Tell Him He’s a Cunt from Me
George Orwell, Lesbian Pushback, and the Etymology of the C-Word We Can’t Forget
My photography partner in crime, Jill Posener, once made a lecture on lesbian feminist photography to an undergraduate art history class. As she described various photographers and their subjects, one young man, a student, had a particularly demanding question for her.
"How is it," he said, "that you can say ‘cunt’— every time you refer to women's genitals? If I said ‘cunt’ to my girl friend, or anyone else, I'd get the back of her hand!"
Lesbians have actually made the world a safe place to say cunt . . . if you respect the proper historical antecedents.
‘Cunt,’ of course, is a woman's vagina and vulva, her pussy, her private parts, her sexual pleasure. It's also been used as a pejorative since the early 20th century.
My father, Bill Bright, who was a linguist, and curious to boot, investigated the word for me:
"Susie, there are related words in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages," he explained, "So it has probably been in English as long as the language has exi…