Cunt was also used freely in the bawdy ballads of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who felt no such compulsion to veil their cunts in double entendres. Ragionamenti della Nanna e della Antonia (1534–36) by Pietro Aretino tells readers to shun flowery euphemisms and just say cunt: ‘Speak plainly, and say fuck, cunt and cock; otherwise thou wilt be understood by nobody’.{23} The Scottish play Philotus (1603) contained the lines ‘doun thy hand and graip hir cunt’.{24} And the Mercurius Fumigosus (1654) celebrates ‘cunt and good company’.{25} But the fact that big-name writers, such as Shakespeare and Marvell, used cunt as a saucy punchline and camouflaged it in puns and cheeky hints suggests that, by Shakespeare’s time, cunt was starting to be censored.
It is no coincidence that it was around this time that the first laws banning sexually obscene material came into force. In Britain, the first parliamentary bill to restrain ‘books, pamphlets, ditties, songs, and other works that promote lascivious ungodly love’ was drafted by William Lambarde in 1580.{26} The Licensing Act of 1662 banned the publication of any ‘heretical, seditious, schismatic or offensive books, or pamphlets wherein any doctrine of opinion shall be asserted or maintained which is contrary to Christian faith’.{27} Language is a powerful tool of social controclass="underline" as sex became repressed, words linking to the body became taboo. After all, how can we enjoy the sexuality of our bodies, shame free, when the very words we use to talk about them, think about them or write about them are considered obscene? Ellis Cashmore argued that cunt’s banishment to the naughty step is a result of mass sexual censure and the rise of ‘modesty’: ‘with rules came manners, and with manners came courtesy, and with courtesy came modesty, and the word “cunt” [was] referring to parts of the body that were enclosed, they were secreted away’.{28} Women’s sexuality came in for particular censure and punishment, and cunt was an obvious symbol of all puritan rule sought to repress.
By the seventeenth century cunt had acquired a shock factor, and one author who revelled in the deliciously deviant embrace of cunt was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647–1680). Rochester was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II. He was the poster boy of debauchery and sexual excess and simply dripped with ‘fuck you’. If Cromwell’s parliament had attempted to dam up sexuality, Rochester surfed to notoriety on the tidal wave of sexual repression that was unleashed when the plug was pulled on Puritan rule. Geoffrey Hughes once perfectly described Rochester as delighting in ‘a world seen from crotch level’.{29}
Wilmot’s poem ‘Advice to a Cuntmonger’ begins as follows:
He described his attraction to a lover as ‘A touch from any part of her had done ’t, / Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a Cunt’ (1680). His 1684 play Sodom features characters such as ‘Queen Cuntigratia’ and her maid ‘Cunticula’. His ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’ (1672) contains eight cunts as he grows increasingly jealous of his mistress’s other lovers.
It’s tempting to read Rochester’s work as a celebration of sexuality, but he directs considerable anger and hatred towards cunts and their owners. In Sodom he defines cunt as ‘Love’s common nasty sink’ and claims ‘she that hath a cunt will be a whore’. His verse is full of degrading, grotesque descriptions of diseased, balding, biting, feral cunts. In ‘A Ramble in St James’s Park’, his hatred towards the women (and genitals) he desires is projected onto the other men, whom he spurns as ‘obsequious’ ‘curs’ in their hunt for cunt.
By the seventeenth century, cunt was also being used as a derogatory synecdoche for women, especially a sexual woman – in much the same way as women can be charmingly referred to as ‘pussy’ (1699) or ‘clunge’ (2008) today. In 1665, Samuel Pepys writes about a powder that should ‘make all the cunts in town run after him’, and one 1675 ballad warns that ‘Citty Cunts are dangerous sport’.{33}
By the eighteenth century, cunt was regarded as an obscene and ugly word. In his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), Francis Grose defines cunt as ‘a nasty name for a nasty thing’, and instead employs the euphemism ‘the monosyllable’.{34} Such modesty from a man who lists ‘Mrs Fubb’s Parlour’, ‘Buckinger’s Boot’, ‘Scut’ and a ‘Lobster Pot’ as common synonyms for ‘a woman’s commodity’. ‘Cunny’, a derivative of cunt, and ‘quim’ come into common usage in the eighteenth century. John Cleland’s 1748 bonkbuster Fanny Hill was a completely cunt-free affair, and Cleland boasted he had written it without one rude word. The annual almanac on London sex workers, Harris’s List (1757–95) also shies away from cunt, preferring instead to use ‘mossy grot’ and ‘Venus mound’.{35}
But one eighteenth-century author who uses cunt precisely for its shock factor was the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). There are ‘little cunts’, ‘frigged’ cunts, ‘open cunts’, ‘pretty cunts’, ‘infamous’ cunts, ‘bloodied’ cunts, ‘fucked’, ‘licked’ and ‘rascal’ cunts. If you shake any book by Sade, a cunt will fall out; Sade is a cunt piñata. His La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (1795) includes such cunt gems as:
Next, I will lodge my prick in her anus; you will avail me of your ass, ’twill take the place of the cunt she had under my nose, and now you will have at it in the style she will have employed, her head now between your legs; I’ll suck your asshole as I have just sucked her cunt, you will discharge, so will I, and all the while my hand, embracing the dear sweet pretty little body of this charming novice, will go ahead to tickle her clitoris that she too may swoon from delight.{36}