yourself [The Observer, Life]
* Albert Ellis (1951) The Folklore Of Sex
* Brett Easton Ellis (1991) American Psycho
* Simon Elmes (21/9/2000) The Roots Of English
* Tracey Emin (1999) No Chance
* Tracey Emin (2002) Weird Sex
* Eve Ensler (1996) The Vagina Monologues
* Eve Ensler (30/4/2001) Private Parts [The Guardian, G2]
* Chris Evans (199-) What Do You Call It Girls? [Breakfast Show]
* Daniel Farson (1991) With Gilbert & George In Moscow
* Suzi Feay (27/4/2003) This Is The Life [The Independent On Sunday, LifeEtc]
* Euan Ferguson (2/12/2001) Download Switch On [The Observer, Review]
* John Fletcher (1622) The Spanish Curate
* FLG (1841) The Stumer's [Swell's Night Guide]
* Sheree Folkston (1991) The Trials Of Oz [Performance]
* Michel Foucault (1976) La Volonte De Savoir I
* Kim Fowley & Esther Wiggins (19/5/1999) Fight The Home Front [Time Out #1500]
* Sigmund Freud (1912) Totem & Tabu: Uber Einige Ubereinstimmungen Im Seelenben Der Wilden & Der Neurotiker [Imago #1]
* Sigmund Freud (1924) Der Untergang Des Odipuskomplexes
* Stepen Fry (199-) Fry On Friday: The C Word [The Daily Telegraph]
* Stephen Fry (1991) The Liar
* Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie (1990) A Bit Of Fry & Laurie
* Peter Fryer (1963) Mrs Grundy: Studies In English Prudery
* Jane Gallop (1982) The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism & Psychoanalysis
* Lynn Gardner (12/5/2001) [The Guardian]
* Lynn Gardner (14/9/2002) The Vagina Monologues [The Guardian, The Guide]
* Jade Garrett (6/7/2001) Chris Morris Courts Controversy Again As Brass Eye Dropped [The Independent]
* Christine Gernon (9/9/1999) The Pox [Let Them Eat Cake]
* James Gilbert (1970) Not Only... But Also...
* Allen Ginsberg (1956) Howl
* David Glencross (1/11/1987) Censorship: Let The Viewers Decide [The Observer]
* Andrew Goldman (1999) A C-Change For NY [The New York Observer]
* Jamie Graham (11/2001) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II [Total Film # 58]
* Linda Grant (1993) Sexing The Millenium: A Political History Of The Sexual Revolution
* Jonathon Green (1993) Slang Down The Ages: The Historical Development Of Slang
* Jonathon Green (1998) The Cassell Dictionary Of Slang
* Germaine Greer (1969) Dear John
* Germaine Greer (1970[a]) The Female Eunuch
* Germaine Greer (6/1970[b]) Welcome To Cuntpower Oz [Oz #29: Female Energy]
* Germaine Greer (6/1970[c]) The Politics Of Female Sexuality [Oz #29: Female Energy]
* Germaine Greer (6/1970[d]) New Ways With Play Clothes [Oz #29: Female Energy]
* Germaine Greer (1971[a]) Lady Love Your Cunt [Suck]
* Germaine Greer (10/1971[b]) I Am A Whore [Suck #6]
* Germaine Greer (1986) The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays & Occasional Writings
* Germaine Greer (1999) The Whole Woman
* Andrew Grice (2/3/2001) Conservative Candidates Told To Avoid The C Word [The Independent]
* Annie Griffin (2001) Magical Realism [The Book Group]
* Francis Grose (1796) The Classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue
* Guillo Tina (200-) [Smut]
* Leslie Halliwell (1977) Halliwell's Film Guide
* Signe Hammer (25/7/1977) [The Village Voice]
* Francis Hanly (25/12/2002) Offensive: The Real Derek & Clive
* Hansard (1857)
* Johann Hari (12/8/2002) Sex & Violence [New Statesman]
* Tony Harrison (1985) V
* Ronald Harwood (2002) See You Next Tuesday
* HR Hays (1964) The Dangerous Sex: The Myth Of Feminine Evil
* Tim Healey (1980) A New Erotic Vocabulary [Maledicta #4]
* Tim Healey (18/2/2000) email to Matthew Hunt
* Louise Heaton (1996) Peter Cook [Omnibus]
* Thomas Heywood (16--) Wisewomen Of Hogsdon
* Peter Higgins (7/12/1999) Taboo Or Not Taboo? [A History Of Alternative Comedy]
* Lindsay Hill (29/3/2001) Country Matters [The Guardian]
* Kevin Hilton (1/1996) Death By A Thousand Cuts [Home Entertainment]
* John Hind (2002) Peter Cook: Over At Rainbow's [Over At Rainbow's]
* John Hind (5/1/2003) What's The Word?: Tenners [The Observer, OM]
* Claire Hinson (14/7/2002) Believe Nothing
* Ian Hislop (29/10/1987) Endpiece [The Listener]
* Ian Hislop (14/3/2000) The Canterbury Tales [Speaker's Corner]
* Liz Hoggard (5/10/2003) Murder Mayhem Mutilation - But Something's Missing [The Observer, Review]
* Richard Hoggart (1961) Introduction [Lady Chatterley's Lover]
* Simon Hoggart (22/12/2000) Gongs For Gaffes Chutzpah & A Great Escape [The Guardian]
* Simon Hoggart (16/7/2003) Whisper Of Confusion Tells Its Own Story [The Guardian]
* Mark Holborn (2003) Introduction [Hell]
* Nicole Holofcener (16/7/2000) Are We Sluts? [Sex & The City]
* Stewart Home (1999[a]) Cunt
* Stewart Home (1/12/1999[b]) letter to Matthew Hunt
* Stewart Home (12/1999[c]) Will They Let Me Put Cunt On The Cover? [Living Marxism #116]
* Graham Hough (1956) The Dark Sun
* Gerald Howarth (27/10/1987) Television Obscenity [Notices Of Questions & Motions]
* Polly Hudson (5/4/2003) TV's Hottest Property [Heat]
* Geoffrey Hughes (1991) Swearing: A Social History Of Foul Language Oaths & Profanity In English
* Norman Hull (7/5/2003) This Is Rockbitch
* Natalie Ingham & Jonathan Haynes (22/10/2002) The Sexual Revelation [Warwick Boar, The Core #25.3]
* Mark Irwin (3/2001[a]) Swearword: The Curse Of The C-Word [Bizarre #43]
* Mark Irwin (5/2001[b]) Swearword: Sweet Suffering Christ [Bizarre #45]
* ITV (199-) The Silence Of The Lambs
* Ian Jack (30/4/2002) Censor Moves On To The View From The Vicarage Garden [The Guardian, Saturday Review]
* Annamarie Jagose (1996) Queer Theory: An Introduction
* Wolf Jahn (1989) The Art Of Gilbert & George Or An Aesthetic Existence
* Eric James (9/2002) Greetings Manhunters [Manhunt #1]
* Julian Jebb (1971) Carnal Knowledge [Sight & Sound #40.4]
* Neil Jeffries (11/1997) Nil By Mouth [Empire #101]
* Howard Jenkins (1982) Hamlet [The Arden Shakespeare]
* Amelia Jones (1995) Sexual Politics: Feminist Strategies Feminist Conflicts Feminist Histories [Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party In Feminist Art History]
* Joreen (1970) Notes From The Second Year
* James Joyce (1922) Ulysses
* Andrea Juno & V Vale (1991)Angry Women [Re/Search #13]
* Kate Kellaway (22/4/2001[a]) Talking 'Bout Our Genitalia [The Observer, Review]
* Kate Kellaway (13/5/2001[b]) The Earth Didn't Move [The Observer, Review]
* Kellogg's (2002) Crunchy Nut Cornflakes
* Paul Kelso (25/5/2002) Keane: A Tenuous Grasp Of Anatomy [The Guardian]
* James Kent (29/1/2003) Witchcraze
* David Kerekes (1994) Sex Murder Art: The Films Of Jorg Buttgereit
* David Kerekes (1998) The Grotesque Burlesque: An Evening In The Company Of The Dragon Ladies & Friends [Headpress #17: Into The Psyche]
* Terry Kinane (23/9/2000) Lily Live
* Robert Knights (5/3/1998) Beyond The Pale [Mosley]
* Kuwait Times (2001)
* Steve Lamacq (23/10/1997) Evening Session
* Steve Lamacq (2000) Going Deaf For A Living
* Linacre Lane (1966) The ABZ Of Scouse: How To Talk Proper In Liverpool II
* Lanfranc (14--) Science Of Chirurgie
* Joan Larkin (1975) Housework
* Paul Laverty (2002) Sweet Sixteen
* DH Lawrence (1928) Lady Chatterley's Lover
* Mark Lawson (5/11/2001) Country Matters [The Guardian]
* Harvey Lee (13/10/1987) Demand For Ban On Four-Letter Poem Defied By Channel 4 [The Daily Telegraph]
* Stewart Lee (2002) Jerry Springer: The Opera
* William Leith (3/8/2000) Privates On Parade [The Guardian, G2]
* Bernard Levin (19/10/1987) An Adult's Garden Of Verse [The Times]
* Mark Lewisohn (1998) Radio Times Guide To TV Comedy
* Leslie Libman (4/2/2001) Blizzard Of '01 [Oz]
* Rod Liddle (24/10/2001) Today
* Ken Loach (1994) Ladybird Ladybird
* David Lodge (1988) Nice Work
* Ian Lorimer (1999) It's Only TV But I Like It
* Matt Lucas (3/8/2000) Work In Progress [The Guardian, G2]
* John Lydon (1990) Introduction [Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, Lady Chatterley's Lover]
* Neil Lyndon (28/8/2000) Why I Hate The Edinburgh F*@!*@*! [The Mail On Sunday]
* Paddy Lyons (1996) Introduction [Everyman's Poetry, Lord Rochester]
* Brenda Maddox (1/11/1987) Four & Against [The Sunday Telegraph]
* Madonna (2000) What It Feels Like For A Girl
* Madonna: Behind The American Dream (8/12/1990) [Omnibus]
* Laurie E Maguire (2000) Feminist Editing & The Body Of The Text [The Feminist Companion To Shakespeare]
* Kevin Maher (12/1/2003) What's Behind The Gore? [The Observer, Review]
* Mail Bomb (199-) If You Don't Listen To Anal Cunt You're A Fucking Cunt
* David Mamet (1992) Oleanna
* Patrick Marber (1997) Closer
* Marquee Meltdown! (2/1998) [Empire #104]
* Pati Marr (2000) Head On Comedy
* Ben Marshall (12/2/1998) Dark Star [The Guardian, The Guide]
* Becky Martin (4/11/2000) The Stand-Up Show
* Andrew Marvell (1653) To His Coy Mistress
* John Mateer (1997) Anachronism
* Ian Mayes (30/7/2001) Corrections & Clarifications [The Guardian]
* Ian Mayes (23/9/2002) Open Door: Undiluted & Undeleted [The Guardian]
* Brigid McConville & John Shearlaw (1984) The Slanguage Of Sex
* James McDonald (1988) Dictionary Of Obscenity & Taboo
* Ian McEwan (2001) Atonement
* Paul McGuigan (4/8/1997) The Granton Star Cause [Renegade TV]
* McLachlan (26/7/2002) [Private Eye #1059]
* Gareth McLean (4/1/2001[a]) Teenage Kicks [The Guardian, The Guide]
* Gareth McLean (3/12/2001[b]) Privatisation On Parade [The Guardian, G2]
* Gareth McLean (5/2/2003) Who's That Girl? [The Guardian, G2]
* Brian McNair (2002) Striptease Culture: Sex Media & The Democratization Of Desire
* Eric McSorley (10/2003) Pass The Swear Box [Front #62]
* Terence Meaden (1992) The Stonehenge Solution: Sacred Marriage & The Goddess
* Claire Michel (2000) The Eleven O'Clock Show: The News Alternative
* Thomas Middleton (1617) A Fair Quarrel
* Barry Miles (1989) Ginsberg: A Biography
* Henry Miller (1934) Tropic Of Cancer
* Casey Miller & Kate Smith (1976) Words & Women: New Language In New Times
* William Ian Miller (1997) The Anatomy Of Disgust
* Kate Millett (1970) Sexual Politics
* Kate Millett (1973) The Prostitution Papers
* Jane Mills (1989) Womanwords: A Vocabularly Of Culture & Patriarchal Society
* Minsheu (1617) Guide Into Tongues
* Juliet Mitchell (1974) Psychoanalysis & Feminism
* Monty Python (1972) Travel Agent
* Monty Python (1976) Crunchy Frog [A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick)]
* Chris Morris (6/4/2000) Jam
* Blake Morrison (24/10/1987) Harrison's Elegy In A City Graveyard [The Independent]
* Fiona Morrow (27/9/2002) Script-Fighting Man [The Independent, Review]
* Inga Muscio (1998) Cunt: A Declaration Of Independence
* Mark Mylod (1997) The Fast Show
* Mark Mylod (26/12/2000) The Last Fast Show Ever I
* Ian Nathan (11/1997) A Sort Of Homecoming [Empire #101]
* John Naysmith (1998) I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
* John Naysmith (9/12/2001) I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
* John Naysmith (13/4/2002) I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
* Anthony Neilson (2002) Stitching
* Sheila Nevins (2001) The Vagina Monologues
* New Musical Express (2000)
* Mike Nichols (1971) Carnal Knowledge
* No Mama No (1979)
* Matthew Norman (5/3/2002) Diary [The Guardian]
* Matthew Norman (10/1/2003) Diary [The Guardian]
* Eli M Oboler (1974) The Fear Of The Word: Censorship & Sex
* Sharon O'Connell (13/9/2000) Music [Time Out #1569]
* Ode To Those Four-Letter Words (----)
* Gary Oldman (1997) Nil By Mouth
* Pentti Olli (2/7/1999) Brit-Writer's Damp Trip To Harma-Land [Helsingin Sanomat]
* Oooer Surgery: This Time It's Serious (2001)
* Orlan (5/1995) I Do Not Want To Look Like... [Women's Art Magazine #64]
* Deborah Orr (17/3/2000) The Triumph Of Style Over Substance [The Independent, Friday Review]
* Oxford English Dictionary (1989)
* Alan Parker (2/2001) I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol: A Conversation With Steve Jones [Bizarre #42]
* Eric Partridge (1931) The Classical Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue
* Eric Partridge (1947) Shakespeare's Bawdy
* Eric Partridge (1961) A Dictionary Of Slang & Unconventional English
* Cindy Patton (4/1999) Hands-On Feminism's Best Jilling-Off Videos [On Our Backs #14.2]
* Julia Penelope (1990) Speaking Freely: Unlearning The Lies Of The Fathers' Tongues
* Noel Perrin (1969) Dr Bowdler's Legacy: A History Of Expurgated Books In England & America
* Anthony Petkovich (1999) Get It On Bang A Chong!: A Conversation With Superior Porn Slut Annabel Chong [Headpress #15: War In Heaven]
* Rhonda Pietrin (2001) Can I Have A Word?: An Article About Mike Hunt [Tertangala #1]
* Minnie Bruce Pratt (1995) S/He
* Primal Scream (1996) The Big Man & The Scream Team Meet The Barmy Army Uptown
* Protecting Thanet's Cuntryside (2000) [Adscene]
* Psychotic Reaction (199-) The Stupid Cunt Song
* Mark Radcliffe (16/7/2003) Word Power [The Guardian, Society]
* Ramona (1998) Sweet Smell Of Sick Sex
* Allan Ramsay (1724) The Ever Green: A Collection Of Scots Poems Wrote By The Ingenious Before 1600
* Frederic Raphael (1999) Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir Of Stanley Kubrick & Eyes Wide Shut
* RF Rattray (1/1961) On Lips Of Living Men [Quarterly Review #299.627]
* Hugh Rawson (1989) A Dictionary Of Invective: A Treasury Of Curses Insults Put-Downs & Other Formerly Unprintable Terms From Anglo-Saxon Times To The Present
* Philip Rawson (1968) Erotic Art Of The East
* Jay Rayner (22/4/2001) Country Matters [The Guardian, Weekend]
* Rellik Laires (199-) Razors In Ya Cunt
* Kerry Richardson (1994) Expletives Deleted [Without Walls]
* Siubhan Richmond (16/1/2002) This Morning
* ALF Rivet & Colin Smith (1979) Placenames Of Roman Britain
* CH Rolph (1961) The Trial Of Lady Chatterley: Regina Vs Penguin Books Ltd
* Herbert Ross (1995) Boys On The Side
* Jerry Sadowitz (10/2003) The Jerry Sadowitz Page [Front #62]
* Linda Sanchez (2001) Greedy Cunt [Quim #6]
* Mark Sanderson (18/7/1999) The Literary Life [The Sunday Telegraph, Review]
* Scargill Poem Is The Pits (12/10/1987) [Daily Express]
* Jesse Schiedlower (1995) The F-Word
* Schlitzkreig (199-) I Smoked Crack With Anal Cunt
* Andre Schwarz-Bart (1973) A Woman Named Solitude
* Martin Scorsese (1976) Taxi Driver
* ACJ Scott (2/4/2003) Notes & Queries [The Guardian, G2]
* Susan Seidelman (5/7/1998) The Power Of Female Sex [Sex & The City]
* William Shakespeare (1588) Loues Labour's Lost
* William Shakespeare (1590) The Comedie Of Errors
* William Shakespeare (1596) The Taming Of The Shrew
* William Shakespeare (1597) The Second Part Of Henry The Fourth
* William Shakespeare (1599) The Life Of Henry The Fift
* William Shakespeare (1601[a]) Alls Well That Ends Well
* William Shakespeare (1601[b]) Twelfe Night Or What You Will
* William Shakespeare (1602) The Tragedie Of Hamlet Prince Of Denmarke
* William Shakespeare (1603) Measure For Measure
* William Shakespeare (1605) The Tragedie Of King Lear
* William Shakespeare (1609) Sonnet CLI
* William Shakespeare (1611) The Tragedie Of Cymbeline
* William Shakespeare (1613) The Famous History Of The Life Of King Henry The Eight
* William Shakespeare (1622) The Tragedie Of Othello The Moore Of Venice
* Tom Shone (1994) Expletives Deleted? [The Sunday Times, Books]
* Edward Shorter (1982) A History Of Women's Bodies
* Elaine Showalter (1992) Sexual Anarchy: Gender & Culture At The Fin De Siecle
* Penelope Shuttle & Peter Redgrove (1978) The Wise Wound: Menstruation & Everywoman
* Sleeper (1997) Cunt London
* Arthur Smith (29/8/2002) [The Guardian, G2]
* Joan Smith (3/3/1998) The Big C [The Guardian, G2]
* Steve Smith (22/1/2003) V Graham Norton
* John Spencer (16/3/2001) Never Mind The Buzzcocks
* Mimi Spencer (23/1/2003) Why Can't We Just Let Our Hair Down? [The Guardian, G2]
* Kate Spicer (24/8/2003) Slut! [The Sunday Times, Style]
* Annie Sprinkle (1998) Confessions Of A Multimedia Whore: Twenty-Five Years As A Post-Porn Modernist
* Gloria Steinem (1979) The Way We Were & Will Be [Ms
* Street Of Shame (12/1/2001) [Private Eye #1019]
* William Stukeley (1743) Avebury Described
* Fiona Sturges (9/12/2001) Coming Home To A Hetero's Welcome [The Observer, Review]
* Diane Taylor (18/3/2002) The C Word [The Guardian, G2]
* The Balled Of Lupe (19--)
* The Final Cuntdown (23/6/1999) [Time Out #1505]
* The Frost Programme (1970)
* The Guardian (2000)
* The Independent (1988)
* The Queers (199-) I Want Cunt
* The Sex Pistols (1977) Never Mind The Bollocks
* The Sun (9/2003)
* The 2 Live Crew (1989) As Nasty As They Wanna Be
* Philip Thody (1997) Don't Do It!: A Dictionary Of The Forbidden
* Mick Thomas (2/5/2003) Friday Night
* Douglas Thompson (1996) Dudley Moore: On The Couch
* Tony Thorne (1990) Dictionary Of Contemporary Slang
* Three Jews Of Norfolk (19--)
* Jacob Tonson (1691) Upon His Drinking A Bowl
* Trailervision (2001) C.U.N.T. [trailervision.com/trailer.php?id=115]
* Alan Travis (15/5/1998) Molly Bloom & The DPP: How They Tried To Kill Off Ulysses [The Guardian]
* Katie Tyrll (31/1/2003) Dead Ringers
* Stephen Valenger (1572) Cockolds Kallender
* Hermann Vaske (1999) The World's Best Sellers: The Fine Art Of Separating People From Their Money [Arena]
* Sally Vincent (10/8/2002) Everybody's Doing It [The Guardian, Weekend]
* Sally Vincent (27/9/2003) At The Heart Of Affairs [The Guardian, Weekend]
* Richard Vine (22/12/2001) Jerry Sadowitz [The Guardian, The Guide]
* Viz #99 (2000)
* Vote For None Of The Cunts! (2001) [Smut #156]
* Ed Vulliamy (18/4/1999) American Graffiti: A Nation's Last Taboo Takes Centre Stage [The Observer]
* Martin Wainwright (12/1/2000) Streetname Chimes With Its Station [The Guardian]
* Barbara G Walker (1983) The Women's Encyclopedia Of Myths & Secrets
* Christine Wallace (1997) Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew
* Mike Wallington (1970) Cocks & Chicken At The NFT [Sight & Sound #40.1]
* John Walsh (17/1/2002) Caprice Accidentally Breaks The Last Linguistic Taboo On Television [The Independent]
* David Ward (3/3/2003) Police Chief's Passion For Rude Poetic Rebel [The Guardian]
* Ned Ward (1924) The London Spy
* John Waters (1972) Pink Flamingos
* Gavin Weightman (1998) Four Is Fifteen [Storm Over Four]
* Stanley Wells (2001) Foreward [Routledge Classics, Shakespeare's Bawdy]
* Irvine Welsh (1993) Trainspotting
* Irvine Welsh (1994) A Smart Cunt [The Acid House]
* Irvine Welsh (2001) Glue
* Irvine Welsh (2002) Porno
* Irvine Welsh (11/10/2003) The Big Blush: A Drink With The Boss [The Guardian, Weekend]
* Paul Wheeler (1/5/1997) Have I Got News For You
* Paul Wheeler (31/5/2002) Have I Got News For You
* Whitehouse (1996) Quality Time
* Whitehouse (1998) Mummy & Daddy
* Jon Wilde (1997) Shock! [Loaded]
* Faith Wilding (1994) Seeds Of Change: Feminist Art & Education In The Early Seventies [The Power Of Feminist Art: Emergence Impact & Triumph Of The American Feminist Art Movement]
* Gordon Williams (1996) Shakespeare Sex & The Print Revolution
* Zoe Williams (21/4/2001) 101 Things We Don't Miss [The Guardian, Weekend]
* John Wilmot (1672) A Ramble In St James's Park
* John Wilmot (1674) Timon
* John Wilmot (1676) Dialogue
* John Wilmot (1684) Sodom
* John Wilmot (16--[a]) The Imperfect Enjoyment
* John Wilmot (16--[b]) Oh! What Damned Age Do We Live In
* James Winny (1965) Introduction [Selected Tales From Chaucer, The Wife Of Bath's Prologue & Tale]
* Jeanette Winterson (5/12/2000) A Porn Reader [The Guardian, G2]
* Wogan (198-)
* Woman's Cunt (19--)
* Nick Wood & Christine Gernon (3/3/2000)

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Replies :

• Re: The C word that ladys dont like. kathygarvin 12:22 01/19/2006 (0)
• Re: The C word that ladys dont like. Matthew Hunt 08:53 09/25/2005 (0)
• Re: The C word that ladys dont like. wow ur a loser 15:37 02/22/2005 (0)