The C word

I always say ‘chesterfield’ instead of ‘sofa’, and ‘dressing-gown’ instead of ‘housecoat’, no one understands me!

“My question was to you, if you would judge me to be sexist.”

No. I thought I made that clear in my first post with all the encouraging people to say ‘cunt’ stuff…

“What history does ‘cunt’ have that ‘dick’ doesn’t have?”

Referral to a group of people who for thousands of years were considered to be property and denied basic human rights and still are being treated like that in most places on earth? How is it an irrational leap for people to associate a gender based insult with prejudice against that gender after sooooo many years of gender based prejudice? Seems pretty logical to me. Would the word ‘dick’ be just as taboo if the gender roles in history were reversed and it was women oppressing men? Probably. But that’s not what happened.

I just don’t understand why people who are offended by the word get pounced on as if it’s unreasonable or even HORRIBLE for them to be offended, it’s not unreasonable and it doesn’t make them horrible. Hell, even I, someone who disagrees with the OP got chewed out for just daring to defend their feelings towards the word.

Have we trivialized or even gone so far as to ignore sexism, something that is still a problem even in the more progressive parts of the world, so much that women who aren’t comfortable with the word “cunt” are just written off as crazy irrational people, and ragged on whenever they acknowledge that discomfort? (RAGGED on, get it?)

I might be getting off on another tangent, but why is everything about “extreme feminists”? Is being offended by the word “cunt” really considered extreme? Millions of women are offended by the word, they all must be extremist feminista warriors or something. It’s just like everything else, you focus on the crazies of the group even when they are the minority.

Lets talk about the majority of feminists instead, who are not oversensitive man-haters, but men and women who believe in gender equality, that’s it. If you believe that you or your mothers and sisters and aunts and daughters deserve equality unlike the inequality your grandmothers and great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers and so on experienced, then you are a feminist… regardless of your gender and even if you won’t admit it.

This isn’t the seventies. And those were radical feminists, you’re still falsely attributing the views of a select few on the views of the many. If you look at mainstream feminism today, you will be surprised by how well your personal philosophies fit in with ours. Feminizes are largely a thing of the past, feminism today shares much in common with humanism, in fact, most feminists also label themselves as humanists.

“Is it really the repetitive use that make it less shocking or is it the way the word gets interpreted by the listener that give it less shock value over time?”

I still think that it’s frequent use that will lead to the word being interpreted differently, not the other way around. As it stands now we only hear the word “cunt” in public or polite company when it is used by someone to either insult or shock people. It obviously wasn’t lack of use that made the word shocking in the first place, but lack of use has certainly kept it shocking decades after sexism has, to an optimistic mind, decreased drastically. Decreased drastically in a few places on earth, not dissolved completely.

I actually disagree about oppression taking time to accomplish. I think you have it somewhat backwards. I don’t think it takes long to oppress people at all in comparison to the amount of time it takes for a society to recover from the oppression. This is why some women are still offended by it even though some of the biggest hurdles have already been cleared as far as obliterating sexism goes. But some of them have not been cleared. I think that although frequent use of the word will help, the only way to completely remove the taboo and any indication that it ever existed is to completely remove sexism… and I’m skeptical (though hopeful) about that ever happening.

So let’s say that we’re in this transitional state of trying to overcome sexism, if not indefinitely, than for a long period of time to come. Is it more likely that each individual woman will consciencely decide on her own accord to suddenly not be offended by the word, or is that even possible unless she’s exposed to the word out of sexist contexts. If the only time women are hearing the word “cunt” is when someone is using it to deeply insult, intimidate, and humiliate her or some other woman (which is the majority of the ways it’s used now publicly, as most people aren’t or don’t want to be seen as directly sexist) she isn’t likely to EVER come to the conclusion that it’s not such a bad word. We remedy that by using it more frequently in different contexts in ways not meant to threaten women. It’s already started, actually. So when it is used against women, it will be less shocking to hear, like “bitch”, still insulting, but not the taboo it is now. Not something we directly associate with sexism. This is how all words change, gradually over time.

We can’t just wish the problem away by suddenly not being offended anymore, and that shouldn’t be expected of anyone. It’s only been decades since women have started gaining a lot of ground even in the most developed countries, compared to the thousands of years spent as second class citizens or mere possessions we have only just emerged as part of a society actively striving for gender equality. Give it some time. It’s going to take a long time for sexism in general to disappear and for words associated with it to break out of that taboo. Redefining the way the word “cunt” is used is a small step of many billions of small steps.

Actually, I didn’t read any of MM’s comments, because I find for such long posts they contain little to no worthwhile content, every point MM makes could be accomplished in a few short sentences if he wasn’t so preoccupied with sounding intelligent, and even then the points never hold up to scrutiny. Frankly, it’s just not worth bothering to read them much less respond. But I’ll try to answer your question the best I can having not read the post.

I take the secondhand knowledge that he called me a cunt as little more than a troll trying and failing to wind me up. Insults are a whole other ballgame when the anonymity of the internet is introduced, and is quite different from someone calling me a cunt in person. If someone called me a cunt in person, I’d be offended just like I’d be offended if they had called me a ‘bitch’ or any other general insult. But if someone used the word cunt without insulting me, say they described something as ‘cunty’, or said ‘cuntfucker!’ after stubbing their toe, I wouldn’t give a fuck. But I don’t think it’s irrational or ridiculous when other women are offended.